How Big Cats and Wild Dogs Coexist in India's Mountains
Posted on November 7, 2022
| 2 minutes
| 420 words
| Patria Henriques
Their domesticated relatives may clash, but India's big cats and wilds dogs get along surprisingly well.
Leopards, tigers and dholes (Asian wild dogs) all compete for the same resources in India's Western Ghat region, yet a new study using camera traps shows that the three carnivores coexist with little conflict. Their solution? The predators have seemingly adapted to life in the relatively small reserves of the Western Ghats region by hunting at different times or in different areas, the researchers said.
[Read More]Hurricanes Hit Canada 'More Often Than You Think'
Posted on November 7, 2022
| 2 minutes
| 396 words
| Patria Henriques
Hurricane Maria is barreling toward Newfoundland, Canada, today (Sept. 16) and coastal areas there are under a hurricane warning, though Canada isn't the first the place you think of as being hurricane-prone.
But tropical hurricanes hit Canada "more often than you think," said the National Hurricane Center's Dennis Feltgen. "We just don't hear a lot about it."
Newfoundland is a favorite target for hurricanes; more than a dozen have affected Avalon Peninsula, where the province's capital, St.
[Read More]Long-lost bunker belonging to 'Churchill's secret army' discovered in Scottish forest
Posted on November 7, 2022
| 3 minutes
| 594 words
| Fernande Dalal
Forestry workers were felling trees in southern Scotland when they noticed something peculiar among the roots and bracken: An iron door. It turns out the team had accidentally discovered a lost WWII-era bunker, built to house one of Great Britain's most secretive — and suicidal — military forces.
Known as the Auxiliary Units (or sometimes "Churchill's secret army"), the force was a corps of volunteers similar to Britain's Home Guard, charged with defending the country in the event of a Nazi German invasion.
[Read More]Man Declared Dead Snores to Life Right Before His Autopsy
Posted on November 7, 2022
| 3 minutes
| 442 words
| Mittie Cheatwood
A man in Spain who was declared dead by three doctors was actually still alive, which doctors discovered only when he began snoring on the autopsy table, according to news reports.
The man, 29-year-old Gonzalo Montoya Jiménez, was a prisoner at a jail in northern Spain. He was found unconscious in his cell on Sunday (Jan. 7), and was believed to be dead, according to the Spanish news outlet La Voz de Asturias.
[Read More]Newborns Know Their Native Tongue, Study Finds
Posted on November 7, 2022
| 2 minutes
| 422 words
| Patria Henriques
Just hours after they're born, babies seem to be able to tell the difference between sounds in their native tongue and a foreign one, according to a new study that suggests language learning begins in utero.
"The mother has first dibs on influencing the child's brain," researcher Patricia Kuhl, of the University of Washington, said in the statement. "The vowel sounds in her speech are the loudest units and the fetus locks onto them.
[Read More]Our Universe Isn't As Special As We'd Like to Believe
Posted on November 7, 2022
| 10 minutes
| 2030 words
| Fernande Dalal
Humans like to be at the center of things.
The early Greeks knew the Earth was round, but most of them could not imagine that the land they walked on was anything but the dead center of reality. Maimonides, the medieval Spanish-Egyptian Jewish philosopher, took that geocentrism to heart, arguing that even the ancient Hebrew Bible described a world where everything revolved around our planet — a position that Rabbi Menachem Mendel Schneerson, the Lubavitcher Rebbe, defended using Albert Einstein's theory of relativity as recently as 1975.
[Read More]Red-Seeing Fish, Blue-Seeing Fish: Deep-Sea Vision Evolves
Posted on November 7, 2022
| 4 minutes
| 726 words
| Arica Deslauriers
Fearsome-looking creatures that live in the near-dark to pitch-black waters of the deep sea, dragon fish wouldn't seem to have much need for eyes, let alone the ability to see color. However, some dragon fish have rapidly evolved from blue-light sensitivity to red-light sensitivity, and then back to blue again.
The deep sea is not the sort of environment that would appear to encourage rapid evolution. "It doesn't change. It is always dark,"
[Read More]Sexy Guys Get More Love from Fertile Gals
Posted on November 7, 2022
| 4 minutes
| 756 words
| Trudie Dory
A woman's relationship satisfaction changes as she nears ovulation, when she's most fertile. But whether or not she's more or less happy with her guy depends on his sex appeal.
In a new study, heterosexual women who rated their guys as highly sexually desirable felt closer to their partners and more satisfied with their relationships just before ovulation, as compared to their less-fertile days. The opposite was true for women who said their partners were less sexy; they felt less close to their male partners and were more critical of their mate's faults as they approached ovulation.
[Read More]Super-Sticky Robot Clings Underwater Like 'Hitchhiker' Fish
Posted on November 7, 2022
| 3 minutes
| 627 words
| Mittie Cheatwood
A robot inspired by a hitchhiking fish can cling to surfaces underwater with a force 340 times its own weight.
The new bot was inspired by the remora, fish that cling to larger marine animals like sharks and whales, feeding off their hosts' dead skin and feces.
Remora fish do this with a specially adapted fin on their undersides called a suction disc, which consists of a soft, circular "
[Read More]Watch the entire Beaver Moon lunar eclipse in 1 minute time-lapse
Posted on November 7, 2022
| 2 minutes
| 316 words
| Mittie Cheatwood
An incredible timelapse video from Los Angeles captures the Beaver Moon during its dramatic partial eclipse Friday (Nov. 19).
Taken from the Griffith Observatory in Los Angeles, the video shows the moon gradually growing darker and then at its peak (which appears to be through haze), turning a slight red.
The Beaver Moon lunar eclipse saw the moon 97% covered by Earth's shadow at its peak at 4:02 am EST (9:02 GMT), and was potentially visible to millions of stargazers across North America, Central and South America, as well as parts of Australia, Europe and Asia.
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