From corals bunkering down in deeper waters to wait out climate change stress, to how vaccines can boost our immune system beyond a specific disease – here are the 20 most surprising scientific facts that we discovered this year.
Read: Five things you need to know about bats, disease and coronavirus
Read: We are starting to crack the mystery of how lightning and thunderstorms work
Read: Understudied deeper water reefs could teach us how to better conserve corals
Read: ‘Four times more toxic’: How wildfire smoke ages over time
Read: Bats have different song cultures and chatter about food, sleep, sex and other bats
Read: Q&A: How vaccines can strengthen immune response beyond a specific disease
Read: Q&A: Why clouds are still ‘one of the biggest uncertainties’ in climate change
Read: Bees use shark ‘supersense’ to help find food
Read: How Stone Age humans unlocked the glucose in plants
Read: Space dust fossils are providing a new window onto Earth’s past
Read: How life on Earth could help us find life on Mars
Read: How hybrid electric and fuel aircraft could green air travel
Read: We can programme plants to grow biomolecules. Is farming the future of vaccines?
Read: Q&A: The curious case of male pregnancy in seahorses and pipefishes
Read: The science of tickling: why the brain won’t let us tickle ourselves
Read: Plants can detect insect attacks by ‘sniffing’ each other’s aromas
Read: Cloud shapes and formations impact global warming – but we still don’t understand them
Read: Alpacas and antibodies: How scientists hope to stop coronavirus in its tracks
Read: How speech recognition techniques are helping to predict volcanoes’ behaviour
Read: Solving an ancient dairy mystery could help cure modern food ills
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