Science

When eyeing a predator, horses keep a poker face as their hearts race Horses have a hidden poker face when they face danger, hiding severe internal stress from their handlers even as their hearts beat at extremely high speeds.A study from The Ohio State University found that horses can instantly recognise a predator just by…

Eucalyptus trees have become highly invasive in regions with similar climates to their native Australia, including California, South Africa, India. Scientists have compared the same invasive plant species in Europe and North America and found that they became 91% more productive after spreading to new habitats. The increase was seen only in the plants’ non-native…

Image Credit: Raphael Zufferey Nature has given us amphibians in various forms, from frogs to other multi-environment creatures, yet few things transcend the different domains of Earth as remarkably as the diving birds that inspired the MIT and EPFL researchers. For so long, scientists have long dreamt of a machine that can fly through the…

For decades, Charon was often viewed as the quieter half of the Pluto system, a frozen world marked by craters, fractures and vast plains. Yet the surface photographed by NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft has continued to reveal hints that its history was far more dynamic than once thought.A new study published in Nature Communications, titled…

The Guam Kingfisher is known as the “sihek” in Chamorro, the native language of the Marianas Archipelago and is the rarest species at the Smithsonian Conservation Biology Institute in Front Royal, Virginia. The bird is classified by the IUCN as extinct in the wild, meaning a single one is not present outside the conservation centre….

Fossils often preserve bones well enough to reveal the shape of an ancient animal, but traces of soft tissues are much less common. That is why a newly described dinosaur from north-eastern China has drawn such close attention from palaeontologists. Dating back around 125 million years to the Early Cretaceous period, the specimen offers more…

Fossils from this period are displayed at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History. South Dakota is one of the most landlocked states in the United States. It is more than 1,000 miles away from both the Pacific and Atlantic oceans. It is hard to imagine that this dry landscape was once covered by water.But…

For centuries, the ancient Maya have been celebrated for their remarkable achievements in astronomy, mathematics and calendar-making. They tracked the movements of planets with extraordinary precision, developed one of the world’s earliest concepts of zero and created complex calendars that guided agriculture, religion and governance. Yet the brilliant minds behind these discoveries have largely remained…

Whales are well known for their songs. But scientists have discovered that, for some whales, those songs may also help them stay alive. A researcher from the University of Washington has found that some baleen whales, including blue, fin and minke whales, have evolved to sing at such low frequencies that killer whales, their only…

A palm-sized AI drone weighing just 40 grams has achieved an engineering first by autonomously hunting and killing a flying insect in mid-air, paving the way for a new approach to mosquito control. Developed by US startup Tornyol, the tiny drone successfully detected, tracked and intercepted a flying moth during a controlled indoor demonstration without…