The world's oceans are the hottest on record for June—and El Niño is set to turn up the heat even more
The world's oceans are the hottest on record for June, pushing past records set during the 2023–24 El Niño years.
The world's oceans are the hottest on record for June, pushing past records set during the 2023–24 El Niño years.
Where would you go to watch a star being born? Probably not the heart of the Milky Way, which is about the most violent neighborhood our galaxy has to offer, a maelstrom of gas churning so fast and so chaotically that you would think nothing could ever settle there long enough to collapse into a star. And yet stars do form in that turmoil, and astronomers have just begun to work out how by finding an unexpected pocket of calm in the chaos.
A rat first frees a cagemate rat and then shares food with it. Is this animal just as empathetic as humans? In an American study from 2011, researchers observed that rats first freed their fellow rats from a cage and then shared food with them instead of leaving them in the cage and eating alone; this means they showed empathy. But do they have the same capacity for empathy as we humans, or do we differ in that regard?
The warblers—those harbingers of spring in the U.K.—have an unappreciated talent of a different sort. Common U.K. birds, including chiffchaffs and blackcaps, are playing a real role in the pollination of plants, according to new research in the Journal of Ecology.