Loon stabs bald eagle to death
In a separate incident from the one described here, a loon launches out of the water to scare off a bald eagle. A bald eagle likely thought that grabbing a tiny loon chick would be an easy meal. It wasn’t. …
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‘Vigorous’ magnetic field oddity spotted over South Atlantic
A long-standing weak spot in Earth’s magnetic field is getting weirder, and it may be splitting into two distinct zones of weakness. The South Atlantic Anomaly is a section of Earth’s magnetic field between Africa and South America. For decades…
How Far Away is the Horizon?
The distance to the horizon is determined by different variables, including the temperature and your height. On a clear day, you can see for miles and miles and miles. The old saying turns out to be just about true. For…
An astronomer calculated that Earth’s intelligent life is probably ‘rare.’ Here’s what that means
If Earth started over, would intelligent life evolve again? If we all got together and started Earth over, winding time back to the moment right after the land cooled from hot magma and giant meteor showers stopped devastating the planet,…
General Relativity passes the Ratio’s Test
Information about the laws of physics is effectively baked into gravitational waves, the ripples in spacetime created when massive objects such as black holes spiral into one another. At least 3,700 years ago, Babylonian mathematicians approximated the ratio of a…
Why bats don’t get sick from the viruses they carry, but humans can
One of the first questions scientists ask when a new disease appears is, “Where did this come from?” Many viruses jump from animals to humans, a phenomenon known as “zoonotic spillover.” Although it remains unclear which animal was the source…