Werner Herzog directed this evocative NatGeo documentary of an ornithologist’s quest to find a new species. Deep in the Angolan Highlands lurks a rumored new species of elephant. Conservationist and ornithologist Steve Boyes has been searching for this elusive herd for years and the story of his journey is…
A unique head spike and fish-eating jaws help make sense of these dinosaurs. The Spinosaurus is a sail-backed, crocodile-snouted dinosaur that Hollywood depicted as a giant terrestrial predator capable of taking down a T. rex in Jurassic Park 3. Then they changed their mind and made it a fully…
The binary asteroid’s orbit around the Sun was affected by the impact. On September 26, 2022, NASA’s Double Asteroid Redirection Test (DART) spacecraft crashed into a binary asteroid system. By intentionally ramming a probe into the 160-meter-wide moonlet named Dimorphos, the smaller of the two asteroids, humanity demonstrated that…
Burr Oak Cemetery is the final resting place of Emmett Till and blues singer Willie Dixon, among others. Back in 2009, residents were scandalized when employees at Burr Oak Cemetery in the Chicago suburb of Alsip were accused of exhuming old graves in order to resell the burial plots,…
A new hypothesis proposes that our ancestors lost their eyes, then rebuilt them. After losing its original eyes, one of our distant ancestors may have done what evolution does best: tinkered with what was available, reshaping a single central visual organ into two new eyes. That’s the idea behind…
Plant won’t be done until 2030 at the earliest, and it still needs an operating license. On Wednesday, the US Nuclear Regulatory Commission announced that it had issued its first construction approval in nearly a decade. The approval will allow work to begin on a site in Kemmerer, Wyoming,…
“I am not aware of anything that is extraterrestrial, other than comets and things like that.” DENVER—Last month, President Donald Trump took to social media with an announcement that he would direct the Pentagon and other federal agencies to “begin the process” of disclosing government files related to alien…
System can identify genes, regulatory sequences, splice sites, and more. Late in 2025, we covered the development of an AI system called Evo that was trained on massive numbers of bacterial genomes. So many that, when prompted with sequences from a cluster of related genes, it could correctly identify…
SEM analysis of pottery residues showed people combined fish with a wide variety of plants when cooking. Archaeologists are keen to learn more about the specific diets and culinary practices of ancient populations around the globe. An interdisciplinary team of scientists analyzed the residues on prehistoric ceramic cooking pots…
Multispectral imaging, proteomics, historical texts yield new insights into 16th-century medical manuals. Forget “eye of newt and toe of frog/wool of bat and tongue of dog.” People in the 16th century were more akin to DIY scientists than Macbeth’s three witches when it came to concocting home remedies for…
