Kate Evans for Undark Kate Evans is a freelance science journalist and writer based in Raglan, New Zealand. Follow her on Twitter @kate_g_evans. This article was originally published on Undark. One of New Zealand’s most spectacular fossil sites originated 23.2 million years ago. It was formed in a valley dotted with small volcanoes, when rising magma deep below the Earth’s ...

J Hardwick Plos OneBiologists thought Disa forficaria orchids went extinct twice. Once in 2018, when a single specimen was found after 52 years without a sighting, and again in 2019 when that one orchid seemingly disappeared. There have only been 11 plants ever found in the last 200 years.  But in 2020, when researchers in South Africa were conducting a ...

Oswaldo Cruz FoundationOne afternoon in 2018, Carlos Alberto Martins da Silva was hiking in Brazil’s Serra dos Órgãos National Park, a wonderland outside Rio de Janeiro where slender granite peaks rise through cloud forest mists, when he came across a dead monkey. The carcass was too decayed to identify the species or speculate about the cause of death, but da Silva, ...

Rowena HillRowena Hill is a PhD candidate in fungi at the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, and Queen Mary University of London. Ester Gaya is a senior research leader at the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew. Simon Kallow is a PhD students at the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew. This story originally featured on The Conversation. This was the moment of truth. We’d spent ...

Solar Aqua Grid LLCCalifornia has around 4,000 miles of canals that shuttle clean water throughout the state. New research shows that these canals can do way more than bringing California’s residents with drinking water—paired with solar panels, these canals might also be a way to both generate solar power and save water. This new study presents an analysis from researchers ...

Katie Belloff/Popular ScienceIs your head constantly spinning with outlandish, mind-burning questions? If you’ve ever wondered what the universe is made of, what would happen if you fell into a black hole, or even why not everyone can touch their toes, then you should be sure to listen and subscribe to Ask Us Anything, a brand new podcast from the editors ...

Hugo Kruip for Unsplash Expanding a cow’s diet to include a pinch of seaweed could go a long way in helping tame their burps and farts—and protect the climate. A new study released last week led by scientists at the University of California at Davis showed that adding just a small amount of dried red seaweed to the feed of ...

Katie Belloff/Popular ScienceIs your head constantly spinning with outlandish, mind-burning questions? If you’ve ever wondered what the universe is made of, what would happen if you fell into a black hole, or even why not everyone can touch their toes, then you should be sure to listen and subscribe to Ask Us Anything, a brand new podcast from the editors ...

NASA/JPL-Caltech/SwRI/MSSSAn international team of astronomers just measured Jupiter’s raging stratospheric winds for the very first time—and they used a 27-year-old comet to do it. Scientists had already measured wind speeds down in Jupiter’s troposphere—where the planet’s iconic stripes lie—and way up in its ionosphere. But this new study was first to take wind speed measurements of Jupiter’s stratosphere using the ...