Earth & Climate

How does a spider build a web? The complex ‘spider dance’ unraveled

For the first time, researchers have captured literally every step of all eight legs using artificial intelligence. Spider webs are beautiful and fascinating works of...

Arctic Ocean warmed up earlier than expected

Off the coast of Svalbard. (Image: Sara Giansiracusa) Man-made climate change ensures that the world's oceans are getting warmer and the poles are melting....

Imperial dynasties under the spell of volcanoes

Researchers have been able to link traces of volcanic eruptions in ice cores from the last 2,000 years to developments in the history of...

Antarctic ice sheet is reacting rapidly

Iceberg in the Antarctic (Image: University of Bonn / Michael Weber) When the earth warmed up after the last ice age, the ice of the...

Europe has 600 million fewer birds

The once ubiquitous house sparrow appears to be the hardest hit. If you look outside now, you see a lot fewer birds than a few...

“Urschlangen” fossil is a marine lizard

Reconstruction of Tetrapodophis amplectus, the alleged primordial snake, in its aquatic habitat. (Image: Julius Csotonyi) Scientists believe that the ancestors of today's snakes still...

Photo worth seeing: The perfect wave

This visualization shows the interaction of infrared light with double-layer graph. The interaction is created by special electron flows. Graphene is one of the...

Scientists make razor-sharp knives from… wood

The wooden blade is almost three times sharper than a stainless steel table knife, allowing it to cut through, for example, a steak with...

The lower part of our atmosphere appears to be growing

Against all odds, the upper limit of our troposphere is still moving upwards. Our planet is surrounded by a relatively thin layer of gases: the...

Air pollution killed more than 300,000 Europeans in 2019

And that while more than half of these deaths could have been prevented. Air pollution is a real silent killer. Hundreds of thousands of...

Scientists come up with a synthetic cell that can divide

The cell – equipped with computer-designed DNA – should provide more insight into the basic processes that underlie life. Five years ago, scientists created a...

Birds in the pristine heart of the Amazon are shrinking due to climate change

Their wings, on the other hand, have lengthened over time. Even the most pristine parts of the vast Amazon rainforest cannot escape it: climate change....

Can this hydrogen jet make aviation really go green?

The Delft students who built the plane themselves and who will send it into the air this year, fervently hope so. In 2018, the Dutch...

Pandemic generates some 8 million tons of plastic waste

And more than 25,000 tons of that ends up in the already polluted ocean, where it is a major contributor to an already unmanageable...

Penis worms squatted empty houses 500 million years ago

Millions of years before hermit crabs developed their famous trick, penile worms used it successfully. British and Chinese researchers come to this surprising conclusion after...

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