Ten of 21 known cockatoo species exhibit dance behavior, and one bird executed 17 unique moves. Snowball the dancing cockatoo gets down with his bad self to the Backstreet Boys. In 2008, a YouTube video featuring an Eleanora cockatoo named Snowball dancing to the beat of the Backstreet Boys…
A collection of new studies on gene activity shows that AI tools aren’t very good. Biology is an area of science where AI and machine-learning approaches have seen some spectacular successes, such as designing enzymes to digest plastics and proteins to block snake venom. But in an era of…
CEO Stockton Rush does not come off well. In a 300-plus page final report released today, the US Coast Guard analyzed the 2023 Titan sub implosion from every conceivable angle and came to a clear conclusion: OceanGate CEO Stockton Rush was a dangerous and deeply unpleasant boss. His company…
Official actions don’t challenge science, while unofficial docs muddy the waters. Last week, the Environmental Protection Agency made lots of headlines by rejecting the document that establishes its ability to regulate the greenhouse gases that are warming our climate. While the legal assault on regulations grabbed most of the…
Officials say there are no leaks and hazardous nests are from legacy contamination. Wasps living around a Cold War-era nuclear facility in South Carolina have built at least four radioactive nests, raising questions about their source of hazardous material and the extent of environmental contamination, according to a report…
“We are looking at the potential to extend this current flight, Crew-11.” The next four-person team to live and work aboard the International Space Station departed from NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida on Friday, taking aim at the massive orbiting research complex for a planned stay of six…
Other July stories: Solving a 150-year-old fossil mystery and the physics of tacking a sailboat. It’s a regrettable reality that there is never enough time to cover all the interesting scientific stories we come across each month. In the past, we’ve featured year-end roundups of cool science stories we…
“I hope this blows your mind because it blows my mind.” This is Part 2 of our interview with Col. Raj Agrawal, the former commander of the Space Force’s Space Mission Delta 2. If it seems like there’s a satellite launch almost every day, the numbers will back you…
The grid is becoming cleaner thanks to projects that have been in the works for years. The United States added 22,332 megawatts of power plant capacity in the first half of this year, and the vast majority of it was utility-scale solar, batteries, and onshore wind. Natural gas was…
The feathers can emit two frequencies of laser light from multiple regions across their colored eyespots. Peacock feathers are greatly admired for their bright iridescent colors, but it turns out they can also emit laser light when dyed multiple times, according to a paper published in the journal Scientific…
