Category: Worth Knowing

A Tiny Skull With a Massive Story to Tell Most snake fossils are two-dimensional — sandwiched within rocks, the pressure of millions of years flattens them like a pancake. That’s what makes a discovery published this week in the journal Nature so extraordinary. In 2020,…

The Discovery Hidden in Plain Sight It sat in a Japanese museum for decades — labeled, catalogued, and completely misunderstood. A block of muddy sandstone at the Nariwa Museum of Art in Takahashi City, Okayama Prefecture, had long been identified as a fossil of Monotis,…

The Moss Beneath Your Feet May Be Running Its Own Network It grows on rocks, creeps across sidewalk cracks, and carpets the forest floor. Most of us barely notice it. But according to a striking new study, that fuzzy green moss is doing something far…

A drone has captured rare footage of the bizarre-looking wedgefish swimming through Shark Bay, offering a remarkable glimpse of one of the planet’s most unusual and seldom-seen creatures. Wildlife videographer Jake Mason filmed the animal as part of a group passing through the area. The wedgefish is considered among the rarest animals in the world.

Scientists have developed a new metal alloy that could transform engineering and construction. The cobalt aluminum nanolaminate material is up to 10 times stronger than structural steel, and remarkably, it achieves this without becoming brittle. Materials typically grow more fragile as they get stronger, but this alloy breaks that longstanding tradeoff, potentially opening the door to lighter, tougher structures across multiple industries.

Human activity is stripping oxygen from the world’s oceans at an alarming rate, posing a serious threat to marine ecosystems and global stability. Declining oxygen levels can suffocate sea life, disrupt food chains, and trigger broader environmental consequences. Scientists are urging policymakers and the public to treat ocean deoxygenation as the urgent crisis it has become.

A team at Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich calculated in 2026 that life may not need a star to survive. Moons orbiting rogue planets, which drift through space untethered to any sun, could maintain liquid oceans for up to 4.3 billion years, roughly the same span that life has existed on Earth, through internal heat alone.

Scientists believe a massive asteroid that broke apart near Jupiter around 800 million years ago may have showered Earth, the Moon, and Mars with rocky fragments. The event likely sent an enormous number of debris pieces hurtling through the inner solar system. Researchers say studying this ancient impact event helps explain crater patterns observed on the Moon and other nearby planets.

Scientists are warning that a major ocean current system is nearing collapse, with potential consequences that could extend as far as California. Earth’s climate systems are deeply interconnected, meaning a disruption in ocean circulation could trigger widespread and unexpected effects on weather patterns, sea levels, and temperatures across regions far beyond the immediate area.

NASA’s Stardust spacecraft made history on January 2, 2004, when it flew through the cloud surrounding comet 81P/Wild 2 at 6.1 kilometres per second. Using a collector filled with silica aerogel, the probe captured cometary particles and transported them across 4.6 billion kilometres back to Earth, where they were dropped into the Utah desert, marking the first time solid comet material had ever been returned for scientific study.