In the heart of the Congo Basin's Cuvette Centrale, a large depression that hosts the world's largest tropical wetland complex, lie two vast, shallow blackwater lakes, Lake Tumba and Lake Mai Ndombe. Together, they are roughly the size of 420,000 football fields.
The age-old question asks, "If a tree falls in a forest and no one is around to hear it, does it make a sound?" While philosophers and scientists alike have pondered this question for centuries, the more relevant question for today's recreation and wildlife managers is: Does it matter what makes the sound?
When grizzly bears clamber onto the talus slopes high in Glacier National Park, they're searching for an abundant, fatty meal: army cutworm moths. The inch-long (2.5-centimeter-long) moths hatch on the Great Plains and fly en masse to escape the heat in the stony upper reaches of the Rocky Mountains. Grizzlies hoover them up by the thousands—at about a half-calorie each—as they fatten up for winter.
There's growing interest in alternatives to traditional burials and in making the process more environmentally friendly in many countries. For many people, it's about the environmental impact of the funeral industry globally.
Honey bee larvae lack the sophisticated olfactory capabilities of adult honey bees, a new study finds. Scientists point to this temporary loss of function as a side effect of the nurse bees' heroic level of brood care, calling it a consequence of social evolution. The new findings are detailed in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
The heat waves of late May and June killed an estimated 2,700 people in England and Wales, according to a recent analysis—around 550 in May, when west London hit 35.1°C (95°F), and 2,200 in June, as East Anglia reached 37°C (99°F).
A new tool that allows researchers to create realistic full-body animations of monkeys has provided the first evidence that nonhuman primates experience the "uncanny valley" phenomenon for body avatars, according to a study by Lucas Maximilian Martini at the University Clinic Tübingen in Germany and colleagues at KU Leuven in Belgium, published in PLOS Biology.
A U.S.-Russian space crew blasted off successfully Tuesday on a mission to the International Space Station.
A record-smashing heat wave was spreading Tuesday from the West toward the East Coast, placing nearly 100 million Americans under heat alerts.
Faster and more effective ways to treat Pseudomonas aeruginosa, a bacterium identified by the World Health Organization (WHO) as one of the most life-threatening pathogens, could be possible thanks to a first-of-its-kind 3D computer model developed by the University of Surrey.
