Pay attention to the mockingbird. This bird makes quite a racket. He imitates a variety of other bird songs, repeating them over and again, sometimes for hours at a time. We wouldn’t have dubbed this bird the mockingbird if we didn’t think its conduct was mildly offensive to other birds. But now pay closer attention.…
When scientists succeeded in cloning the endangered black-footed ferret in December 2020, they took a giant step toward a renewed global goal to battle climate change and biodiversity loss. The triumph of cloning both fulfilled the founding objective of Earth Day and terrified its most ardent supporters. Conservationists took a step ahead in protecting a…
While apps like Signal make it possible to exchange encrypted communications, no system is fully secure. But, owing to quantum mechanics, the esoteric area of science that regulates the cosmos at the lowest scales, encryption may become far more difficult to crack in the future. You’re almost probably viewing this on an electrical gadget that…
Many creatures, from humans (for whom loneliness has lately been dubbed an “epidemic”) to wasps to so-called “Resident” orcas (killer whales in the coastal North Pacific who consume fish and live in matrilineal communities), rely on social ties. The drone footage was utilized in a recent study published in the journal Proceedings of the Royal…
A Canadian radio telescope discovered 535 fast radio bursts in one go, quadrupling the known number of these brief, very powerful events. The long-awaited findings reveal that these perplexing events may be divided into two types: one-time bursts and recurrent bursts that continue at least ten times longer on average. Fast radio bursts could be…
A tiny phase II clinical trial published on June 9 in the journal Science Translational Medicine indicated that nitrous oxide (often known as “laughing gas” in the dentist’s office) may help some people with treatment-resistant depression reduce their symptoms. Researchers have been interested in approaches that act faster than traditional depression medications, such as SSRIs,…
Techniques for inducing mutations in viruses that give microorganisms new abilities are included in the microbiology toolbox. Scientists do these experiments for a variety of purposes, including to learn how bacteria avoid detection by our immune systems. However, enhancing a pathogen’s capabilities comes with apparent hazards, especially if this “gain of function” implies increased virulence…
Natasha Mikles is a philosophy lecturer at Texas State University. This essay was first published in The Conversation. Space for burying the deceased is becoming increasingly scarce as the world’s population grows. Many cities in the United States, as well as many other countries across the world, are already short on burial land. Simultaneously, many…
Mysterious whales hold their breath in the murky waters of the benthic zone, the ocean’s deepest layer, which famous mainly for invertebrates like sea urchins, worms, and crabs. The activities of beaked whales have long been a mystery to humans. Still, a recent study sheds light on their habits, thanks to discovering two new subpopulations…
Here’s a game for you. In 1948, Claude Shannon, the father of information theory, devised. He was attempting to model English as a random process. Pick out a random book from your shelf, open it, point to a random area on the page, and write down the first two letters you see. Let’s pretend they’re…