Dec 24th, 2025 - How centuries of human pressure quietly reshaped a rare brown bear Bears are one of the big victims of deforestation. As more and more forests get cut down, bears keep retreating to remote corners, keeping their distance from people. In a small stretch of central Italy, however, bears have followed a different path. A new genetic study suggests that Apennine brown bears have gradually become less aggressive over thousands of years of living alongside people. Rather than retreating entirely from human activity, this isolated population appears to have adapted to it. The research, published in ... [Read More]

Dec 23rd, 2025 - 'Stingraybot' uses microbubble muscles controlled by ultrasound While it might sound like a weapon of oceanic destruction in the hands of Aquaman's arch enemies, the new "stingraybot" from a team at ETH Zurich (the Federal Institute of Technology of Switzerland) offers enormous promise for surgery, medical care, wildlife biology, robotics, and more, thanks to muscular membranes of microbubbles. At a mere 4 cm (1.6 inches) in width, the stingraybot swims using the same wavelike motions of the wing-like pectoral fins of real stingrays. Even more remarkably, this tiny ichthyo-droid requires no ... [Read More]

Dec 23rd, 2025 - Follow Earth on Google An embryo doesn't just drift into place and hope for the best. Almost immediately, it starts talking to the uterus. In a new study from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem (HUJI), scientists watched this conversation unfold in real time and found that it begins far sooner than expected – within about an hour. Using lab-grown models of early embryos and uterine lining cells, the team tracked a rapid back-and-forth of molecular messages that help decide whether attachment will succeed. Those messages travel in tiny membrane packages, shuttling fats, metabolites , ... [Read More]

Dec 23rd, 2025 - Follow Earth on Google Young star systems, like nearby Fomalhaut, are messy places. Rocks slam together and icy bodies shatter. Dust fills the space where solid objects once moved quietly along. This chaos is how planets are built, but it usually plays out far from view and over very long stretches of time. That is why Fomalhaut has scientists buzzing. In just 20 years, astronomers have seen the dusty aftermath of two massive space collisions around this star. These events are rare, according to long-standing models. Seeing two impacts so close together raises a simple question: Are we very ... [Read More]

Dec 23rd, 2025 - Until around the middle of the third century BC, Celtic people mostly carried out their everyday transactions using a barter or payment-in-kind system. They exchanged items like grains, textiles, metalware, salt, small properties, gold rings, iron bars, bell-shaped tokens, or animals for buying food and essentials. But then, something shifted. The Celtic warriors who ventured out into Greece to fight battles found something that dramatically reconstructed the Celtic economy. These warriors would come back home bringing the idea of money with the wages they were paid for fighting in Greece. ... [Read More]

Dec 23rd, 2025 - According to a team of researchers from the University of Arizona, new species are being discovered at a faster rate than ever before, one that far exceeds extinction University of Arizona About 300 years ago, Swedish naturalist Carl Linnaeus set out on a bold quest: to identify and name every living organism on Earth. Now celebrated as the father of modern taxonomy, he developed the binomial naming system and described more than 10,000 species of plants and animals. Since his time, scientists have continued to describe new species in the quest to uncover Earth's biodiversity. According to a ... [Read More]

Dec 22nd, 2025 - By Archaeologists searching a field in Poland came across a remarkably rare, 600-year-old brass seal which depicts a local saint, per Popular Mechanics . St. Catherine of Alexandria was a patron saint of a church in the Braniewo region of Poland and a symbolic figure for the local militia. Archaeologists discovered the remarkably well-preserved seal while surveying a farmer's property in the region. St. Catherine is depicted holding a sword aloft, symbolizing her martyrdom. Along the flat front side of the seal is Gothic script, while the raised backside provides a hole which would have ... [Read More]

Dec 22nd, 2025 - These giant monuments are 1,000 years older than Stonehenge and share an interesting connection with water. Scattered across Armenia's highest mountains are giant carved stones that seem wildly out of place. Some stand taller than a two-storey building, yet none of these mysterious vishaps or dragon stones sit near known archaeological sites such as ancient villages.  Archaeologists have struggled to explain why, 6,000 years ago, people dragged these giant monuments into frozen, harsh, high-altitude terrain—often above 2,700 meters—where snow limits human activity to just a ... [Read More]