Life
Scientists painted black cows with white stripes to test whether zebra markings deter biting flies
A simple experiment with paint suggests evolution's answer to one of biology's most enduring mysteries.
Aug 8, 2026
Writer at Science Blog
Brendan Brown
Brendan Brown writes for Science Blog on natural history and the history of science. He founded The Expert Editor, a professional editing practice, in 2012, and spent years editing manuscripts before writing for the publication.
Earth & Environment
While Europe and America baked through record heat this summer, the other end of the planet quietly dropped to minus 119 Fahrenheit
As the Northern Hemisphere sweltered through record heat, a skeleton crew at a remote Antarctic station documented an extreme most of us will never experience—and now they're trapped until spring.
Aug 8, 2026
Brain & Behavior
Research suggests the 1960s and 70s produced adults who could self-soothe, entertain themselves, and tolerate boredom
A generation of unsupervised, under-entertained children may have accidentally stumbled onto the secret to emotional resilience.
Aug 5, 2026
Brain & Behavior
Psychology suggests people who browse social media but never post or comment aren't passive
The silent majority of social media aren't checking out—they're the only ones who've truly thought through what they're doing there.
Aug 5, 2026
Brain & Behavior
Research suggests people who handwrite lists and people who use phone apps process their entire day differently
Over time, outsourcing your to-do list to your phone might be outsourcing your sense of agency along with it.
Aug 4, 2026
Brain & Behavior
We tend to imagine happiness as a life of rest and leisure
The deepest satisfaction doesn't arrive during rest — it emerges when you're so absorbed in a challenging task that time disappears and self-consciousness evaporates entirely.
Aug 3, 2026
Space
The Soviet Lunokhod 1 rover went silent on the Moon in 1971, then scientists found its lost reflector in 2010 and got a signal bright…
A Cold War-era robot's forgotten mirror just became a window into the Moon's past, decades after everyone stopped looking.
Aug 3, 2026
Science
The Antikythera mechanism recovered from a Roman shipwreck in 1901 turned out to be a hand-cranked bronze computer that could predict…
A device that predicted celestial events with mechanical precision lay forgotten underwater for two millennia, only to challenge everything we thought we knew about ancient engineering.
Aug 3, 2026
Brain & Behavior
The marshmallow test, redone with ten times as many children, found that a four-year-old's willpower mostly stopped predicting teenage…
A celebrated study on childhood self-control may have missed the real driver of success all along: your parents' bank account.
Aug 2, 2026
Life
It looked like a cross between a pig and a turtle, it had two tusks and a horny beak and no other teeth, it was hardly anyone's idea of a…
For 300 million years, this ungainly creature with a pig's body and a turtle's beak dominated every habitat it inhabited—outcompeting dinosaurs themselves through sheer evolutionary staying power.
Jul 19, 2026
Life
In a pitch-black cave on the border of Greece and Albania, more than 100,000 spiders share a single web the size of half a tennis court
A predator and its prey have abandoned millions of years of evolutionary conflict to build something neither could construct alone.
Jul 19, 2026
Life
The story of edible 3,000-year-old tomb honey is poorly documented, but honey really does resist spoilage
Honey's low water activity, acidity and sugar content resist microbial growth. The familiar story about edible honey recovered from Egyptian tombs is not well documented.
Jul 10, 2026
Space
Why the Sun often looks yellow from Earth even though its combined visible light is white
Ask a child to draw the Sun and they will reach for the yellow crayon. Ask an adult, and they will do the same, without thinking about it.
Jul 9, 2026
Life
The oldest known piece of Earth is a crystal barely wider than a hair, found in the hills of Western Australia
Somewhere in the low, rust-coloured hills north of Perth, in a remote scrap of Western Australia called Jack Hills, a geologist bent down in 2001 and picked up a piece of rock.
Jul 9, 2026