Science

When you think of Antarctica, you might imagine a stark, otherworldly continent of endless, white ice, with the only sound being the wind punctuated by the crack of a glacier calving in the distance.

Climate change is contributing to the escalation of existing local conflicts in Africa. A new WZB study by Ruud Koopmans, Daniel Meierrieks, and Daniel Tuki uses the example of pastoralist conflict between nomadic herders (mainly Muslim Fulani) and sedentary farmers in Nigeria to show how droughts triggered by climate change exacerbate existing religious conflicts.

Artist Frédéric Auguste Bartholdi’s small maquette represents the big ideals of the iconic national monument in New York Harbor

Sometime between 5.5 and 5.6 million years ago, two shell crushers squared off in the languid currents of an ancient Florida river. The fossils they left behind, discovered by paleontologists at the Florida Museum of Natural History, reveal the identity of the combatants and the outcome of their encounter.

How did life make the leap from single cells to coordinated, multicellular organisms? And how do genetically identical cells still perform a version of that feat every time an embryo begins to take shape?

Megalomaniacal leaders are fascinating. They exude boundless confidence, harbor sometimes excessive ambitions and make decisions that are often out of touch with reality.

‘USS Herring’ sank in June 1944, killing all 83 sailors aboard. The post Lost WWII submarine discovered off the coast of Japan appeared first on Popular Science.

Research into a common environmental germ that can cause severe infections in people and animals has raised concern that horses are starting to develop antibiotic resistance towards it. The University of the Sunshine Coast study examined the prevalence of the bug P. aeruginosa in Australian wild birds, native wildlife, livestock and domestic animals.

After the fantastic Total War: Warhammer trilogy, Creative Assembly is marching into the grim darkness of Warhammer 40K's far future.

New research clearly links thawing permafrost to toxic shift—and offers a way to predict it. The post The mystery of Alaska’s orange rivers is finally solved appeared first on Popular Science.

New research has found that masturbation among bird species, including parrots, is natural, despite prevailing assumptions that it is a harmful behavior in response to environmental factors.

A collaborative study with the University of Cologne, recently published in Nature Communications, provides compelling evidence that the extreme aridity in the hyperarid core of the Atacama Desert began over 40 million years ago—significantly earlier than previously assumed. The findings require a reconsideration of how deserts form and offer a new perspective on the long-term evolution of Earth's most extreme environments. Researchers from SUERC Centre for the Isotope Sciences are co-authors of a study which casts new light on the history of Earth's driest region, the Atacama Desert in Chile.

As soil health becomes a defining goal of the EU Soil Strategy for 2030, researchers at Aarhus University are rethinking how we model what lives beneath our feet. Their new spatially explicit population model for the soil invertebrate Folsomia candida (springtails) marks a significant step beyond standard laboratory testing.

Astronomers have discovered the first evidence of magnetic worlds beyond the solar system thanks to their high-speed, violent winds, representing a major step forward in exoplanet research.

After investigating thousands of wrist bones, scientists suspect the last common ancestor species of humans and chimpanzees may have navigated the world on its knuckles