In 2009, a man named Edwin Rist planned a museum heist. His target wasn't jewels, or fossils, or the Declaration of Independence. It was bird skins. It took just over a year for authorities to track him down, largely because the...

Do animals exercise? Think about it -- do animals need to lose weight, or train for their big migration? We'll look at a few definitions of exercise and see if animals meet the criteria for hitting the gym.

All crocodilians look more or less the same today, but to survive two different mass extinctions, they've had to change a lot. Here's how they pulled it off.

Rocky bodies like moons, asteroids, and comets are chock full of resources, from water, to helium-3, to rare earth elements. But how can we access them? Some scientists have proposed using microbes to aid in the mining of certain metals.

Correction

07:11 We made a conversion error! The asteroid in this sentence should be 95,000 meters or 95 km. The conclusion (water would be deadly hot and sterilized) is cor

rect.

Let's face it: The Earth is going to get...

The Sahara is rather famously a desert, but it wasn't always that way. And during the time of lush green forests, there were plenty of people who lived there, but they've been hard to study. However, new genetic analysis has given us...

The North American continent used to have deep roots extending far into the Earth's mantle. They melted. Here's how scientists think they disappeared.

Humans love to decorate, and that's been true for a long time. Early humans have been painting on the walls for tens of thousand of years, and their work helped us understand a lot about their world and our own. From Lascaux Cave in...

We all picked up new habits during the COVID-19 pandemic. But not all of them stuck. Here's the data on whether we're better or worse drivers, exercisers, social media community members, neighbors, and self carers than during and before...

Whether or not you think humans should be announcing our presence to the cosmos, we're doing it, anyway. Both intentionally, and not. And if aliens really do exist, there are several ways they could find us. Here are six of them.

Astronomers have spent the past century (roughly) trying to figure out where all the elements on the Periodic Table come from. For example, the oldest hydrogen emerged when the universe was just a baby (Big Bang nucleosynthesis). And the...

While the word "mummy" may conjure up an image of King Tut (or a 1999 Brendan Fraser action/adventure movie), ancient Egyptians were far from the only culture that mummified their dead. Around the world, and across millennia, people...

If you’ve been around the internet long enough, you’ve probably heard of the “conspiracy” that birds aren’t real (It's not a real conspiracy theory; it was started as a joke). Well for decades, scientists have been using fake birds (even...

Mushroom foragers rejoice! Your lives just got a whole lot easier! Now, we can farm four mushrooms that used to only be found in the wild: morels, huitlacoche, chanterelles, and truffles. Here's why it took so long.

Space travel is infamously bad for your health. But it turns out that in some very specific cases, space travel may actually be beneficial. Like by strengthening your bones, or repairing your DNA.

To explain how the world works, scientists occasionally have an idea that — upon further testing — turns out to be wrong. From rays that carry coldness instead of heat, to a neighboring star that causes regular mass extinctions on Earth,...

Most cultures who developed metalworking technology never let the skill go to waste. But in what's now Michigan, Native Americans started making metal tools well before anyone else did, and then stopped. And the reason why this happened...

There's one human innovation that's so critical to our lives that every modern human group seems to have it. And you probably have some in your craft drawer - it's glue! Turns out there's a long history of glue-making that cements it as...

Diamonds, rubies, emeralds, and sapphires are most of the classic gemstones adorning royal jewels. But they used to be accompanied by a stone that nowadays is most often found in museum gift shops: Amethyst. Here's the story of...

Science can help solve the world’s most important problems, and what could be more important than keeping pee off your shoes? Yes, even the lowly urinal—and those who use it—can benefit from the occasional peer-reviewed study. So let’s...

Whether you saw a quantum computer featured in a tech news blog post, or that Black Mirror episode "Joan is Awful", the chandelier-like look may have inspired the thought "Why does it look like that?" Well, it's not for the sci-fi...

Even though cleft lips and palates are really common, there's still a lot of research that needs to be done into why they form. But scientists have found a whole new line of evidence that might crack the case wide open, and it's in dog...

Soviet agronomist Nikolai Ivanovich Vavilov was obsessed with plants. Especially finding out where domesticated crops first came from. And out of his research came a proposal that certain crops, like rye and oats, were evolutionary...

In the middle of the South Pacific lies Point Nemo: the most remote location on Earth. This super isolated spot is home to a graveyard filled not with human remains, but hundreds of broken up spacecraft and satellites. And after more...