Summer can be lovely—until a wasp turns up. Whether they present as an irritating picnic visitor or an uninvited attic guest, common social wasps are as much a part of our summer as festivals, sunscreen and the growing despair ...
Ecology
Jul 29, 2026
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298
Why do humans keep pets? A new international study suggests that some of the behavioral foundations of human-animal companionship may have much deeper evolutionary roots than previously thought.
Evolution
Jul 29, 2026
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288
Imagine holding one of our most precise quantum devices at a fixed position outside a black hole. A Josephson junction—two superconductors separated by an ultrathin barrier—can turn a voltage into a quantum oscillation with ...
Extant and ancient cephalopods—including octopuses, squids, extinct ammonites, cuttlefish and nautiluses—have all had to solve the problem of buoyancy, whether they have hard external shells or not.
Evolution
Jul 29, 2026
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237
An international team of volcanologists working on Carlingford Mountain has found that liquid "magma chambers" do not always exist beneath volcanoes. The team instead demonstrated that magma "plumbing systems" beneath Earth's ...
Earth Sciences
Jul 31, 2026
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230
Remembering the past can help living organisms make better decisions, but memory comes at a cost. Whether it is an animal searching for food or a single cell responding to its surroundings, storing and using information requires ...
Evolution
Jul 29, 2026
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228
A newly discovered dinosaur from Zimbabwe is offering fresh clues to how the animals diversified, suggesting they spread across distinct ecosystems in southern Africa, scientists said Wednesday.
Paleontology & Fossils
Jul 29, 2026
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215
An international team of researchers from École Polytechnique, Collège de France and Helmholtz-Zentrum Dresden-Rossendorf (HZDR) has achieved a world first: the experimental realization of an all-optical photonic time crystal ...
Optics & Photonics
Jul 30, 2026
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214
A new study using data from NASA's Hubble Space Telescope finds that star formation in the nearby Andromeda galaxy has undergone a 500-million-year decline, with an even steeper drop in the last 40 million years. Andromeda, ...
Astronomy
Jul 27, 2026
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199
In 2010, scientists waiting to use the William Herschel Telescope in the Canary Islands captured a brief 36 minutes of images of Venus. They were waiting for the sun to set so they could look at distant stars and dust disks ...
