Earth & Environment
Squirrels stage elaborate fake burials to fool rival thieves
Grey squirrels sometimes stage empty burials when rivals are nearby, apparently creating decoy caches that reduce the risk of theft.
Sep 21, 2026
Writer at Science Blog
Daniel Moran
Contributor
Daniel Moran is a writer at Science Blog covering the intersection of psychology, technology, and human behavior. Daniel brings a background in technology research and a focus on how scientific findings translate into the way people actually live, work, and think.
Earth & Environment
Your ten-dollar smoke alarm contains a radioactive element from nuclear reactors
Some ionisation smoke alarms contain americium-241, a reactor-made element; ionisation and photoelectric alarms respond differently to different kinds of fire.
Sep 19, 2026
Earth & Environment
Ergot-poisoned bread may have sparked the Salem witch trials
Could a medieval plague of madness have been caused by contaminated bread rather than demonic possession?
Sep 17, 2026
Life
Mice discovered performing emergency airway technique on unconscious companions
Mice responded to unconscious cage mates by opening their mouths and pulling their tongues, actions that widened airways and shortened recovery from anaesthesia.
Sep 17, 2026
Animals
African forest elephants' disappearance threatens the wood that lines piano keys
The disappearance of African forest elephants from Congo Basin forests is quietly unraveling the future of the wood that lines piano keys and guitar fretboards.
Sep 17, 2026
Earth & Environment
Soviet planners drained the Aral Sea to grow cotton in the desert
A cautionary tale about the price of pursuing economic growth without heeding scientific warnings: Soviet planners knowingly sacrificed an entire sea for cotton profits.
Sep 16, 2026
Featured
Berlin buried Nazi ruins under 26 million cubic metres of rubble from the war
A Nazi fortress became the city's solution to an impossible problem: what to do with the wreckage of war itself.
Sep 16, 2026
Earth & Environment
A century-old dam break created California's largest lake and an environmental catastrophe
A century-old engineering mishap created California's largest lake—and left behind an environmental catastrophe that refuses to disappear.
Sep 15, 2026
Brain & Behavior
AI companions trigger real grief when relationships suddenly end
When the AI they loved stopped being themselves overnight, users experienced grief indistinguishable from losing a real person—raising urgent questions about emotional authenticity in the digital age.
Sep 13, 2026
Earth & Environment
Fish adapted to freshwater in 50 years after Alaska earthquake lifted seafloor
When an earthquake lifted the seafloor in Alaska, it accidentally created a evolutionary laboratory where fish rewrote millions of years of adaptation in just five decades.
Sep 13, 2026
Brain & Behavior
Farmer searching for lost hammer unearths one of Britain's richest Roman hoards
A routine search for a lost farm tool became an archaeological windfall that rewrote Britain's understanding of Roman wealth and collapse.
Sep 12, 2026
Brain & Behavior
Homeowners can hide tens of thousands in rental income with a 14-day loophole
The tax code contains a loophole that lets homeowners pocket tens of thousands in unreported rental income simply by renting their homes for two weeks instead of three.
Sep 11, 2026
Technology
A leap second in 2012 broke airlines, Reddit and internet services worldwide
A single leap second added to Earth's rotation caused global systems to crash—revealing how fragile our digital infrastructure really is.
Sep 11, 2026
Social Sciences
USPS still mails live baby birds if they're wet from hatching
A century-old loophole lets farmers mail millions of live birds across the country—as long as they're still damp from the egg.
Sep 10, 2026