Popular Science

In Florida, giant invasive pythons, the state’s signature alligators, and bears that sometimes roam around theme parks are typically among the most upfront wildlife in the news. But when the temperatures drop, one reptile stands ready to take the limelight and also drop—iguanas. 

When air temperatures get cold enough, the reptiles will get stunned (or freeze) and fall from trees. Today, morning temperatures in Jacksonville and Tallahassee dipped as low as 20 degrees Fahrenheit overnight, while Orlando hit the mid-30s, and Miami fell to the upper 40s. All temperatures that are cold enough to temporarily freeze an iguana. 

Reptiles like iguanas are cold-blooded—or ectothermic—reptiles that rely on external environmental conditions to regulate their body temperature. By comparison, warm-blooded or endothermic animals like humans and other mammals have a more consistent body temperature. Since the outside temperature has such a drastic effect on their bodies, cold-blooded animals often adapt their behavior as a response. They may bask in the sun to warm up or find shade to cool down and achieve a more balanced body temperature. 

CREDIT: Florida Lad.

When it gets cold, iguanas may also enter a dormant state called cold-stunning or freezing since they are not adapted to life in colder temperatures. Iguanas can start to slow down if the temperature gets below 50 degrees, and stun once they hit the 40s or 30s. 

“When that happens, they may lose their grip and fall from the trees,” said AccuWeather Meteorologist Brandon Buckingham. “It’s a unique cold-weather hazard in Florida.”

After they fall from a tree, they may appear to be dead. However, their critical body functions will all still be working and they will continue to breathe. Once temperatures rise, they can jump back into action as if nothing happened. 

Iguanas can grow up to seven feet long and weigh upwards of 30 pounds, so it is best to be cautious when walking under palm trees in colder weather. Getting hit by a reptile of that size could be dangerous. 

If you see a frozen iguana on the ground, do not rush in to warm them up. Joe Gonzalez from the Iguana Police told WPTV in West Palm Beach that relocating or interfering with an iguana can lead to more problems.

“If you capture an iguana in your own yard and don’t move it anywhere else, that’s fine,” Gonzalez said. “But if you relocate it, you’re essentially taking your problem and dumping it somewhere else. This can have legal consequences, including fines.”

Instead, it’s best to just leave the iguana alone. It will usually be fine once it gets over 50 degrees again. 

The post Don’t pick up frozen iguanas appeared first on Popular Science.

If you’ve ever been around a cat, you know they can get the sudden urge to groom themselves at just about any moment. You’re petting them on the couch. They’re purring. Everything seems lovely and content. Then, they lose all interest in you and start licking their butt. 

But some felines don’t just lick themselves: They also lick you. A cat will be busy grooming themselves. Then, without warning, they’ll turn their spiky tongues on their unsuspecting humans. Other cats can’t be bothered and won’t ever groom or lick their human friends, or other kitty friends for that matter. 

So, why do some cats lick their owners? Are they trying to clean you, too? We asked an animal behaviorist and cat expert to help us sort out exactly what is going on when your cat licks you.

Mama cats regularly groom their babies

For a mother cat, grooming is an important part of child rearing. When a mama cat licks her kittens it serves two important purposes: keeping her kittens clean and promoting social bonds, Kristyn Vitale, an animal behaviorist at Maueyes Cat Science and Education tells Popular Science. 

On the one hand, “mother cats are going to groom their kittens to help keep them clean and healthy,” says Vitale. Kittens can be especially susceptible to diseases, and “anybody who’s raised young kittens knows how dirty they can get, and a mother cat is not going to obviously bathe their kitten in a tub. They’re going to use their tongue to clean them.”

Cats learn to groom from their mothers. Image: DepositPhotos

But grooming also helps a mother cat strengthen her relationship with her kittens, says Vitale. A mother licking her babies is “one of the kitten’s first forms of social interaction.” 

It’s essentially a way for mothers to say, “I love you and I care for you.”

How grooming shifts for cats in adulthood

Kittens learn to groom from their mom, and usually start grooming themselves when they’re around four weeks old. Pretty soon after that, some cats “begin to reciprocate [their mother’s] grooming and they’ll groom their siblings or other unrelated cats and also preferred people in the house,” says Vitale. 

If your cat grooms other cats, animal behaviorists like Vitale call those cats their “preferred associates.” For instance, bonded cats often groom each other as a way to reinforce their bestie status. For cats, grooming other cats becomes “a very important social behavior that helps build bonds between the individuals.”

Wild cats lick each other, too

We also see the same behavior in wild cats where mothers groom their cubs to keep them clean and strengthen their connection, says Vitale. In adulthood, wild cats might continue to groom others. You don’t have to search hard to find adorable videos online of lions and tigers licking their besties.

Like domestic cats, lions will lick their feline buddies. Video: Lions Cuddling and Licking Each Other/ DerpDerp

But Vitale says there is one big difference here. A lot of wild cats, like tigers or even the closest relative of domestic cats, the African wild cat, “don’t live in social groups the same way the domestic cat does.” So they don’t always have the same opportunities to shower their buddies with love, because, well, they just don’t really have many buddies.

Cats lick humans to strengthen your relationship

So why, then, do some cats licks their owners? In general, if your cat licks you, it’s them saying (in so many licks) that they love you. 

Vitale says when her cat licks her, she sees it as them “engaging in a social behavior with me” that’s strengthening our relationship. “I’m thinking in my mind that they’re just in a happy mood and looking to hang out together and interact a little bit.” 

What if your cat doesn’t lick you?

While all cats groom themselves (which is why you don’t really need to worry about baths for most cats), not all cats groom other cats or their human friends. But should you feel bad if your cat doesn’t lick you? Does it mean they don’t love you? “No!” says Vitale. 

“Licking’s just one social behavior they could engage in. If your cat just sits on your lap, or sits near you, or your cat’s rubbing up against you, or your cat plays with you, those are all other social behaviors that show there’s a bond,” she says. Cats show love for their owners in all sorts of ways, she emphasizes. “Licking is just one thing a cat could do.”

Vitale has three cats, and of the three she says only one licks her, “very, very sparingly, like once or twice a month.” 

So, don’t worry, whether they’re a licker or not, your cat loves you. They might just have a different way of showing it. 

In Ask Us Anything, Popular Science answers your most outlandish, mind-burning questions, from the everyday things you’ve always wondered to the bizarre things you never thought to ask. Have something you’ve always wanted to know? Ask us.

The post Why do cats lick you? An expert explains. appeared first on Popular Science.

A supermassive black hole is reawakening inside a distant galaxy cluster—and after almost 100 million years of slumber, astronomers now say it’s making up for lost time. According to a study published today in Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society, J1007+3540 is erupting like a volcano and spewing plasma across interstellar space.

A black hole isn’t constantly devouring its unfortunate galactic neighbors. In fact, it can lay dormant for eons. But when one of these gargantuan entities finally reawakens, the resulting display isn’t only impressive—it illustrates the chaotic battle between its own cosmic forces and the pressures of the universe around it.

One of the most striking glimpses of such an event was recently captured by a team led by Shobha Kumari at India’s Midnapore City College. Supermassive black holes rarely emit magnetized, radio-emitting plasma, but according to Kumari, J1007+3540 is especially unique. After analyzing data collected by the Low Frequency Array (LOFAR) in the Netherlands and India’s Giant Meterwave Radio Telescope (uGMRT), researchers say there is undeniable evidence of multiple eruptions stretching deep into the universe’s past.

“It’s like watching a cosmic volcano erupt again after ages of calm—except this one is big enough to carve out structures stretching nearly a million light-years across space,” Kumari said in a statement.

The same images with labels showing the compressed northern lobe, curved backflow signature of plasma and the inner jet of the black hole. Credit: LOFAR / Pan-STARRS / Kumari et al.

Radio imaging revealed a small, bright interior jet indicative of J1007+3540’s internal forces revving back up. But surrounding this illumination is an older layer of fading, distorted plasma from previous active eras.

“This dramatic layering of young jets inside older, exhausted lobes is the signature of an episodic [active galactic nucleus]—a galaxy whose central engine keeps turning on and off over cosmic timescales,” added Kumari.

The supermassive black hole’s forces are unfathomably strong, but the influences of the giant galaxy cluster around it can’t be ignored either. The surrounding plumes of incredibly hot gas exert their own pressure, in this case even higher than most other radio galaxies. These cosmic regions then mangle and distort J1007+3540’s plasma jets as they race outward. For example, LOFAR’s imaging depicts a compressed northern lobe that is curving to one side due to the galactic gas. Complimentary data from uGMRT reveals a very steep radio spectrum indicative of old, weakened plasma particles.

“J1007+3540 is one of the clearest and most spectacular examples of episodic AGN with jet-cluster interaction, where the surrounding hot gas bends, compresses, and distorts the jets,” added Surajit Paul, a study coauthor and astronomer at the Manipal Center for Natural Sciences in India.

Moving forward, Kumari, Paul, and their collaborators hope to employ higher-resolution equipment to peer into J1007+3540’s core. In doing so, researchers can better chart how the black hole’s reignited jets travel through the galaxy cluster, as well as how often such events actually occur.

The post Black hole space volcano erupts after 100 million year nap appeared first on Popular Science.

Seven naturally-mummified cheetahs are more than just an exciting paleontological find. The specimens discovered in five caves near the city of Arar in northern Saudi Arabia offer a glimpse of hope for reintroducing the species to the Arabian Peninsula. The findings are described in a study published today in the journal Communications Earth & Environment.

Cheetahs once lived in much of Africa, and Western and Southern Asia, but their range in Asia has decreased by 98 percent over the past several thousand years. As a whole, cheetahs only occupy nine percent of the territory they used to. On the Arabian Peninsula (Saudi Arabia, Yemen, Oman, United Arab Emirates, Qatar, Bahrain, and Kuwait) cheetahs were found as recently as 1977, when a hunter in Oman killed an adult female cheetah. However, the animals are now considered locally extinct in the region. There are five cheetah subspecies, and the Asiatic cheetah (Acinonyx jubatus venaticus) is believed to have been the only subspecies that lived in present-day Saudi Arabia. The Asiatic cheetah is currently considered critically endangered, with only one small wild population remaining in Iran. Whether or not cheetahs could be reintroduced in the area is debated, largely due to continued habitat destruction.

During digs in five caves in 2022 and 2023, field biologist Ahmed Boug from Saudi Arabia’s National Center for Wildlife and his team uncovered skeletal remains of 54 other cats and seven naturally-mummified cheetahs. In desert regions, natural mummification is common due to the dry conditions where fungi and bacteria can’t thrive on a decomposing corpse. Deserts also have the right mineral content in the sand for preservation.

The oldest of the cat skeletal remains date back about 4,000 years ago. The mummified cheetah remains were much younger—ranging from only 130 to 1,870 years ago. 

They also extracted complete genome sequences from three of the seven mummified cheetahs. According to the team, this is the first time that this kind of genetic material extraction has been done on naturally-mummified big cats. While the most recent specimen is genetically closest to the Asiatic cheetah, the two older specimens are more similar to the Northwest African cheetah (Acinonyx jubatus hecki). This critically endangered species is found in the Sahara and several countries in northwestern Africa.

One of the mummified cheetahs as it was found in situ in a cave in northern Saudi Arabia. Image: National Center for Wildlife – Saudi Arabia

The authors say that their results indicate that cheetah subspecies could support the re-establishment of cheetahs in Saudi Arabia. An increased available genetic pool from other subspecies would make rewilding efforts more feasible, as subspecies can generally interbreed and create fertile offspring that further the population. The team also suggests that their method shows that ancient DNA records from similar specimens can inform future reintroduction plans for other endangered species.

The post Mummified cheetahs could help save the critically endangered big cats appeared first on Popular Science.

A young woman pushes a balled-up piece of napkin into a cup of Jell-O, asking the viewer to imagine that it is an airplane, high in the air.

“That is you flying through the sky,” she tells the camera. “There’s pressure from the bottom, pressure from the top, from the sides, pressure coming from everywhere.”

She taps the top of the Jell-O, making the suspended napkin ball quiver.

“This is what happens when there’s turbulence,” she says. “You feel the plane shaking, but [it] is not just going to fall down.”

The video is by Australian TikToker Anna Paul. Just days after she uploaded it in June 2022, it had accumulated more than 15 million views and thousands of comments from people saying it had cured their fear of flying. Paul says she got the tip “from a real pilot.”

But how accurate is the analogy? Is turbulence really like Jell-O?

@anna..paull

Fear of flying tip

♬ original sound – Anna Paul The origins of the Jell-O analogy

The Jell-O analogy is the brainchild of former airline captain Tom Bunn, who is now a licensed therapist and founder of the SOAR program, which helps people overcome their fear of flying. Over years of listening to clients express their worries, Bunn realized that explaining the science of flight was often not enough to reassure people that flying was truly safe.

“Clients would say they look up in the sky and see a plane and it doesn’t look like it should be there,” he says. “It should fall because they don’t see anything holding it up.”

Because these nervous flyers lacked understanding of the forces holding a plane in the air, they would feel the jolts during turbulence and panic, imagining the plane was about to drop from the sky. To help them overcome this fear, Bunn looked for an analogy that would convince the emotional part of their brains that the plane was not going to fall.

He found it by asking them to recall the familiar sense of air resistance growing as speed increases.

“If you walk across the room, air doesn’t slow you down,” he says. However, “if you’re in a car and push forward with your hand out the window, it feels about the same as putting your hand in a swimming pool and pushing against the water.”

Appealing to this logic, Bunn would ask his clients to imagine the air getting thicker as the plane accelerated down the runway. By the time they were in the air, it was the consistency of Jell-O, supporting them on all sides.

Bunn acknowledges that the analogy is not completely accurate scientifically. But it is an emotionally resonant way of visualizing the forces that hold a plane up during flight.

“Technically, it involves Bernoulli’s theorem,” he says. “It has to do with the fact that the bottom of the wing is pretty much flat and the top is curved.”

If you’ve ever put your hand out of the window in a car, you’ve felt the same kind of pressure that helps keep planes in the air when they fly. Image: DepositPhotos The science that keeps planes flying

Daniel Bernoulli was an 18th-century Swiss mathematician and physicist who formulated several key concepts in fluid dynamics. The most famous is Bernoulli’s principle, which states that an increase in the speed of a fluid decreases the pressure exerted by the fluid.

In a river, for example, water speeds up as it passes through narrower sections. The water pressure is lower in these constricted areas, as the acceleration is caused by higher pressure behind the constriction than within it.

Air behaves much like a fluid. When it encounters an obstacle, it compresses or speeds up as it flows around the object in its path.

“When the plane runs into the air, the air that goes across the top of the wing has to catch up,” Bunn explains. Because of the curve on the wing’s top, the air “has to take a longer route, so the molecules spread out slightly. So, they don’t push as much on the top of the wing as on the bottom.”

As Paul says in her TikTok video, there is pressure coming from the air above and below the airplane. But the wing’s design means that the air pressure is greater below it than in the faster-moving air above it, pushing the wing upwards. This is the phenomenon known in aerodynamics as “lift.” 

“The faster you go, the more powerful the Bernoulli effect,” Bunn explains. This is why, as a plane flies through the air at nearly 600 miles an hour, the pressure under the wings holds it in the sky as securely as a napkin ball in Jell-O.

Turbulence happens when blocks of air rub past each other at different temperatures, pressures or speeds. It can have many different causes, from thunderstorms to the centrifugal force of the earth’s rotation, which pushes bands of air outwards. Its strength ranges from mild, causing little more discomfort than a slight trembling, to severe, in which passengers or flight crew can be thrown around the cabin and risk injury if not wearing seatbelts.

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Why do we put seatbacks up for landing? An aviation expert explains.

Turbulence is less scary than it feels

But while strong turbulence can feel alarming, Patrick Smith, a commercial pilot and writer of the Ask the Pilot blog, says that “people tend to have a very exaggerated sense of what the airplane is actually doing.”

“Airplanes have what we call positive stability,” he says. “When they’re disturbed from their position in space, by their nature they want to return to where they were.”

During turbulence, every jolt down is matched by an equivalent jolt up, holding the plane steady on its course—as if it were suspended in Jell-O.

“There has never been a plane crash from turbulence,” Paul says in her video. Is this true?

Bunn recalls one incident in the 1960s when a flight departing Japan’s Tokyo airport encountered severe turbulence off the side of Mount Fuji, causing it to suffer structural damage and crash into a forest. But, he emphasizes, such an incident would never happen today. For one, commercial jets would never fly so close to a mountain, knowing that these can disrupt air flows and cause strong forms of turbulence close to solid ground, where planes are naturally most vulnerable.

For another, improvements in airplane technology mean that planes are now much better constructed to withstand even the strongest forms of turbulence.

During testing of modern airliners, “you can almost bend the wing double [in half] and it won’t break,” Bunn says. In real situations, “you never see even a tenth that much wing flex.”

So, is turbulence really like Jell-O? Not exactly. But if you’re a nervous flyer, perhaps the image can help reassure you that the only real dangers from turbulence can be solved by simply wearing a seatbelt.

As Paul says: “You can just chill there. You’re just wriggling in jelly.”

In Ask Us Anything, Popular Science answers your most outlandish, mind-burning questions, from the everyday things you’ve always wondered to the bizarre things you never thought to ask. Have something you’ve always wanted to know? Ask us.

The post Is turbulence really like Jello-O? Pilots weigh in. appeared first on Popular Science.

A young woman pushes a balled-up piece of napkin into a cup of Jell-O, asking the viewer to imagine that it is an airplane, high in the air.

“That is you flying through the sky,” she tells the camera. “There’s pressure from the bottom, pressure from the top, from the sides, pressure coming from everywhere.”

She taps the top of the Jell-O, making the suspended napkin ball quiver.

“This is what happens when there’s turbulence,” she says. “You feel the plane shaking, but [it] is not just going to fall down.”

The video is by Australian TikToker Anna Paul. Just days after she uploaded it in June 2022, it had accumulated more than 15 million views and thousands of comments from people saying it had cured their fear of flying. Paul says she got the tip “from a real pilot.”

But how accurate is the analogy? Is turbulence really like Jell-O?

@anna..paull

Fear of flying tip

♬ original sound – Anna Paul The origins of the Jell-O analogy

The Jell-O analogy is the brainchild of former airline captain Tom Bunn, who is now a licensed therapist and founder of the SOAR program, which helps people overcome their fear of flying. Over years of listening to clients express their worries, Bunn realized that explaining the science of flight was often not enough to reassure people that flying was truly safe.

“Clients would say they look up in the sky and see a plane and it doesn’t look like it should be there,” he says. “It should fall because they don’t see anything holding it up.”

Because these nervous flyers lacked understanding of the forces holding a plane in the air, they would feel the jolts during turbulence and panic, imagining the plane was about to drop from the sky. To help them overcome this fear, Bunn looked for an analogy that would convince the emotional part of their brains that the plane was not going to fall.

He found it by asking them to recall the familiar sense of air resistance growing as speed increases.

“If you walk across the room, air doesn’t slow you down,” he says. However, “if you’re in a car and push forward with your hand out the window, it feels about the same as putting your hand in a swimming pool and pushing against the water.”

Appealing to this logic, Bunn would ask his clients to imagine the air getting thicker as the plane accelerated down the runway. By the time they were in the air, it was the consistency of Jell-O, supporting them on all sides.

Bunn acknowledges that the analogy is not completely accurate scientifically. But it is an emotionally resonant way of visualizing the forces that hold a plane up during flight.

“Technically, it involves Bernoulli’s theorem,” he says. “It has to do with the fact that the bottom of the wing is pretty much flat and the top is curved.”

If you’ve ever put your hand out of the window in a car, you’ve felt the same kind of pressure that helps keep planes in the air when they fly. Image: DepositPhotos The science that keeps planes flying

Daniel Bernoulli was an 18th-century Swiss mathematician and physicist who formulated several key concepts in fluid dynamics. The most famous is Bernoulli’s principle, which states that an increase in the speed of a fluid decreases the pressure exerted by the fluid.

In a river, for example, water speeds up as it passes through narrower sections. The water pressure is lower in these constricted areas, as the acceleration is caused by higher pressure behind the constriction than within it.

Air behaves much like a fluid. When it encounters an obstacle, it compresses or speeds up as it flows around the object in its path.

“When the plane runs into the air, the air that goes across the top of the wing has to catch up,” Bunn explains. Because of the curve on the wing’s top, the air “has to take a longer route, so the molecules spread out slightly. So, they don’t push as much on the top of the wing as on the bottom.”

As Paul says in her TikTok video, there is pressure coming from the air above and below the airplane. But the wing’s design means that the air pressure is greater below it than in the faster-moving air above it, pushing the wing upwards. This is the phenomenon known in aerodynamics as “lift.” 

“The faster you go, the more powerful the Bernoulli effect,” Bunn explains. This is why, as a plane flies through the air at nearly 600 miles an hour, the pressure under the wings holds it in the sky as securely as a napkin ball in Jell-O.

Turbulence happens when blocks of air rub past each other at different temperatures, pressures or speeds. It can have many different causes, from thunderstorms to the centrifugal force of the earth’s rotation, which pushes bands of air outwards. Its strength ranges from mild, causing little more discomfort than a slight trembling, to severe, in which passengers or flight crew can be thrown around the cabin and risk injury if not wearing seatbelts.

Related 'Ask Us Anything' Stories

How pilots avoid thunderstorms—and what happens when they can’t

How do airplane toilets work?

What do TSA bag scanners actually see?

Why do our ears pop on a plane? An audiologist explains.

Why do we put seatbacks up for landing? An aviation expert explains.

Turbulence is less scary than it feels

But while strong turbulence can feel alarming, Patrick Smith, a commercial pilot and writer of the Ask the Pilot blog, says that “people tend to have a very exaggerated sense of what the airplane is actually doing.”

“Airplanes have what we call positive stability,” he says. “When they’re disturbed from their position in space, by their nature they want to return to where they were.”

During turbulence, every jolt down is matched by an equivalent jolt up, holding the plane steady on its course—as if it were suspended in Jell-O.

“There has never been a plane crash from turbulence,” Paul says in her video. Is this true?

Bunn recalls one incident in the 1960s when a flight departing Japan’s Tokyo airport encountered severe turbulence off the side of Mount Fuji, causing it to suffer structural damage and crash into a forest. But, he emphasizes, such an incident would never happen today. For one, commercial jets would never fly so close to a mountain, knowing that these can disrupt air flows and cause strong forms of turbulence close to solid ground, where planes are naturally most vulnerable.

For another, improvements in airplane technology mean that planes are now much better constructed to withstand even the strongest forms of turbulence.

During testing of modern airliners, “you can almost bend the wing double [in half] and it won’t break,” Bunn says. In real situations, “you never see even a tenth that much wing flex.”

So, is turbulence really like Jell-O? Not exactly. But if you’re a nervous flyer, perhaps the image can help reassure you that the only real dangers from turbulence can be solved by simply wearing a seatbelt.

As Paul says: “You can just chill there. You’re just wriggling in jelly.”

In Ask Us Anything, Popular Science answers your most outlandish, mind-burning questions, from the everyday things you’ve always wondered to the bizarre things you never thought to ask. Have something you’ve always wanted to know? Ask us.

The post Is turbulence really like Jello-O? Pilots weigh in. appeared first on Popular Science.

If you’re someone who mosquitoes just adore, we feel your pain. Unfortunately, new data indicates the number of mosquito species that feed on humans is increasing—and it’s likely to get worse.

Dr. Sérgio Lisboa Machado, a microbiologist from the Universidade Federal do Rio de Janeiro in Brazil, is the co-author of a study published today in the journal Frontiers in Ecology and Evolution on a potential link between deforestation and mosquitoes’ increasing preference for human blood. 

Whose blood is it anyway?

In the study, Machado and his colleague Dr. Jeronimo Alencar examined the feeding habits of several mosquito species in the Atlantic Forest, a moist broadleaf forest that stretches along the eastern coast of South America.

According to Machado, the project began as an attempt to figure out which local animals these mosquitoes were feeding on. 

“When we started our research, our main goal was to find the preferred blood source that some species of female mosquitoes use for reproduction,” Machado tells Popular Science

The process of identifying the blood in the creatures’ stomachs was time-consuming. The first step was identifying which of the region’s roughly 40 mosquito species were biting. This involved careful scrutiny of the creatures with a stereoscope. 

“The identification itself is not complicated,” Machado says, “but there is a shortage of entomologists to perform it.”

This fact, along with the need to transport the mosquitoes back to Rio de Janeiro for analysis, meant by the time the samples were analyzed, the DNA and RNA inside of them had started to break down. Even with these difficulties, the analysis provided Machado with a pretty good idea of which mammal species the mosquitoes in question preferred for dinner. In several cases, this blood was human.

 “This was something we didn’t expect,” Machado says. “Since we were in a forest reserve, we expected to find DNA from vertebrates in the local fauna.”

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Shifting tastes

So why so much human blood? The researchers hypothesize that the Atlantic Forest’s changing environment has led these species to develop a taste for human blood. 

“We believe it’s a matter of opportunity given the lack of a preferred food source,” Machado says. “It seems that if mosquitoes can’t find their preferred blood source, they seek out whatever is available.”

As biodiversity declines and animal species go extinct, more mosquito food sources are disappearing. However, unlike many of the animals on which they feed, mosquitoes are adaptable creatures. There’s almost always a ready-made alternative, including humans. 

While this might be good news for the mosquitoes, it risks being terrible news for humans. As an increasing number of mosquito species develop a taste for humans, so too does the risk that species which have not been particularly problematic in the past could act as new vectors for blood-borne diseases.

Once mosquitoes acquire a new food source, they tend to develop a preference for that particular blood—and humans are one species whose availability is most definitely not declining. Today, the Atlantic Forest occupies barely a quarter third of its former area, and it’s not alone. With every passing year, more wilderness is lost to human incursion.

The answer seems to be first arresting, and then reversing, this process of deforestation and habitat destruction. But it’s not altogether clear that the damage is so easily reversible. Humans certainly aren’t going anywhere, so who’s to say that the mosquitoes won’t just keep feeding merrily on us regardless?

Machado expresses cautious optimism on how we can address how deforestation affects what mosquitoes eat.  

“We believe this is a reversible process, but this will require restoring the biome while simultaneously continuing our study. We are still seeking more evidence that [these] mosquitoes have a preferred food source. For now, we are observing that there is a possibility that they are adapting to different sources and do not [prefer] human blood.”

Jumping species

Nevertheless, humanity continues to play with fire as it pushes further and further into previously unspoilt ecosystems. A landmark 2001 study found that new diseases are twice as likely to be zoonotic—transmissible between animals and humans—than existing ones. The danger posed by such diseases was exemplified by COVID-19, which jumped from bats to humans to catastrophic effect.

While disastrous scenarios surrounding a novel pathogen spread by mosquitoes are hypothetical, there are also very real dangers linked to deforestation. For instance, the malaria parasite in the Amazon is largely spread by the Anopheles darlingi mosquito. It was thought to have been eradicated in the 1960s, but re-emerged in the 1990s, and is now common. Another study found that cleared forest patches had created a perfect breeding environment for the insect, helping its return.

Ultimately, Machado stresses that it’s important to control the emergence of new disease vectors and thus mitigate further risks. 

“The re-establishment of ecosystems will certainly contribute to this and should minimize the climate changes we are experiencing,” he says. “We need to learn that our actions today, however small, will always have global repercussions in the future.”

The post Without forests, mosquitoes turn to human blood appeared first on Popular Science.

Animals see the world around them in ways that we humans can only imagine. Arctic reindeer’s eyes change color with the season to help them find food, while giant squid have eyes the size of dinner plates. Many species take advantage of seeing ultraviolet (UV) light that’s invisible to humans—including deer. 

The woodland mammals appear to be using UV as a way of communicating. Their scrapes—markings they make in the dirt or on wood and fill with secretions—glow under UV light that they can see and we can’t. The same goes for their rubbings, or the secretion-filled marks their antlers make on trees and fence posts. According to the findings published in the journal Ecology & Evolution, the photoluminescence is potentially a way for the mammals to find a mate. 

“People have been hypothesizing about if this glow exists in the environment, but nobody had gone out yet to try and connect it to the deer until now,” Daniel DeRose-Broeckert, a study co-author and ecologist at the University of Georgia’s Deer Lab, said in a statement. “As we got closer to breeding season, those markings increased in visibility as deer prepared for it.”

Over three months, the Deer Lab team searched for white-tailed deer markings in Whitehall Forest near Athens, Georgia, during the day. By night, they investigated them with UV lights. They analyzed 109 antler rubs on trees and 37 urine-marked acres across 800 acres of forest. 

The glowing deer rubs and scrapes look unassuming during the day. Image: Daniel DeRose-Broeckert.

“Their vision is vastly different from ours. Once the sun is slightly gone around dusk and dawn, the UV light dominates for deer since it’s not being washed out by the visible light spectrum from the sun,” said DeRose-Broeckert.

The team believes that rubs’ glow may be made from a combination of plant and tree sap and secretions from the animal’s forehead glands. The scrapes’ glow is likely from urine.

“In the process of scraping the bark off a tree with their antlers, they are depositing glandular secretions. Likewise, when they make a scrape, a different gland is also between their toes,” added study co-author and ecologist Gino D’Angelo. “Deer have lots of ways to interact with the environment, and they are leaving those signatures out there to smell and glow.”

The researchers believe the glow may help deer to leave messages for potential mates. Image: Daniel DeRose-Broeckert.

Earlier studies suggest that other mammals also glow under UV light, but the reasons why have been vague. Deer use the same scrapes as a way to communicate through scent, so the team on this study believes that the glow offers a visual way for deer to communicate

“The scrapes become a communication hub where other deer will visit it after it’s created and contribute to it. It’s like a phone booth out in the city when trying to make nighttime plans at a meeting point,” D’Angelo said.

During deer mating season from mid-October through December, marking is particularly important.

“We’ve known that there’s an olfactory component, but now we know the deer are also getting stimulated in two senses, both olfactory and visually,” said DeRose-Broeckert. “Both males and females utilize scrapes to advertise their presence in the environment and their breeding status and fitness level.”

The post Deer markings actually glow appeared first on Popular Science.

Archaeologists often focus on what skeletal remains can tell about how and when ancient peoples died. But an individual’s final moments are far from their complete life story. By analyzing features like their teeth, researchers can better understand not only the person as an adult, but how they developed over the course of their life.

In Italy, a team at Rome’s Sapienza University has conducted the first dental study of its kind for an Iron Age community 35 miles south of present-day Naples. After analyzing the microscopic makeup of teeth from ancient Italians, it appears that the people living near Pontecagnano enjoyed a diverse diet that reflected a time of increased interactions with nearby Mediterranean societies. Their findings are detailed in a study published today in the journal PLOS One.

Archaeological records at Pontecagnano span multiple cultures and date as far back as the Copper Age (3500–2300 BCE). By the 7th century, the region was home to the Etruscans, who occupied the area until the Roman Empire’s arrival in the late 4th century. The Etruscans often interred their deceased in necropolises, which is where the Sapienza University team recovered 30 teeth from 10 individuals who died during the 7th and 6th centuries.

“The teeth of Pontecagnano’s Iron Age inhabitants opened a unique window onto their lives: we could follow childhood growth and health with remarkable precision,” study co-author and archaeologist Roberto Germano said in a statement.

They analyzed the growth patterns displayed in dental tissues, and then compared the resultant data between canines and molars to contextualize the first six years of each person’s life. This revealed minor stress events linked to dietary shifts, often between the ages of one and four. According to researchers, the changing sources of nutrition likely made the young children susceptible to diseases, which left lingering evidence in their teeth.

However, their diets were incredibly diversified by the time of adulthood. Dental plaque examinations showed remnants from an array of foods, including legumes and cereals as well as “abundant carbohydrates and fermented foods.” These chemical traces are supported by the existing historical understanding of the era, which featured increased trade with other societies around the Mediterranean.

The team believes that their approach represents a proof-of-concept for using dental analysis to offer personalized insights into the individual lives of ancient peoples. While not intended as findings representative of the larger Etruscan region, the analysis illustrates a more intimate look at Iron Age existence.

“The study…makes it possible to go beyond the narrow focus on the period close to their death, and brings to the forefront the life of each of them during their early years,” explained study co-author Alessia Nava.

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The axolotl (Ambystoma mexicanum) is a confusing creature, and not simply because it looks like a real-life Pokémon. Despite its cultural prominence, even the most optimistic conservationists estimate that less than 1,000 of the foot-long amphibians can be found living in a single location—Mexico City’s Lake Xochimilco. At the same time, captive-bred axolotls are an increasingly popular exotic pet in the United States. But due to their status on the IUCN Red List and potential problems as an invasive species, it can be difficult to determine when, where, or even if it’s okay to adopt your own axolotl pal.

A good example of the ongoing amphibian conundrum recently occurred at Chicago’s O’Hare Airport. According to a U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service (FWS) social media post earlier this month, inspectors flagged a shipment containing “smuggled” axolotls inside a commercial import of live fish intended for pet resale. Already listed under the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora (CITES), regulators also added them to the Lacey Act in 2025 an “injurious species” because of their potential to spread disease to native amphibians if released. Despite this, comments from both impassioned axolotl fans and wary observers quickly inundated the FWS.

“These are commonly bred in captivity. Why the fuss?” one user asked. Another claimed that, “Making them illegal was a mistake. They will still be bought and sold everywhere.”

The tiny axolotls were seized within a larger illegal shipment, according to FWS. Credit: Amanda Dickson/USFWS

Many others noted another mixed message from the FWS, this time in the post’s accompanying photo. Unlike Mexico’s dark-colored amphibians, these pinkish-white axolotls appeared to be leucistic, meaning they lacked their standard pigmentation. Leucistic axolotls are routinely bred in captivity—you may have even seen some in a local pet store. So, what’s the deal? Can or can you not own axolotls?

“Even though wild axolotls are imperiled, many of these animals are bred in captivity to be sold as pets. These animals are often cross bred with other species (such as tiger salamanders) and may be both genetically and behaviorally different than wild populations,” FWS senior public affairs specialist Christina Meister tells Popular Science.

Meister explains that while they are illegal to own in some states, that isn’t the case everywhere. At the same time, the axolotl’s recent addition to the Lacey Act’s injurious species list makes it illegal to import the amphibians into the U.S. It’s also unlawful to transport them from the continental U.S. to either the District of Columbia or any U.S. territories without a proper permit. And because Meister says the Lacey Act “broadly prohibits” the sale or transfer of basically any wildlife in violation of federal, state, tribal, or foreign law, that means that you really need to check the fine print before acquiring your axolotl. 

Axolotl ownership legality depends on where you live in the US. Credit: Amanda Dickson/USFWS

In the case of the recent incident at O’Hare Airport, the FWS clarified the exotic pets were part of a larger shipment that violated the Lacey Act, and included, “other wildlife that was not properly declared or labeled, violating both the Endangered Species Act (ESA) and the Lacey Act’s trade provisions.”

Axolotl demand now goes beyond pet owners, however. Meister says animal traffickers are particularly attracted to them due to their “unique appearance and inability to defend themselves make them a relatively easy target.” Meanwhile, they’re coveted by many researchers—particularly in the biomedical industries—because the critically endangered amphibians possess a remarkable ability to regenerate limbs and even certain organs.

So although they aren’t illegal everywhere in the U.S., Meister highly recommends people consult both federal and state wildlife laws before considering purchasing an axolotl. And when you do, be sure to buy them from reputable vendors and not those trying to sneak them through airports.

The post Is it illegal to own an axolotl? It depends. appeared first on Popular Science.

A YouTuber and his father have once again reclaimed the Guinness World Record for fastest quadcopter drone. Soaring through the air at an average speed of 408 miles per hour, Luke and Mike Bell’s Peregrine 4 highlights the latest intersection between engineering, creativity, and 3D-printing technology. The Bells’ achievement arrives barely a month after Australian aerospace engineer Ben Biggs and his Blackbird drone set the now-previous world record at 389 mph.

According to Luke Bell’s recent video update, he and his father have spent the past five months improving “every aspect” of their Peregrine design through a combination of simulation runs, stress tests, and equipment experimentation. This time around, they built much of their drone frame using a Bambu Lab H2D dual-extruder 3D-printer. This allowed them to print Peregrine 4’s main body, camera mount, and landing system as a single, unified component.

“That gave us smoother aerodynamics and a much higher surface finish quality than before,” Luke explained. 

Other alterations included upgrading to four, 900 kV T-Motor 3120 brushless motors—an increase of 100 kV over their previous motor choices. The Peregrine 4’s frame is also slightly larger than earlier models, but that clearly didn’t seem to affect its overall performance.

As in past verification trials, Guinness World Record officials followed the industry-standard rubric of averaging two flight runs in opposing directions to offset any windspeed influences. 

It remains to be seen how long the Bells can hold on to their title now. The title has shifted multiple times over the past few years. After topping their own initial achievement in April 2024, two other inventors increased the drone speed records twice more before the duo set the bar even higher in June 2025. After supplanting Biggs’ subsequent efforts, this now marks the Bells’ third time as Guinness World Record holders. Like the drones themselves, the speed at which bragging rights changes hands seems to be constantly accelerating.

The post Father and son reclaim Guinness World Record for fastest quadcopter drone appeared first on Popular Science.

A team from the Young-Williams Animal Center in Knoxville recently rescued two pigs stranded on a group of islands in the Tennessee River. After receiving multiple calls about the animals that appeared to be abandoned on Looney Islands, the team worked with the Knoxville Fire Department and Knox County Rescue to get to the islands.

After some searching, the two pigs were found together and rescued thanks to a bit of patience and the team’s “pig whisperer.” This pig whisperer is Mary Nussbaum, the Young-Williams Animal Center’s Director of Medical Operations. Nussbaum has over 30 years of experience in veterinary medicine, including working at the University of Tennessee College of Veterinary Medicine and its Veterinary Medical Center.

“She also is passionate about the care and protection of animals. Since the pigs were stranded on Looney Islands in January, available food resources were scarce, and the rescue team was able to lure the pigs with a whole lot of patience and several snacks,” Janet Testerman, CEO of the Young-Williams Animal Center tells Popular Science. “As soon as Mary started offering them food, they approached and were comfortable coming to her.”

The pigs were brought back to the rescue center and received a medical evaluation. As of now, it is not clear how they made it to the islands. If an owner comes forward to reclaim the pigs, Young-Williams will inquire further. If no one claims ownership, the duo will be made available for adoption.

The municipal no-kill shelter takes in over 10,000 animals every year, primarily stray cats and dogs. “But we also see our share of roosters, chickens, rabbits, hamsters, gerbils, snakes, turtles, and pigs,” says Testerman. 

The two-year-old facility accepts animals no matter the severity of sickness or injury and is considered a “no-kill” shelter. According to the Animal Human Society, in order to be considered a no-kill, a shelter or rescue must have an at least a 90 percent animal placement rate.

“The story of the pigs is but one of thousands of calls we have responded to in less than two years that have led to better options for the community and our animals,” says Testerman.

The post Abandoned pigs rescued on Tennessee’s Looney Islands appeared first on Popular Science.

Archaeologists in Denmark say a sunken Viking ship near Copenhagen is the largest boat of its kind ever discovered—and that’s saying something. At nearly 92 feet long, the 600-year-old vessel is also one of the best preserved examples of a cog, a “super ship” whose advanced design and carrying capacity helped transform trade in medieval Europe.

“The find is a milestone for maritime archaeology,” excavation lead Otto Uldum said in a statement, adding the boat now offers a “unique opportunity to understand both the construction and life on board the biggest trading ships of the Middle Ages.”

Named after the channel in which it resides, Svælget 2 was longer than two school buses and nearly as wide as one. Archaeologists analyzed tree rings in its timber to estimate that Viking artisans constructed the cog in the Netherlands around 1410 CE. Almost 40 feet of sand and silt had buried the ship since it sank centuries ago, protecting much of it from underwater conditions that normally destroy similar relics. Svælget 2 is so well-preserved that it still contains evidence of its rigging.

A 3D elevation map showing the remains of Svælget 2. Credit: Viking Ship Museum

“It is extraordinary to have so many parts of the rigging. We have never seen this before, and it gives us a real opportunity to say something entirely new about how cogs were equipped for sailing,” said Uldum.

Details like Svælget 2’s rigging will help archaeologists better understand how its comparatively small crew controlled such a large ship during its many voyages throughout the region.

“The finds show how something as complex as the rigging was solved on the largest cogs,” Uldum added. “Rigging is absolutely central to a medieval ship, as it makes it possible to control the sail, secure the mast and keep the cargo safe. Without ropes and rigging, the ship would be nothing.”

In addition to these materials, researchers are now finally able to confirm that some Viking cogs featured tall wooden platforms at both the bow and stern known as castles. Although historical illustrations have long suggested these structural features existed, no clear archeological evidence substantiated the artwork.

“We have plenty of drawings of castles, but they have never been found because usually only the bottom of the ship survives,” said Uldum. “This time we have the archaeological proof.”

Despite its size, the cog required a relatively small crew to pilot. Credit: Viking Ship Museum

In the case of the stern (or back) castle, archaeologists identified details of a covered deck that provided shelter and protection for the cog’s crew. Compared to previous shipwrecks, Svælget 2 features an estimated 20 times as much material to analyze.

“It is not comfort in a modern sense, but it is a big step forward compared to Viking Age ships, which had only open decks in all kinds of weather,” Uldum explained.

Although its discovery doesn’t revise researchers’ understanding of medieval seafaring trade, Svælget 2 illustrates just how much funding, resources, and technological knowledge was required to construct such a vessel.

“We now know, undeniably, that cogs could be this large—that the ship type could be pushed to this extreme,” said Uldum.

The post 600-year-old Viking shipwreck is the largest of its kind appeared first on Popular Science.

New research gathered with the help of a free-to-play video game indicates most people are happy to help their fellow neighbors, even if it costs them a bit of cash. According to the designers of Race Against Rot, their social experiment suggests that some new strategies to address longstanding issues facing both small-scale farmers and their nearby communities could be beneficial.

Environmentalists and sustainable food system advocates alike have long stressed the importance of supporting small farms, but it’s easier said than done. Despite the clear health and environmental sustainability benefits, shopping local generally means spending much more money—often at seasonal markets. Overall, this makes it especially difficult for low-income families and those living in food deserts to access quality ingredients.

The cost problem isn’t from price-gouging farmers, but the state of the overall industry. The vast majority of farms in the United States are struggling. The U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) estimates around 88 percent of the industry falls under the “small operation” designation, meaning they earn less than $350,000 annually in gross sales. Factor in costs, and less than half of U.S. small farms actually generate any profit at all.

A sample round during the game Race Against Rot. Credit: University of Vermont

In 2023, researchers at the University of Vermont built a simulation game called Race Against Rot to illustrate the uphill battles facing farmers. In the game, players took on the role of a small apple orchard operation and worked to maintain profitability through multiple policy scenarios. These included opting for farmers market or wholesale distribution options, paying a universal basic income to their workers, and supporting localized food hubs.

To incentivize the over 1,000 people who participated in the game, players could earn actual cash payouts of $1 per every $40,000 of orchard profits. But instead of walking away with the most pocket change possible, most Race Against Rot players opted to make less money in order to help supply their neighbors with healthy fruit. They called this concept of fostering local wellbeing “community nourishment.”

“We found that there was a very, very strong commitment to a value structure around community nourishment,” principal project investigator Amy Trubek explained in a recent university profile.

Food systems researcher Carolyn Hricko, co-author of a recent policy report based on the team’s findings, said it was “very heartening” to see random players adopt altruistic practices even during a simulated experience.

“When they walked in the shoes of a farmer, [they] came out the other side saying they’re willing to support community nourishment alongside their ability to stay in business, theoretically,” she said.

Trubek and Hricko know that reality is far more complicated than a video game simulation. People often behave more selfishly when consequential amounts of money—not to mention livelihoods—are on the line, and the global agricultural industry can’t be distilled down to a hypothetical apple orchard. At the same, most of today’s food distribution systems aren’t designed with this concept of community nourishment in mind. By beginning to consider the social implications of a game like Race Against Rot, policy makers could discover new and effective ways.

“Equitable food systems solutions can only emerge from questions posed and data gathered that honestly reflect the structure and function of both our current food system and any vision for a better one,” the policy report authors wrote.

Thanksfully, that vision of a better system is something most people want to see realized.

“The public really cares about community well-being and the success and livelihoods of farmers. That’s great news,” added Hricko.

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Not eating yellow snow is obviously wise advice, but how about snow that looks like a poppy seed bagel? You should also avoid that too, because those “seeds” may actually be tiny critters commonly called snow fleas.

As a video taken at the Monomoy National Wildlife Refuge in Massachusetts shows, these little black specks bounce across the snow. While technically called springtails, snow fleas (Hypogastruna nivicola) are a springtail species active during winter. Snow fleas are generally found in groups and their dark-colored bodies are easily noticed against white snow. These ancient insects have been around 410 million years—making them older than dinosaurs. 

Springtails are found in habitats all over the world. According to the United States Fish and Wildlife Service, they typically show up on top of snow because colder temperautres slow their speeds down “just enough for us to notice their chaotic parkour routine.” That hopping move is done with a forked tail called a furcula that launches the bugs into the air. This long tail is typically tucked underneath the abdomen. However, if a springtail is disturbed or threatened, it will use the furcula to launch its body into the air like a spring. Their acrobatics are so impressive that they have inspired designs for leaping robots.

They can also be found in soil, feasting on fungi, pollen, algae, or decaying organic matter, according to the University of Minnesota Extension. When they move through the soil, they create little pockets of air that help give plant roots oxygen, which helps keep them healthy. Eating decaying plant material helps break down organic matter into nutrients that the soil can use.

Indoors, the jumpy critters are often found in areas with excess moisture, such as near plumbing leaks or poor drainage systems. 

Fortunately, the arthropods are harmless. They don’t sting, bite, or suck your blood since they are much more interested in chomping up all of that nutritious plant matter. 

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A star spends its entire life influencing the cosmos across billions of miles in all directions. In certain circumstances, the surrounding gas and dust plumes will even interact to generate powerful, observable shockwaves. However, once its nuclear fuel is completely expended, a star is often reduced to a dense, inactive core that floats through space with little impact on its surroundings. So when astronomers detected shock waves emanating from a dead stellar object 730 light-years from Earth, they were understandably perplexed.

“We found something never seen before and, more importantly, entirely unexpected,” explained Simone Scaringi, a researcher at Durham University in the United Kingdom.

As Scaringi and her team describe in a study published today in the journal Nature Astronomy, they first noticed curious signals from the white dwarf RXJ0528+2838 while analyzing images taken by Spain’s Isaac Newton Telescope. A white dwarf is what remains after the death of a low-mass star, and sometimes exists in a binary system with another stellar object. In this case, RXJ0528+2838 is orbited by a still-living star similar in size to our sun.

In such cases, material from the active star is usually siphoned to the white dwarf to form a disk of debris around it. Some of this energy is then also hurled into space in what are known as outflows. But RXJ0528+2838 doesn’t feature a disk, so the dead star shouldn’t create such a curved, “bow shock” outflow or its resultant nebula—yet it does. What’s more, the white dwarf’s outflow has billowed for at least 1,000 years.

“Our observations reveal a powerful outflow that, according to our current understanding, shouldn’t be there.” added Krystian Iłkiewicz, a study co-author at Poland’s Nicolaus Copernicus Astronomical Center. 

To further investigate the cosmic anomaly, the team used the Multi-Unit Spectroscopic Explorer (MUSE) inside the European Southern Observatory’s Very Large Telescope. MUSE helped the researchers construct a detailed map of the bow shock and its composition, which they traced back to RXJ0528+2838 instead of an unrelated dust cloud or nebula. 

The team confirmed that RXJ0528+2838 also possesses a strong magnetic field that allows it to gather material from its companion. While more examinations are needed, they believe it’s this magnetic field that can help explain the dead star’s strange behavior.

“Our finding shows that even without a disc, these systems can drive powerful outflows, revealing a mechanism we do not yet understand,” said Iłkiewicz, adding that their new study now “challenges the standard picture of how matter moves and interacts in these extreme binary systems.”

There are still many unanswered questions about this never-before-seen cosmic relationship. Importantly, the magnetic field Scaringi calls the white dwarf’s “mystery engine” doesn’t seem strong enough to generate the observed bow shock. Instead, the current field should power an outflow that only lasts a few hundred years. But with additional investigation, the astronomers hope to one day solve the discovery that no one saw coming.

“The surprise that a supposedly quiet, discless system could drive such a spectacular nebula was one of those rare ‘wow’ moments,” said Scaringi.

The post Dead star emits perplexing shock wave for 1,000 years appeared first on Popular Science.

A winter storm blew an unexpected visitor from the south into a backyard in New Bedford, Massachusetts—a purple gallinule (Porphyrio martinica). These gorgeously colored birds with shockingly large feet, live in marshes from the southeastern United States through South America. These long-legged avians can walk across lily pads, and they eat seeds, aquatic plants, and small invertebrates like insects and snails. 

Upon seeing this unique bird, an unidentified woman called the New England Wildlife Center in Weymouth, Massachusetts. The organization had never received a purple gallinule before. Priya Patel, wildlife medical director at the wildlife center, tells Popular Science that in Massachusetts, purple gallinules are exceptionally infrequent, with “a few reports of one or two up here in the last 10 years or so.”

According to the New England Wildlife Center, southern birds sometimes end up in Massachusetts. “During periods of strong storm systems and shifting low pressure these birds can get pushed off course and carried north along the coast,” the center writes.

The purple gallinule in question, whom the staff did not name to avoid getting attached, arrived at the wildlife center majorly underweight and in a precarious condition. Thankfully, however, the team didn’t find any major injuries in their initial examination and X-rays. 

While it may seem that the best thing to do upon finding a struggling bird is feeding it as much food as possible, that is a dangerous move. If a starving animal eats a lot of food all at once, it can cause refeeding syndrome—when the stomach draws the limited remaining resources from the most vital organs, like the heart, brain, and lungs, too fast. This could lead to serious consequences, such as heart arrhythmias or brain seizures. This is why, among other reasons, the New England Wildlife Center doesn’t want the public to feed found animals before they have undergone an exam. 

Purple gallinules use their long legs to walk across lily pads. Image: New England Wildlife Center.

“This is why food must be introduced slowly to the animal so the organs have time to respond,” Patel says. “The best thing to do for these cases is fluid therapy, and rehydrating the patient often by giving injectable fluids.” 

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As the purple gallinule’s health improved, they collaborated with partners to decide how to best return the bird to its habitat. On January 8, the purple gallinule landed in South Carolina aboard a small private plane piloted and co-piloted by New England Wildlife Center volunteers, explains Patel. It made the journey with another fellow purple gallinule found in Vermont. After landing, the birds were picked up by Carolina Wildlife Rehabilitation Center volunteers. 

While the team in Massachusetts doesn’t know specifically when the volunteers will release the birds, Patel says that the plan is for the volunteers there to briefly monitor them to make sure they are okay before letting them travel further south. 

The post A giant-footed bird showed up in a Massachusetts backyard. It didn’t belong there. appeared first on Popular Science.

In the 2023 movie Plane starring Gerard Butler, a commercial aircraft is caught in a terrible storm. Dark purple thunderclouds suffocate the sky. The plane shakes and the lights go out. Turbulence throws an unbelted passenger across the cabin. Eventually a lightning strike cuts the plane’s power, forcing it to crash land in a warzone, where the movie’s story really begins.

In reality, plane crashes in thunderstorms are extremely rare—largely because pilots seldom fly into thunderstorms in the first place. 

“You’re never going to intentionally fly into a thunderstorm, because thunderstorms contain the roughest air, as well as other hazards,” says Patrick Smith, an airline captain and writer of the Ask the Pilot blog.

How pilots track thunderstorms

Avoiding thunderstorms, Smith explains, involves close collaboration between meteorologists, air traffic control, and the flight crew, both before and during the flight.

“We receive reports and forecasts before every flight indicating where storms might occur,” he says, referring to detailed satellite mapping provided by meteorologists. “But if you’re on a 12-hour flight, the information you have at the beginning is only so valuable. What you’re really relying on are the real-time tools.”

Part of the job of Smith and other pilots is to constantly monitor the plane’s onboard radar and Weather Avoidance System (WAS), which show “where storms are, how high they are, how fast they’re moving, the direction they’re moving and so on,” he says.

“[The radar] sends a signal out from the airplane and it bounces off the water in the clouds and comes back,” former pilot Tom Bunn explains. “The more water, the more intense the thunderstorm.”

Another key source of information comes from other pilots

“There might be 20, 30, 40 airplanes that [air traffic] control is watching at a certain altitude range,” Bunn says. “Everybody’s on the same frequency, you can hear each other. If you have turbulence, you’re supposed to announce it.” 

This combination of radar and information-sharing allows pilots to track storms and rough air up to a couple of hundred miles ahead. They can then ask air traffic control for a change of altitude to avoid turbulence, or a change of route to bypass a storm. Most airlines recommend that pilots keep a minimum of 10 to 20 miles distance from thunderstorms, depending on their severity.

“You see with your radar, it’s color-coded,” Bunn says. “The green is the edge of the thunderstorm, that’s bumpy, but it’s not severe. The yellow would be pretty severe and then there’s red. You just want to stay out of that.”

Advanced weather radars in planes show pilots what parts of a storm to avoid. Video: Amazing Lighting show – How MASSIVE thunderstorms look on airliner radar scope!/ DIY with Michael Borders How planes fly through storms

When flying through scattered thunderstorms, pilots may sometimes choose to chart a course through the gaps between the storms, rather than deviate too far from their planned path. In these conditions, the 20-mile distance guideline can provide an important buffer against unpredictable shifts in the weather.

“It can change very quickly and you can be in an area where a storm moves or morphs a certain way where that amount of clearance is impossible,” Smith says. “You won’t fly into the heart of the storm, but you may be skirting the edge of it from time to time.”

For the same reason, he says, it is usually not advised to fly over the top of storms—as the unfortunate pilot Brodie Torrance (Gerard Butler) attempts in the movie Plane.

“Thunderstorms can extend well into what we call the flight levels, upwards of 40 or even 50,000 feet,” he says. Although flying over the top of a thunderstorm can be smooth and safe, they can billow up quickly, making it safer to go around them than above them.

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Despite such strenuous efforts at avoidance, both Smith and Bunn agree that flying into a thunderstorm is rarely as perilous as the movies might suggest—although it could make for an uncomfortable ride.

“Probably the worst thing that can happen is you get hailstones, they make little tiny dents on the wing,” Bunn says. “If you dent the edge of the wing, it’s not going to be quite as efficient.” More severe hail can even crack the plane’s windscreen, although the vast majority of hail damage to airplanes is more a financial concern to the plane’s owner than a safety threat to passengers.

Thunderstorms are often also accompanied by heightened turbulence, which can be uncomfortable and frightening for passengers, but rarely unsafe. The pilot’s protocol is simply to set the autopilot to the optimum Turbulence Penetration Speed—calibrated to maintain stability while minimizing aerodynamic stresses—and ride out the bumps.

Why pilots avoid landing in storms

The one circumstance in which turbulence can be dangerous is when it occurs close to the ground, which is why pilots are particularly eager to avoid landing during thunderstorms.

“One of the big concerns is windshear,” Smith says. “Windshear is a sudden change in the speed and/or direction of the wind, which can be dangerous to planes at low altitudes.”

He explains that modern aircraft are equipped with windshear avoidance systems, and airports also have alerting systems for the phenomenon. If windshear is detected above the runway, “you may enter a holding pattern somewhere and wait for the weather to improve, or you may divert to an alternate airport.” 

“Those decisions are made usually between the pilots and the dispatchers on the ground,” he says. “Ultimately, it’s the captain’s decision, but in practice it’s a collaborative thing.”

And what about the greatest fear of many nervous flyers, a direct lightning strike like the one that takes out the aircraft’s power systems in Plane?

Planes are designed to withstand lightning strikes. Video: Lightning hits plane leaving BC airport/ @globalnews

“It’s not a problem,” Bunn says. “The average plane gets hit, I’m told, twice a year.” The electrical systems of commercial aircraft are designed to withstand these shocks, with backup systems that take over in the rare event of failure. 

“It’s like if lightning hits your car, it just follows the skin,” he explains. “Doesn’t do anything to people inside the car. Same with the airplane. If you get hit by lightning, you just have a flash and a loud noise.”

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Nestled in the South Pacific Ocean, some 6,000 people live on the most isolated, inhabited island in the world: Rapa Nui. Known to many as Easter Island, a name Dutch explorer Jacob Roggeveen coined after landing on the island on Easter Sunday 1722, Rapa Nui is roughly double the size of Disney World, or 63.2 square miles. And every year, some 100,000 people visit the remote island to see the famed 13-foot-tall moai statues or Easter Island heads.

As you might expect, visiting the remote island isn’t easy. To combat overtourism to the small island, only a limited number of flights travel to Rapa Nui each week. That means flights can book up quickly, especially during the busy season between December and March. But now, thanks to the work of an intrepid team of geographers and researchers, you can view the impressive moai statues from the comfort of home.

The team, which included faculty from Binghamton University and the State University of New York, just launched the first-ever high-resolution 3D model of Rano Raraku, one of the major quarries on Rapa Nui. The model includes nearly 1,000 carefully rendered moai statues. It also lets viewers explore the Rano Raraku quarry, which is located in a steep volcanic crater that visitors to the island can’t explore due to safety concerns.

“You can see things that you couldn’t actually see on the ground. You can see tops and sides and all kinds of areas that [you] just would never be able to walk to,” said team member and Binghamton University anthropologist Carl Lipo in a statement. Lipo is also the lead author of a new paper on the model and statues published in PLOS One in November 2025.

Three-dimensional model of Rano Raraku quarry produced through Structure-from-Motion photogrammetry. This comprehensive digital documentation, derived from 11,686 UAV images, reveals the complex spatial organization of production activities distributed across multiple workshops. areas. Image: Carl Lipo

In addition to providing researchers with a detailed 3D replica of Rano Raraku quarry, Lipo also hopes the model will help more people experience the island.

“We’re documenting something that really has needed to be documented, but in a way that’s really comprehensive and shareable.” So go get busy exploring Rano Raraku! As Lipo said, “the quarry is like the archeological Disneyland.” But one you can now visit from the comforts of home.

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Chances are sushi aficionados have left a restaurant take-out in tow and with a handful of adorable, but environmentally problematic, fish-shaped soy sauce packets. These single-use plastic “shoyu-tai” drip bottles are as iconic as they are convenient, but their small size and disposability mean they often end up sliding down sinks and into drains. Eventually, these plastic faux fish make their way to landfills or, worse, the ocean. Once in the big blue, they slowly break down into microplastics that are then eaten by real fish. Ironically, those microplastic-filled fish may one day end up nestled between rice at a sushi bar.

One Australian state has already passed legislation banning the plastic fish-shaped soy sauce packets, and others are reportedly considering following suit. But designers at Heliograf and Australian design studio Vert Design may have found a way to keep the fish packet alive—albeit in a more sustainable form. Their newly designed fish is called Holy Carp! and is made entirely from biodegradable plant fibers. Allegedly, these fibers will completely break down in just four to six weeks, leaving no microplastics behind. The new product is also noticeably heftier than a typical plastic fish, with a liquid capacity of 12 milliliters—a deliberate choice informed by research showing that diners often use more than one packet per meal.

“The soy fish are cute and convenient, but while they serve their purpose for just a few minutes, they can persist in the environment for hundreds of years,” Heliograf writes in a blog post. The company estimates somewhere between eight to 12 billion plastic fish soy sauce packets may have been discarded since the product’s introduction in the 1950s.

“They’ve become a symbol of a wasteful, linear economy that’s harming both people and the planet,” Heliograf adds. 

A traditional plastic fish-shaped soy sauce container (left) with the new biodegradable option (right). Image: Heliograf. A bigger, fresher, fish 

Heliograf and Vert Design say they gathered feedback from restaurants to arrive at a design that preserves some of the original fish’s emotional nostalgia, while prioritizing sustainability. The new container is made primarily from bagasse pulp, a byproduct of sugarcane production that has already been proven effective in other biodegradable packaging. When diners squeeze the fish’s engorged belly, soy sauce trickles out through a small dropper near its head. The team says the container is made entirely without PFAS, synthetic compounds that can take thousands of years to degrade, often called forever chemicals .

However, there are some drawbacks. Since the fish containers needs to break down quickly, it can only hold sauce for a maximum of 48 hours. This means restaurants will have to fill the containers individually themselves. Heliograf and Vert Design optimistically suggest that this could result in fresher sauce for customers. It also means more work for store employees.

The inventors of Holy Carp! aimed to merge the original plastic fish-shaped design with sustainability. Image: Heliograf. Fish containers warrant’ always made of plastic 

The plastic fish were reportedly first invented in Japan in 1954 by Teruo Watanabe, the founder of Japanese houseware company Asahi Sogyo.The earliest versions were made of ceramic and glass, but the push for mass production, and the timely advent of inexpensive industrial-grade plastics, led to the creation of the now-iconic polyethylene container. As in so many other cases, the pursuit of scale prompted manufacturers to adopt single-use plastics.

Like water bottles and plastic grocery bags, these plastic fish are particularly problematic because of how long it takes for them to break down. That’s partly why lawmakers in South Australia passed legislation in 2025 officially banning the fish-shaped containers. Defending the law, government officials noted that the packets were especially troublesome because their petite size caused them to be captured, or missed entirely, by recycling sorting machines. 

The new containers are made without dangerous forever chemicals. Image: Heliograf.

Relying too broadly on recycling to reduce plastic waste has proven to be a losing bet. Even as recycling has become more common, the vast majority of single-use plastics are not recycled. A 2023 United Nations report  found that nearly half (46 percent) of all plastic waste ends up in landfills, while another 22 percent is mismanaged and becomes litter.

Holy Carp! provides an elegant, though admittedly imperfect solution to the problem. The reality is, plastics are popular for a reason and sustainable alternatives will almost always struggle to match their convenience and functionality. But it’s been that and the more microplastic in the ocean, the real fish would certainly prefer the former.  

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