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Wood storks to be removed from federal Endangered Species List
After over 40 years of recovery efforts, one population of the wood stork (Mycteria americana)is being removed from the federal list of endangered and threatened wildlife. The large birds are as tall as 45 inches with wingspans that can reach 65 inches and are the only native storks in the United States. They are primarily found in the southeastern United States, where they feed on fish.
Wood storks were listed as endangered in 1984, when its population had dropped by over 75 percent—from roughly 20,000 nesting pairs to about 5,000 nesting pairs—primarily due to wetland loss.
The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service (FWS) has determined that the birds are no longer in immediate danger of extinction. The FWS estimates that the wood stork breeding population has 10,000 to 14,000 nesting pairs across roughly 100 colony sites. They are now found on the coastal plains of Mississippi, Alabama, Florida, Georgia, South Carolina, and North Carolina.
Dedicated conservation efforts and the birds’ adaptability are some of the likely reasons behind this rebound. They have adapted to new nesting areas, including coastal salt marshes further north, flooded rice fields, floodplain forest wetlands, and even golf courses and retention ponds.
“Even when they’re in odd habitats, it’s still exhilarating to see these wild birds doing what they do in a natural marsh,” Dale Gawlik, endowed chair for conservation and biodiversity at Texas A&M University’s Harte Research Institute, told USA Today. “The birds have the flexibility to explore new habitats and eat new foods and that might be really important in a period when the environment is changing rapidly, like it is now.” Gawlik worked on wood stork recovery in Florida before moving to Texas.
However, not everyone is convinced that the birds should be taken off of the Endangered Species List. Environmental groups including Audubon Florida and the Center for Biological Diversity fear that their populations have not recovered enough. Advocates are concerned about what would happen if wood stork colonies are found on private lands when they are no longer federally protected. Wildlife officials in North Carolina supported removal, while the state of Georgia supported it with caveats, raising similar concerns about private land.
They also still face the uphill battle of future habitat loss in wetlands.
“This is a short-sighted and premature move. Wood storks need wetlands to survive, and that habitat is facing overwhelming pressure,” Southern Environmental Law Center (SELC) Wildlife Leader Ramona McGee wrote in a statement. “It is disappointing that Fish and Wildlife Service largely brushed away serious concerns about how losses to wetlands protections and climate change’s consequences for our coast increase threats to our U.S. population of wood stork. This delisting comes at a time when species face a storm of proposed federal rollbacks to habitat protections that are likely to imperil wood storks and countless other Southeastern species.”
The FWS says it has a 10-year post-delisting monitoring plan to make sure that the species’ recovery is maintained. The official delisting of the wood stork will finalize on March 9, 2026.
The post Wood storks to be removed from federal Endangered Species List appeared first on Popular Science.
Groovy! Dive into the world’s largest online slang dictionary
Language can’t stay still for long. It’s constantly evolving alongside the cultures that use them—and slang frequently showcases this complex relationship at its most creative, playful, and strange. While some terms or phrases may linger for centuries, most of today’s slang terminology is more current. That often makes it difficult to keep up with the times, let alone understand casual communications of the past.
That’s where Jonathon Green came to the rescue. In 1993, Green started compiling 500 years of English slang by sifting through mountains of primary sources. The culmination was Green’s Dictionary of Slang, a three-volume reference set containing 10.3 million words over 53,000 separate entries. It was first published in 2010, but the printed reference tomes are out-of-date and out-of-print only 16 years later. Today, an original copy of Green’s Dictionary can easily set you back over $1,300.
Like slang itself, Green is for the people. Following a few more years of work, the lexicographer—a studier or compiler of dictionaries—transferred his entire project online for anyone to peruse. As Open Culture recently highlighted, Green’s Dictionary of Slang is now available for free as its own, regularly updated website. Not only that, but it includes more than 60,000 additional quotations along with 2,500 new entries and sub-entries. The site also contains search tools as well as a predictably gigantic source bibliography. For an additional subscription fee, users can also gain access to additional citations and advanced search options.
“Language does not reach an end, nor does research,” Green wrote in his original introduction to the website in 2016. “GDoS Online is therefore a project in continual development. As well as the natural expansion of the material on offer, it is our intention to add to the way the information is displayed, both as to quality and quantity.”
With a little persistence, regular perusal of Green’s Dictionary may help revive some long forgotten gems: it’s well worth your next stoppo, if nothing else.
The post Groovy! Dive into the world’s largest online slang dictionary appeared first on Popular Science.
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A Tyrannosaurus tooth embedded in dinosaur skull tells a violent story
A rare dinosaur fossil on display at the Museum of the Rockies in Bozeman, Montana, tells a gory story. The skull from a large plant-eating Edmontosaurus has a tooth lodged into it, indicating that it may have met its final moments as a meal. The tooth in question belongs to one of the most famous dinosaurs on earth—Tyrannosaurus.
Montana was once home to Tyrannosaurus rex, the most famous of several known members of the fearsome Tyrannosauridae family. This apex predator stomped around until the end of the Age of Dinosaurs, roughly 66 million years ago. It lived alongside large plant-eaters like Triceratops and the duck-billed Edmontosaurus.
In 2005, paleontologists found a nearly complete Edmontosaurus skull in the fossil-rich Hell Creek Formation in eastern Montana. Now on display at the museum, a reexamination of the skull revealed one striking detail: a Tyrannosaurus tooth stuck inside its face. The findings are detailed in a study published today in the journal PeerJ.
The full Edmontosaurus skull. The triangle indicates where the tooth is embedded. Image: Montana State University/Museum of the Rockies.“Although bite marks on bones are relatively common, finding an embedded tooth is extremely rare,” Taia Wyenberg-Henzler, a study co-author and University of Alberta doctoral student, said in a statement. “The great thing about an embedded tooth, particularly in a skull, is it gives you the identity of not only who was bitten but also who did the biting. This allowed us to paint a picture of what happened to this Edmontosaurus, kind of like Cretaceous crime scene investigators.”
When comparing the embedded tooth to all of the known prehistoric inhabitants in the Hell Creek Formation, they found that it closely matched teeth of Tyrannosaurus. CT scans of the skull helped the team discover more details about the wound.
“A fossil like this is extra exciting because it captures a behavior: a tyrannosaur biting into this duckbill’s face,” added co-author and Museum of the Rockies’ Curator of Paleontology John Scannella. “The skull shows no signs of healing around the tyrannosaur tooth, so it may have already been dead when it was bitten, or it may be dead because it was bitten.”
The Tyrannosaurus tooth. Image: Montana State University/Museum of the Rockies.Tyrannosaurus was one of the largest carnivores to ever walk the Earth and paleontologists have been studying their feeding habits for decades. The tooth found inside this Edmontosaurus skull gives another look into Tyrannosaurus behavior. According to the team, the way that the tooth is embedded in Edmontosaurus’ nose suggests that the duck-billed dino met its toothy attacker face-to-face. Typically, this happens to an animal that is ultimately killed by a predator.
“The amount of force necessary for a tooth to have become broken off in bone also points to the use of deadly force,” said Wyenberg-Henzler. “For me, this paints a terrifying picture of the last moments of this Edmontosaurus.”
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Chihuahua, boxer, and 10 other dog breeds at risk of breathing troubles
Despite their popularity, for their seemingly helpless-looking eyes and flat faces, short-skulled (or brachycephalic) dogs like the French bulldog often have serious difficulty breathing. A study published today in the journal PLOS One found that in 12 breeds, a flat face, collapsing nostrils, and rounded physique puts them at a higher risk for developing common breathing conditions. Pekingese and Japanese chins were noted to be the highest risk.
The study examined the risk of Brachycephalic Obstructive Airway Syndrome (BOAS) in 14 short-skulled dog breeds. Image: Anthony Lewis (www.anthony-lewis.com), PLOS, CC-BY 4.0For breeds like bulldogs and pugs, their shortened skull shape can lead to a condition called Brachycephalic Obstructive Airway Syndrome (BOAS). It causes exercise intolerance, difficulty breathing, and wheezing and can lead to surgery. Pugs, French bulldogs, and bulldogs are the most well-known and studied brachycephalic breeds, but there are several other dog breeds that could face these same issues.
“BOAS exists on a spectrum. Some dogs are only mildly affected, but for those at the more severe end, it can significantly reduce quality of life and become a serious welfare issue,” Dr. Fran Tomlinson, a study co-author for the University of Cambridge Veterinary School, said in a statement. “While surgery, weight management and other interventions can help affected dogs to some degree, BOAS is hereditary, and there is still much to learn about how we can reduce the risk in future generations.”
To better understand what characteristics predict BOAS, the team collected data from 898 dogs representing 14 different breeds, including boxers, King Charles spaniels, Chihuahuas, and Pekingese. They measured the animals’ skulls and noses, bodies and necks, and checked them for symptoms of BOAS.
They graded the dogs for BOAS on a scale from zero to three—zero indicating few symptoms and three meaning the dog had difficulty exercising and getting enough air. The team then compared the 14 breeds to pugs, French bulldogs, and bulldogs.
Pekingese had a rate of BOAS similar to bulldogs, with only 11 percent of pekingese dogs breathing freely. The Japanese chin also fared poorly, with only 17.4 percent free of symptoms. The King Charles spaniel, shih tzu and Boston terrier had between 25 and 50 percent of dogs at grade zero. The Cavalier King Charles spaniel, Pomeranian, boxer, and Chihuahua fared best, with between 50 and 75 percent of dogs at grade zero.
Four Boston terrier study participants with (from left to right) study authors Dr. David Sargan, Dr. Fran Tomlinson, and Dr. Jane Ladlow, all from the Cambridge Veterinary School. Image: Fran Tomlinson.The two breeds at a high risk for BOAS—the Pekingese and Japanese chin—had high rates of nostril narrowing, with about 6 percent and 18 percent of dogs respectively having open nostrils.
According to the team, this shows that BOAS varies widely amongst brachycephalic breeds. Understanding the differences and pinpointing key risk factors could help scientists develop more targeted and effective strategies to help dogs at risk.
“This research would not have been possible without the support of dedicated owners and breeders who volunteered their dogs to take part,” the authors add. “Their enthusiasm and willingness to engage with health testing highlights how much people care about improving breed health.”
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XAI Grok 4.20 Makes Scheduling Repeated Monitoring Easy for Up to 200 Queries
Biologists discover gene that may determine ‘good’ and ‘bad’ dads
Most mammals grow up in single parent homes. It’s estimated that over 95 percent of the planet’s nearly 6,000 known mammalian species rely almost exclusively on mothers to nurture and raise their offspring. But even when dads stick around, it’s not always smooth sailing. Fatherhood can range from attentive and caring to downright violent behaviors—but why this spectrum exists remains largely a mystery to evolutionary biologists.
Take the African striped mouse (Rhabdomys pumilio), for instance. Males can exhibit diverse responses to their young after becoming fathers. Particularly caring mice dads will groom their pups and even insulate them with their bellies against inclement weather. Meanwhile, other fathers may ignore or hurt a litter’s weaker siblings.
Although a simplified example, the striped mouse can serve as a proxy for other mammals including humans. Knowing this, researchers at Princeton University recently investigated the neurological underpinnings of rodent fatherhood. Their new study published today in the journal Nature indicates that a specific molecular group inside the brain may largely determine how dads react to their progeny.
To learn more, the team recorded the neural activity of male striped mice when placed in various situations both with and without pups. They soon noticed that neural activity in the brain’s medial preoptic area (MPOA) increased whenever the males encountered a young mouse. These MPOA spikes weren’t uniform, however. Higher activity in the region corresponded with helpfulness, while lower recordings aligned with hostility. Although this isn’t the first time that biologists noted MPOA’s relation to parenting, past research largely linked it to rodent females after becoming mothers.
“But in the case of these males, it’s not pregnancy or even parenthood that transforms their brains,” Forrest Rogers, a neuroscientist and study co-author, said in a statement. “Bachelors can be just as capable of caring as experienced dads.”
Rogers and his colleagues noticed MPOA was not the only area that tied to parenting. Surprisingly, the more caring mice dads also displayed lower levels of a gene called Agouti. This gene is typically known for its influence on metabolism and skin pigmentation, not fatherhood.
“Discovering this previously unknown role in the brain for parenting behavior was exciting,” said Rogers.
After finding this new link, researchers wanted to know what conditions influenced Agouti gene expression in the MPOA. Contrary to what one may initially assume, they found that solitary males possessed low levels of Agouti compared to males who lived in groups. Especially high levels also sometimes muted neural activity in the MPOA.
Artificially boosting Agouti through gene therapy reinforced these observations, too. Male mice who were previously nurturing became less interested or even volatile towards pups if they produced more Agouti. As a remedy, the team later relocated some of these males from communal to solitary living conditions. This naturally lowered their Agouti levels, making them more interested in the mice pups again.
“Our findings point to Agouti as a potential evolutionary mechanism that allows animals to integrate environmental information, such as social competition or population density, and adjust the balance between self-preservation and investment in offspring,” added study co-author and neuroscientist Catherine Peña.
Forrest, Peña, and their collaborators are still interested in examining which specific environmental factors may influence Agouti levels in mammals like striped mice and humans. At the same time, they warned against viewing their findings as a one-size-fits-all solution for parenting behaviors. Instead, they hope to help other researchers identify factors that may contribute to higher risks of issues like father figure neglect or abuse.
“Parenting is a complex trait. We’re not suggesting that you can take a pill to become a better parent, or that struggles with parenting reflect some molecular deficiency,” said Peña.
The post Biologists discover gene that may determine ‘good’ and ‘bad’ dads appeared first on Popular Science.
Prehistoric Japan was home to cave lions—not tigers
Present-day Japan may see its fair share of bears, but the islands’ big cat populations are long gone. Between 129,000 and 11,700 years ago, temporary land bridges allowed the ancient predators to migrate between mainland Asia and the islands. Paleobiologists have long believed tigers were the primary cats to make this trek, but recently analyzed evidence published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences suggests a different timeline.
“Our findings challenge the prevailing view that tigers once took refuge in Japan and that cave lion distribution was limited to the Russian Far East and northeast China,” explained the study’s authors. “These findings provide evidence that lions, rather than tigers, colonized the Japanese archipelago during the Late Pleistocene.”
The earliest big cats got their start in Africa around 6.4 million years ago, but it would take another 5.4 million years for the first lions to travel into northern Eurasia. While their tiger cousins largely migrated toward Eurasia’s southern regions, the predators still occasionally crossed paths in the “lion–tiger transition belt,” an area spanning portions of the Middle East through Central Asia into eastern Russia where the two intermingled.
Amid these Late Pleistocene migrations, Earth also experienced glacial periods that lowered sea levels and revealed land bridges linking Asia’s lion–tiger transition belt to the Japanese archipelago. Fossil records suggest that many tigers took advantage of these pathways, but they are not without some instances of mistaken identity. According to the study’s authors, researchers previously catalogued these big cat fossil discoveries based on morphological evidence instead of more reliable DNA data.
To double-check these past conclusions, the team reexamined a set of fossil specimens using genetic sequencing and radiocarbon dating. Although many examples are now in poor condition, five yielded enough information to facilitate lineage profiling. In each case, the “tiger” in question instead possessed molecular information aligning with a now extinct species of cave lion (Panthera spelaea). Even more striking, the team didn’t find any tiger evidence in Japan from the Late Pleistocene.
Radiocarbon analysis of one specimen indicates that it lived around 31,060 years ago, but researchers believe the first cave lions possibly arrived as far back as 72,700 years ago. It now appears the big cats also thrived on the islands for at least 20,000 years after their species went extinct in Eurasia. Researchers believe the reason for their prolonged survival is what brought them to the archipelago in the first place—the land bridges.
“This extended survival of cave lions may reflect Japan’s unique paleogeographic history,” they wrote, adding that “This finding extends the known range of cave lions in East Asia and refines our understanding of how far south the lion–tiger transition belt shifted during this period.”
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Mature Cultural Desire
A common immature attitude to desire is to assume that you are entitled to what you passionately desire, and to then cry if you don’t get it, to pressure others to give it to you. If you still don’t get it, a common response is to then declare that you’ve given up on the entire category, and just don’t care anymore.
For example, you fall in love with someone who rejects you, and then declare you are done with love, and will just live alone. Or you want a career as an actor, but then fail there, and so declare that jobs don’t matter, they are just a paycheck. Or you try to elect socialist utopian, who then betrays your hopes, so you decide it’s all corrupt, and you might as well elect partisans on your side.
A more mature stance, adopted by the wiser and more experienced, is to admit that you care a lot, but even so you can’t always get your favorite outcomes. Thus you must search carefully for the best feasible options. (LLMs confirm this overall story: 1,2,3.)
Regarding culture, the most common attitude I see is naive entitlement. Such folks fully embraced the aesthetic and moral views of their childhood, schools, associates, and entertainment sources. They see the views of folks from other times and places as just wrong, and expect history to prove their judgements right. They are typically disappointed when later generations reject many of their cultural truths.
The second most common attitude I see is among folks who have come to realize that cultures change greatly over time, and that the reasons they were given to embrace their local cultures don’t really stand up to scrutiny. In response to evidence that their culture is likely to decay and be replaced by very different ones, such folks often express indifference. They don’t care much which cultures win in the long run.
These both seem, to me, immature stances on cultures. A more mature stance is to admit that the future won’t preserve your culture by default, and that in fact it might not preserve very much of it. But then to ask what you most value in your culture, and to search for ways to preserve those best features. Even if you maybe can’t save much.
Folks with a mature stance on cultural desire are ready to help me think about how to fix cultural drift.
Capitalist ≠ Voluntary
Time for a status update on cultural drift. I’ve been pondering solutions, and now see at best only three weakly promising options. The other possible approaches seem to me at best only modest supplements to these three best solutions.
The first solution is for some rather large polity to adopt a very competent form of governance (e.g. futarchy) tied to an ex post measurable sacred goal correlated greatly with the capacity of our main world civ over the next few centuries. Citizens should see this goal as sacred so that they are proud to sacrifice for it, and ashamed to abandon it. Polls suggest some possible goals: the date when a million people live in space, or when we achieve physical immortality. This approach requires that that we find, prove, and adopt a competent form of governance, tie it to such a sacred goal, and do so for polity so large that its actions have a substantial influence on the overall chance of our main world civ achieving this goal. Yes, this seems a long shot. Futarchy to help firm cultures seems a good training ground.
The second solution requires groups where members somehow become strongly attached to the goal of group adaption itself, even though few today feel much attachment to it, or see it as remotely sacred. Yes, that seems harder, especially given the modern taboo on “social Darwinism”, but an advantage of this approach is it that can work for much smaller groups. We’d create a way to measure ex post group adaptive success in a few centuries, make market estimates today of those future measures, and then reward/punish group leaders as those estimates rise/fall. This requires substantially competent governance, and could fail if the world too strongly shares many maladaptive global norms and status markers. Yes this also seems a long shot.
While I have separate posts on the above two approaches, this is my first post on the third solution: more capitalism. Which, yes, also seems a long shot. The parts of our world that are driven by capitalism today, such as tech and commerce, seem to have healthy cultural evolution, even though they are subject to many maladaptive global norms. So the idea here is to get more parts of our world to be more driven by capitalism.
Yes, many other parts of our world, such as marriage, parenting, sex, friendship, and art, are mostly “voluntary”, but that’s not “capitalism” for my purposes here. Just as kings of old who “owned” nations were also not very “capitalist”. The issue here isn’t what choices are voluntary, or who owns what, but which behaviors are strongly directed by for-profit ventures who use the powerful tricks we’ve learned over recent centuries to manage such orgs. Tricks like as stock price signals, hostile takeovers, boards of directors, CEOs with stock options, clear performance metrics for employees, standardized job roles, and so on. These tricks, added to basic capitalist freedoms and incentives, are what let capitalism be so powerful today at enforcing and evolving adaptive behaviors.
Some examples of how capitalism might drive more behaviors:
We might pay lots to parents. For example, we could give them a transferable right to a percentage of the future tax revenue that those kids pay as adults. While parents might try to manage this by themselves, investors and for profit ventures such as boarding schools seem likely to get involved to advice, shape, and manage parenting in big ways.
We could have capitalist governance of towns, cities, or larger sized government units. This could induce much stronger adaptive incentives re policies that governments set or influence. For example, they might make citizenship transferable.
We could change bequest and charity laws to let organizations that pay low tax rates primarily hold assets and reinvest their returns. If allowed to persist for generations, such orgs would accumulate most of the world’s capital. As a result, the world would have far more capital, investment rates of return would fall to econ growth rates, and capitalism would care lot more about the long term future.
Making hostile takeovers of firms much easier would greatly increase competitive pressures to make firms efficient.
Heath and life insurers, merged together, could let people buy only cost-effective medicine.
Crime vouchers could help clients be cost-effective at avoiding committing crimes, and at punishing them if they do commit crime.
Tax career agents could help guide key life choices, such as re education, careers, or even marriages.
Note that, like the second approach above, this approach could also fail if the world too strongly shares maladaptive global norms and status markers.
While this third “capitalist” approach seems more “libertarian” than the other two, I fear it doesn’t seem libertarian enough to excite most self-identified libertarians, who likely prefer the current artisanal non-capitalist ways that we manage marriage, parenting, sex, friendship, art, etc.
What about the other approaches I’ve discussed before? AI/ems would strengthen selection pressures, but not directly address other drift issues. Spreading across stars would induce variety at the largest scales but not address within system drift. Nationalism, recently risen and now falling, seems too weak to drive sufficient competition. Deep multiculturalism seems very hard, unpopular, and only addresses the variation issue. These can at best supplement the main three approaches.
Added 15Feb: A poll finds this approach to be most favored:
Let me emphasize that all these approaches require a group or polity using them be sufficiently insular re a wider world culture’s norms and status markers.
Situate Your Essay
Having been an academic researcher for over forty years now, I am well aware of academia’s many big failures as an intellectual system. By comparison, our system of public intellectuals has many advantages, including that it doesn’t try to be boring or hard to understand, and that it is willing to take on topics that ordinary people care about, even when those are out of academia fashion, or poor topics for demonstrating academic impressiveness. However, the system of public intellectuals has one huge failing, a failing so big that it threatens to cancel all its other advantages.
Academics have a key “situate” norm, which says that a paper should situate itself within a prior literature. That is, it should cite not only the actual sources which influenced it, but also the closest prior work in the same topic area; the author should have read and been influenced by those. A paper should also fairly explain its relation to these other papers, and respond to their relevant points on the theses of this paper.
The related norm of public intellectuals is instead to mention any other high profile public intellectuals who have discussed a topic lately. Any other sources or similar writings can be ignored. Yes, the academic situate norm has substantial costs, and we often fail to follow it into other disciplines or low prestige sources. But we follow it far more than do public intellectuals.
This academic norm to situate greatly encourages the accumulation of insight over time. Combined with the norm of novelty, it pushes academics to explain how our each paper adds to and extends the sum total of what we knew before. Public intellectuals, in contrast, can and do regularly repeat what others have said many times before. They fail to create a division of labor so that humanity can coordinate to more efficiently explore the vast space of possible topics.
The obvious solution here is to create or strengthen a situate norm among public intellectuals. Yes, ordinary readers couldn’t easily enforce such a norm, but public intellectuals already follow many norms not now enforced by typical readers. For example, editors of journalists usually enforce norms of spelling, grammar, and non-false quotes that typical readers can’t easily enforce.
If the many words required to situate an essay would detract too much from the flow of that essay, such words might perhaps be included in an available appendix or aside. If this is too big an overhead for short essays (e.g., X posts), we might excuse those.
Situate: I looked for but did not find someone who make this point before. Maybe Richard Posner says something similar in Public Intellectuals: A Study of Decline.
Added 13Feb: The fall of academia includes the decline of theory and efforts to find new abstractions, the rise of public intellectuals, the fragmentation of disciplines, and the rise of the prestige level below which academics feel free to ignore previous work.
New ladybug species is the size of a grain of sand
Ladybugs are famously harbingers of good luck, and the trait proved consistent at a university in Japan when researchers found a new species of the iconic insect directly on the campus.
Ladybugs, also known as ladybird beetles or lady beetles, consist of the family Coccinellidae within the order of beetles (Coleoptera). The newly identified member is a black Parastethorus pinicola, and researchers discovered it on a pine tree at Kyushu University’s Hakozaki Satellite. In fact, its species name means “pine dweller.”
The identification of the tiny species—barely more than 0.039 inches (or one millimeter) long—occured within the context of a broader study. In a study recently published in Acta Entomologica Musei Nationalis Pragae, two Kyushu University researchers updated the categorization of a group of ladybirds called Stethorini in Japan . Stethorini ladybugs are small and eat spider mites.
“I knew that this group of ladybirds often inhabits pine trees. Since there are Japanese black pines growing at the Hakozaki Satellite, I decided to look there, and that is where I found the new species,” said Ryōta Seki, the paper’s first author and a graduate student at the Graduate School of Bioresource and Bioenvironment Sciences’ Entomological Laboratory. “Normally, insect collectors do not pay much attention to pine trees, which is perhaps why scientists have overlooked this species for so long.”
We can forgive researchers for not identifying P. pinicola sooner. The pine dweller and other tiny black ladybirds are so hard to identify, so they haven’t received significant research attention, Seki explained. The only way to distinguish them is by cutting them open, not to mention the fact that they’re just a bit bigger than a single grain of sand.. It’s thus unsurprising that previous documentations have a significant number of wrong classifications.
As such, the duo studied around 1,700 ladybugs, and also concluded that two species—Stethorus japonicus and Stethorus siphonulus—are one and the same. Another previously unidentified species also came to light, which they called Stethorus takakoae after Seki’s grandmother, Takako Ōtsuki, and her support of his interest in insects.
“Standardizing these names is important because it allows us to share data and research with other countries in Asia,” Seki said. “It clarifies that this is a widespread species found from the tropics to temperate Japan.”
“People rarely notice such small insects. But as our study showed, even in a city or on a university campus, there are unknown species living right beside us,” Kyushu University Museum’s Munetoshi Maruyama, the other co-author, pointed out. “These ‘minor’ insects support our ecosystems. I hope this discovery makes people interested in the diverse and fascinating world that exists unnoticed at our feet.”
The post New ladybug species is the size of a grain of sand appeared first on Popular Science.
The world’s only dark sky airport sits inside a national park
Airports aren’t typically known for being the best places to view the night sky. But last spring, the Jackson Hole Airport in Wyoming became the first airport in the world to become certified as an International Dark Sky Place, thanks to a community committed to night sky preservation. Here’s how they did it, why it matters, and how it’s still as safe to fly into as any other airport (because we know you were wondering).
What Is an International Dark Sky Place?According to Michael Rymer, communities program manager at DarkSky International, around the world, the organization DarkSky International has certified over 260 cities, parks, preserves, and counties on six continents as home to remarkable night skies—places where stargazers are practically guaranteed to be dazzled by the cosmos due to a relative absence of artificial light.
DarkSky International offers several different certifications. In the case of a national park like Big Bend in Texas or a sanctuary like Rainbow Bridge National Monument in Utah, certification means the spaces are far enough from major cities that there’s little measurable light pollution obscuring the view. But it’s not just about stars; dark night skies also preserve ecologically sensitive areas, especially for nocturnal wildlife that can be negatively impacted by excessive artificial light at night.
Jackson Hole became the first airport in the world named an International Dark Sky Place in April 2025. Image: DarkSkyIn towns like Flagstaff, Arizona—the first International Dark Sky Community and Dark Sky Place in the world—it means the entire community has prioritized public and private lighting that reduces light pollution enough so that you can still see a full sky of stars, perhaps even the Milky Way, from downtown.
Teton County, an area of 4,216 square miles that includes the town of Jackson, Grand Teton National Park, and the Jackson Hole Airport, is one of these Dark Sky Communities. With the support of local nonprofit Wyoming Stargazing, the airport itself, the city of Jackson, and the county it’s in are all officially Urban Night Sky Places, a designation reserved for “urban areas that promote an authentic nighttime experience despite being in the midst of significant artificial light,” according to the organization. The county and airport were certified simultaneously in 2025.
Urban Night Sky Places are a bit different. Unlike parks, sanctuaries, and reserves, these places don’t have to provide a specific measurable reduction in light pollution, and compliance is voluntary, not compulsory. But they must adopt a lighting management plan or policy that addresses all outdoor lighting over time and commit to bring all of its lighting into compliance within 10 years of being certified.
Community outreach, collaboration, education and destination-chosen lighting policies are also emphasized. “The town of Jackson was very much on board,” offers Rymer, ans the airport saw a reduction in light pollution after the switch.
“Standing in the parking lot, one can look up and pick out constellations. Once you leave the airport, one can see the Milky Way less than a mile from a commercial runway,” says Jac Stelly, the airport’s environmental manager.
Safety firstIn case the thought of a dark airport has you concerned about safety, fear not. “We take safety very seriously,” states Rymer. But maybe more importantly, actual air-side lighting—including landing strip lights, safety lights, and anything along the runway—is mandated and regulated by the Federal Aviation Administration and can’t be altered.
“There’s only so much you can do regarding lighting on that side,” says Jeremy Barnum, chief communications officer for the Jackson Hole Airport Board. “There’s a lot you can do on the land side,” he continues, speaking of the areas of the airport that travelers encounter, “so that’s where we focused our efforts.”
Lighting strategiesThose efforts included replacing roughly 300 light fixtures, spending around 600 hours of direct labor, and at least as much time on strategy and deliberation, explains Stelly.
Most updates involved relatively small changes that collectively made a big difference. That includes focusing on where and when light is actually needed. For example, between midnight and 4:00 am, parking lot lights dim to 30 percent. Sensors allow many of those lights to bump up to 60 percent when motion is detected.
Many bulbs were switched to LEDs with a warmer color temperature, which results in less light pollution, and most land-side and employee area lights were given shields to reduce light spill. Others are on dimmer switches or motion sensors to reduce light when it’s not needed. Dark Sky certification focuses on addressing exterior lights, but the airport broadened the scope to include indoor lighting too, like timing-scheduled shades and dimmers.
View this post on InstagramLights in the fuel facility, car rental area, and any non-customer facing areas, including private aviation, are now able to be fully shut off, too. “It is an all-encompassing project,” Stelly states. The airport also added signs providing information about the importance of dark skies education about the importance of responsible light at night and why dark skies are not just about seeing stars is also an important part of the Dark Sky Places program.
“The airport checked all the boxes. They went above and beyond. Jackson Hole Airport set a strong precedent for airports everywhere,” Rymer says.
Why go to all the effort and investment? “It’s part of our values,” Barnum says. Perhaps not surprising since it’s the only airport in the U.S. to be fully located within a national park, which Stelly says warrants a special commitment to environmental stewardship.
And while Grand Teton National Park isn’t a certified park on its own yet, the relatively pristine night skies in the region that’s largely undeveloped are part of what makes it such a special destination for locals and visitors alike. “This is an endorsement of Jackson recognizing that our natural resources are what makes us extraordinary,” Barnum states.
Proof of conceptAs the first airport to receive this designation, Stelly hopes they can stand as proof of concept for other airports, proof that airport infrastructure can coexist with natural ecosystems, no matter the size of the airport. “It’s a really great opportunity to broaden the idea of what’s possible,” he says.
They’ve created the roadmap; it’s now up to other airports to follow suit. In the meantime, a trip to Jackson, Wyoming, now means visitors can enjoy a clearer night sky than ever before. Even from the airport parking lot.
The post The world’s only dark sky airport sits inside a national park appeared first on Popular Science.
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