Young reef octopuses do not slap every fish that gets close
Field observations of juvenile reef octopuses separate short defensive clashes with territorial fish from longer encounters with nonterritorial followers.
Aug 21, 2026
Deeper reporting,
thinking made visible.
Longer essays and features from Science Blog. Pieces here go through additional research and review.
Space
A laser array on Earth could one day push a gram-scale spacecraft to roughly 20% of the speed of light
A ground laser could push an ultralight sail to nearly 60,000 kilometers per second, but today’s experiments are still testing materials and femtonewton forces.
Aug 21, 2026
An accidental laboratory flood revealed that hibernating queen bumblebees can survive completely underwater for seven days
In a controlled study, dormant common eastern bumblebee queens survived up to seven days underwater, though later colony founding was not tested.
Aug 21, 2026
The mantis shrimp punches with the acceleration of a .22 calibre bullet, creating a cavitation bubble that collapses at nearly the…
The peacock mantis shrimp's strike is fast enough to boil the water behind it. A February 2025 Science paper explains how the animal survives its own punch.
Aug 21, 2026
The worst mass extinction in Earth's history struck 252 million years ago, before dinosaurs had even appeared
The end-Permian extinction devastated the oceans before dinosaurs existed. Its link to the Siberian Traps depends on not just immense lava volumes, but magma heating volatile-rich rock.
Aug 21, 2026
Canopy-penetrating laser scans along 4,430 kilometres of flight lines over Acre and Amazonas found 432 earthworks where only 36 had been…
The first geometric earthworks in the Brazilian state of Acre were recorded in 1977. For most of the half century since, nearly…
Aug 21, 2026
Dimetrodon — the sail-backed predator routinely mistaken for a dinosaur — first appeared roughly 60 million years before the earliest…
Dimetrodon lived in the Permian, before dinosaurs, and belonged to Synapsida, the same major evolutionary branch that later produced mammals.
Aug 21, 2026
Your brain has no dedicated decision-making centre
What you experience as a deliberate choice may be your brain's sensory and motor systems talking to each other, with no executive in between.
Aug 21, 2026
We picture fertilization as millions of sperm racing alone
A 621-species evolutionary analysis finds that arthropods repeatedly gained and lost five forms of sperm grouping, while the function of those cellular teams remains unsettled.
By Lachlan Brown · Aug 21, 2026