More from Laura Baisas

Paramecium bursaria under a microscope. All creatures whose cells house a nucleus, including Paramecium bursaria, can be traced back to a common ancestor called the Last Eukaryotic Common Ancestor (LECA).
Animals

Newfound single-celled hunters may have been Earth’s first-ever predators

By Laura Baisas

An illustration of the rhynchosaur Bentonyx from the Middle Triassic of Devon, about 245 million years ago.
Animals

This ancient reptile had a deadly vegetarian diet

By Laura Baisas

The California two-spot octopus (Bimaculoides) is the first octopus species to have its genome sequenced and is very helpful for studying cephalopods.
Animals

Octopuses rewrite their own RNA to survive freezing temperatures

By Laura Baisas

A summit eruption of Kīlauea volcano, within Halemaʻumaʻu crater, began at approximately 4:44 AM on June 7, 2023. Lava is flowing on the crater floor and there are several active vent sources. The eruption at Kīlauea’s summit is occurring within a closed area of Hawai'i Volcanoes National Park and high levels of volcanic gas are the primary hazard of concern.
Science

Hawaii’s Mount Kīlauea volcano erupts again—and you can watch it live

By Laura Baisas

Four kittens standing in grass. Less invasive measures could protect stray cats and the environment.
Animals

A new shot can be a safe and effective alternative to surgical spaying

By Laura Baisas

The Downtown Manhattan skyline stands shrouded in a reddish haze as a result of Canadian wildfires on June 6, 2023 in New York City. Over 100 wildfires are burning in the Canadian province of Nova Scotia and Quebec resulting in air quality health alerts for the Adirondacks, Eastern Lake Ontario, Central New York, and Western New York.
Climate Change

Wildfire smoke is choking the eastern United States

By Laura Baisas

A monkey laying on a tree smiling.
Animals

Super semen could be one reason why primates evolved to masturbate

By Laura Baisas

An entrance to the Dinaledi Chamber of the Rising Star Cave system, part of the Cradle of Humankind World Heritage Site near Johannesburg, South Africa. Newly found grave sites and wall engravings have led a team of archeologists to reevaluate the meaning-making capacity of an early human ancestor, Homo naledi.
Archaeology

Extinct human cousins may have beaten us to inventing burial rituals

By Laura Baisas

A doctor examines a chest x-ray.
Cancer

A daily pill could cut lung cancer deaths in half, new study shows

By Laura Baisas

A badger in a forest on a rainy day.
Animals

Air quality monitoring stations could help track and preserve threatened species

By Laura Baisas

An elk grazing in Grand Teton National Park in Wyoming.
Animals

The role of people in preserving nature, according to America’s National Parks docuseries

By Laura Baisas

An conservator from English Heritage looks at one of over 50 pairs of tweezers Roman men and women used to remove armpit hair.
Archaeology

The Roman Britons cared a lot about hair removal, and it shows in artifacts

By Laura Baisas

A moth with wings extended outward lands on a flower.
Animals

This massively underrated pollinator needs your help

By Laura Baisas

A graphic rendering of the ESA's Mars Express orbiter. Mars Express lifted off from Baikonur Cosmodrome aboard a Soyuz–Fregat rocket on June 2, 2003. It entered orbit around Mars on December 25, 2003 and reached its operational orbit in January 2004. The initial mission duration was one Martian year (687 Earth days), completed in September 2005.
Mars

Witness space history by tuning into the first almost-live stream from Mars

By Laura Baisas

The adult gomphothere skull (foreground, tusk capped in white plaster) was separated from the main body (background, covered in plaster) prior to its preservation.
Animals

Elephants once roamed Florida—and scientists just stumbled on a graveyard full of them

By Laura Baisas

A mother and baby golden snub nosed monkey. These primates live in mountainous regions of southwestern China. Longer periods of maternal care may have helped them form more complex societies.
Animals

Chilly climates may have forged stronger social bonds in some primates

By Laura Baisas

An artist’s reconstruction of an Australian pterosaur flying with a large wingspan.
Biology

Dinosaur Cove reveals a petite pterosaur species

By Laura Baisas

A satellite view of Hurricane Florence in 2018. Atlantic hurricane seasons runs from June 1 to November 30.
Environment

NOAA predicts a ‘near-normal’ Atlantic hurricane season for 2023

By Laura Baisas

A full moon rises with clouds below. June's Strawberry Moon peaks on June 3.
Mars

A Strawberry Moon, solstice, and meteor shower will dance across the skies this June

By Laura Baisas

A microphone on a dark stage.
Archaeology

A lost ‘bawdy bard’ act reveals roots of naughty British comedy

By Laura Baisas

Reassembled partial skeleton Ambulator keanei with silhouette demonstrating advanced adaptations for quadrupedal, graviportal walking.
Animals

This 500-pound Australian marsupial had feet made for walkin’

By Laura Baisas

A saltwater crocodile with its mouth wide open.
Animals

Snorkeler pries crocodile’s jaws off his head to survive attack

By Laura Baisas

A close up of a skull and teeth.
Archaeology

Plague DNA was just found in 4,000-year-old teeth

By Laura Baisas

A walker in sneakers, with the bottom of the shoe visible.
Biology

Evolution of human foot arches put the necessary pep in our upright steps

By Laura Baisas

A sloth hangs in a tree in Costa Rica. The mammals have the slowest digestive system of any animal on Earth. It can take sloths two weeks to digest an entire meal, and they sleep about 20 hours a day to conserve energy.
Animals

Sloth schedules are surprisingly flexible

By Laura Baisas

The weevil Anchylorhynchus trapezicollis is the main pollinator of South American palm Syagrus coronata. Here, the weevil is seen on a female flower, touching the receptive parts and leaving pollen grains in the process.
Agriculture

Move over, bees: The lowly weevil is a power pollinator

By Laura Baisas

A sign that reads "Protect Our Waters" outside of the US Supreme Court before a rally to call for protection of the Clean Water Act on October 3, 2022. As the term began, the court was hearing arguments in the case of Sackett v. Environmental Protection Agency.
Climate Change

Wetlands lose some environmental protections in new Supreme Court ruling

By Laura Baisas

For the first time after more than a decade of work by researchers in France and Switzerland, a paralyzed man has regained the ability to walk naturally using only his thoughts thanks to two implants that restored communication between his brain and spinal cord. The press conference was held in Lausanne on May 23, 2023.
Health

AI-assisted brain and spine implants helped a paralyzed man control his legs again

By Laura Baisas

The sun over the ocean. Over 5,000 species could be at risk if deep sea mining begins in the Pacific Ocean's Clarion-Clipperton Zone.
Animals

A deep sea mining zone in the remote Pacific is also a goldmine of unique species

By Laura Baisas

Visible satellite image of Super Typhoon Mawar on Tuesday, May 23, 2023. At the time, Mawar had sustained 1-minute winds of 155 mph.
Climate Change

Guam hit by strongest ‘Super Typhoon’ in decades

By Laura Baisas

Meningococcal bacteria under a microscope. According to the World Health Organization, meningitis caused an estimated 25,000 deaths in 2019.
Diseases

Meningitis shot that fights 5 different strains shows promise in latest trial

By Laura Baisas

A spiny mouse standing on a rock. Spiny mice can regenerate skin, muscle, nerves, spinal cord, and possibly cardiac tissue.
Animals

African spiny mouse joins a small but mighty group of bony plated mammals

By Laura Baisas

Climate justice campaigners march from the Shell Centre to Trafalgar Square to demand urgent climate finance and reparations for loss and damage for global south communities on November, 12 2022 in London. The march was organized by the Climate Justice Coalition as part of a Global Day of Action called by African climate campaign groups at COP27.
Climate Change

Chevron’s carbon offsets are mostly ‘junk,’ according to global watchdog investigation

By Laura Baisas

A polar bear stands on sea ice.
Animals

The Montreal Protocol had a dramatic ice-saving side effect

By Laura Baisas

A group of yellow and fuzzy baby chicks.
Agriculture

How a sniff test could make sexing chicks more humane

By Laura Baisas

A bathtub ring seen above the waterline o the brown and red rocks around Lake Powell, Utah due to drought that reduced the flow of the Colorado River.
Climate Change

Colorado River deals pays Arizona, California, and Nevada $1.2 billion to use less water

By Laura Baisas

A detailed example of a light bridge crossing a sunspot’s umbra. Hot solar material (plasma) rises in the bright centers of these surrounding “cells,” cools off, and then sinks below the surface in dark lanes in a process known as convection.
Science

See hot plasma bubble on the sun’s surface in powerful closeup images

By Laura Baisas

An artist’s illustration of the giant gorgonopsian Inostrancevia with its dicynodont prey, scaring off the much smaller African species Cyonosaurus.
Biology

This tiger-sized, saber-toothed, rhino-skinned predator thrived before the ‘Great Dying’

By Laura Baisas

The lower Manhattan skyline at dusk.
Climate Change

NYC is sinking and climate change is only making it worse

By Laura Baisas

NASA’s Perseverance Mars rover captured this mosaic of an isolated hill nicknamed “Pinestand.” Scientists think sedimentary layers stacked on top of one another here could have been formed by a deep, fast-moving river
Mars

Mars rover snaps pics of dusty craters that may have once roared with water

By Laura Baisas

A newly hatched California condor.
Animals

Thriving baby California condor is a ray of hope for the unique species

By Laura Baisas

A rendering of the newly discovered Protathlitis cinctorrensis near coastal areas where it lived during the Cretaceous Period.
Dinosaurs

A giant new spinosaur species has been unearthed in Spain

By Laura Baisas

An aerial view of a desert kite in the Jebel az-Zilliyat region of Saudi Arabia. The kite dates back to the Stone Age and was a kind of hunting trap.
Archaeology

Blueprints engraved in stone from Saudi Arabia and Jordan could be the world’s oldest

By Laura Baisas

Siler collingwoodi is a colorful, ant-mimicking spider found in China and Japan.
Animals

This spider pretends to be an ant, but not well enough to avoid being eaten

By Laura Baisas

A young baboon hangs from a thin tree branch.
Animals

Baboons can recover from childhood trauma with a little help from their friends

By Laura Baisas

Melting icebergs.
Climate Change

World set to ‘temporarily’ breach major climate threshold in next five years

By Laura Baisas

The skull of a victim of the explosion of earthquakes that accompanied the explosion of Mount Vesuvius in 79 ce.
Archaeology

‘Violent’ earthquakes accompanied the infamous volcanic eruption that buried Pompeii

By Laura Baisas

Two doctors performing lab tests, one looking into a microscope and the other using a pipette.
Diseases

A once-forgotten antibiotic could be a new weapon against drug-resistant infections

By Laura Baisas

A positive pregnancy test.
Health

Cannabis use in first trimester has ‘significant’ harmful effects on a fetus

By Laura Baisas

Bubbles in a dark carbonated soda.
Health

Sugar substitutes won’t help you lose weight

By Laura Baisas

A blue butterfly on a pink flowering plant.
Animals

A ‘butterfly tree of life’ reveals the origins of these beautiful insects

By Laura Baisas

A coral reef in the Gulf of Eilat/Aqaba in the Red Sea. Corals here and in the Persian Gulf are particularly affected by light pollution.
Animals

Light pollution is messing with coral reproduction

By Laura Baisas

A closeup of Saturn's colorful rings. The image was taken on June 30, 2004 using the Cassini spacecraft’s Ultraviolet Imaging Spectrograph as it entered the planet’s orbit.
Science

Saturn’s icy rings may be a relatively new addition to the gas giant’s signature look

By Laura Baisas

Extinct ‘thunder beasts’ went from mini to massive in the blink of an evolutionary eye
Animals

Extinct ‘thunder beasts’ went from mini to massive in the blink of an evolutionary eye

By Laura Baisas

A clownfish swimming in an anemone.
Animals

Baby anemonefish can rapidly change their genes to survive in the sea

By Laura Baisas

An donor relaxes their arm after donating blood.
Health

FDA finalizes new rules on blood donation for gay and bisexual men

By Laura Baisas

Smoke stacks from a power plant emit smoke.
Climate Change

Power plants may face emission limits for the first time if EPA rules pass

By Laura Baisas

A spoon of creamy peanut butter over a slice of bread and surrounded by peanuts, shelled and unshelled.
Food Safety

A peanut allergy patch is making headway in trials with toddlers

By Laura Baisas

A mosquito hanging upside down on a leaf.
Animals

Can scented soap make you less of a mosquito buffet?

By Laura Baisas

A NASA satellite image of huge plumes of methane coming from fossil fuel fields in Turkmenistan.
Climate Change

Satellites traced super methane plumes to Turkmenistan’s gas fields

By Laura Baisas

Soft brie cheeses on a plate with their rind on top.
Biology

A hunk of cheese is a perfect playground for fungal antibiotics

By Laura Baisas

A new butterfly species with orange wings and black spots next to the eye of Sauron from the Lord of the Rings films.
Animals

Lord of the Rings villain Sauron inspires the name of new butterfly genus

By Laura Baisas

A koala in a leafy tree.
Animals

Wild koalas are getting vaccinated against chlamydia

By Laura Baisas

A bat sea star on a dark background.
Animals

The blueprints for early organs may be hiding in sea stars

By Laura Baisas