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
Writer at Science Blog
Daniel Moran
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.
Brain
London's secret driverless mail trains ran beneath the city a century before self-driving cars
A century before autonomous vehicles became trendy, London's postmen rode in the world's first driverless trains—and nobody knew about it.
Sep 10, 2026
Brain
British businessman prosecuted for minting coins on his private island
When a financier's fantasy of island sovereignty collided with crown law, a handful of homemade coins became evidence in one of Britain's most peculiar prosecutions.
Sep 10, 2026
Earth & Environment
Millions of tires sank as a reef experiment. Now crews are still pulling them up
What began as an environmental triumph—dumping millions of tires to build an artificial reef—became one of the ocean's most stubborn cleanup nightmares.
Sep 10, 2026
Life
Monarch butterflies navigate 4,000 km using sun and internal clock
A creature smaller than a postage stamp solves one of nature's greatest navigation puzzles without ever being taught the way.
Sep 9, 2026
Earth & Environment
Iceland's geothermal heating system warms nearly every home and now faces a climate change test
A renewable heating system perfected over decades now warms nearly every Icelandic home—and the country is racing to export the technology before climate change rewrites the rules of geothermal abundance.
Sep 9, 2026
Life
Brainless slime mould recreates Tokyo's rail system with uncanny efficiency
A single-celled organism with no brain solved a transportation puzzle that took human engineers decades to perfect.
Sep 9, 2026
Earth & Environment
A power station in Kenya runs almost entirely on steam drawn from beneath the East African Rift, where volcanic heat turns the ground…
As energy poverty persists across Africa, Kenya has found an unlikely solution beneath its feet—one that could reshape how the continent powers itself.
Sep 8, 2026
Life
Cattle showed strong preference for women over men in cuddling study
A surprising finding from a cuddling study challenges assumptions about which humans animals instinctively trust.
Sep 8, 2026
Science
Professor shrunk half an inch after 100 days underwater in pressurized habitat
The extreme pressure of living underwater for months doesn't just test the mind—it physically reshapes the body in ways scientists are still working to understand.
Sep 8, 2026
Science
Scientists built the first nuclear reactor under a Chicago stadium with only an axe as backup
The architect of the atomic age had no emergency button, no computer failsafe—just a physicist with an axe and steady nerves standing between Chicago and catastrophe.
Sep 8, 2026
Life
Ancient fossils suggest human ancestry split far earlier than scientists believed
The fossil record is forcing scientists to rewrite when and where human ancestry split into separate branches, upending decades of assumptions about our evolutionary path.
Sep 8, 2026
Life
Humpback whales synchronize their songs to every phase of their dives
Sixteen hours of nonstop singing would wreck a human throat, a human diaphragm and probably a human marriage.
Sep 8, 2026
Life
Four hippos brought to Colombia in 1981 have multiplied into nearly 200 animals roaming the Magdalena River basin
An African megafauna mistake now threatens entire ecosystems across South America, decades after a drug lord's exotic pets escaped into the wild.
Sep 7, 2026