More from Laura Baisas (Page 16)

A cicada sitting on a green leaf. The insect has bright orange eyes and large wings. Cicadas live underground for 13 or 17 years, before emerging to mate.

Fiber optic cables can pick up cicadas’ droning din

By Laura Baisas

A French bulldog standing in a pile of leaves.

An unknown respiratory illness is sickening dogs in the US, but ‘don’t panic’

By Laura Baisas

A large rat stands on a tree trunk at night. The Vangunu giant rat is the first new species of rodent described from Solomon Islands in over 80 years.

A legendary Vangunu giant rat was finally caught on camera

By Laura Baisas

An artist’s impression showing the HH 1177 system. The young and massive stellar object glowing in the center is collecting matter from a dusty disc while also expelling matter in powerful jets. This is the first time a disc around a young star has been discovered in another galaxy.

Astronomers spot an extragalactic star with a disc around it for the first time

By Laura Baisas

A photomicrograph of Chlamydia trachomatis taken from a urethral scrape. If left untreated, chlamydia can cause severe and costly reproductive and other health problems.

FDA authorizes at-home chlamydia and gonorrhea test for the first time

By Laura Baisas

An orange California newt sits on a rock. The amphibians are endemic to California.

Female Taricha newts are more poisonous than males

By Laura Baisas

A newborn rhino calf stands under his mother. He is black and does not have his signature horns in yet.

Endangered Species

A critically endangered Sumatran rhino named Delilah welcomes first calf

By Laura Baisas

Six African penguins standing on a rock. They have white plumage with black dots arranged in individual patterns on their chests.

African penguins may tell each other apart by the spots in their plumage

By Laura Baisas

A woman scratches her forearm.

How an unbalanced skin microbiome can make you itch

By Laura Baisas

An artist's rendering of a trilobite based on preserved soft body parts. The animal has two antennae protruding from its head and is oval-shaped.

10 new species of trilobite fossil rise from volcanic ash

By Laura Baisas

A man with his head in his hands.

Why does red wine cause headaches? It may be flavanol’s fault

By Laura Baisas

The bones of sacrificed horses found in the courtyard of Casas del Turuñuelo site in Badajoz, Spain.

Over 6,000 sacrificed animal bones tell a story of Iron Age Spain

By Laura Baisas

A mature Megasyllis nipponica with a developing female stolon.

Why these sea worms detach their butts to reproduce

By Laura Baisas

An aquatic nematode living in pond water among cyanobacteria. The small worms are sometimes trapped and eaten by carnivorous fungi.

These tiny worms are no match for carnivorous fungi

By Laura Baisas

The full view of the James Webb Space Telescope’s NIRCam (Near-Infrared Camera) instrument reveals a 50 light-years-wide portion of the Milky Way’s dense center. An estimated 500,000 stars shine in this image of the Sagittarius C region, along with some as-yet unidentified features. A vast region of ionized hydrogen, shown in cyan, wraps around an infrared-dark cloud, which is so dense that it blocks the light from distant stars behind it. Intriguing needle-like structures in the ionized hydrogen emission lack any uniform orientation. Researchers note the surprising extent of the ionized region, covering about 25 light-years.

Space Telescope

Chaotic region shines bright with 500,000 stars in new JWST image

By Laura Baisas

Colorful eyes of different animals; illustration

How do animals see the world?

By Laura Baisas

An artist’s concept of the Milky Way, which is a spiral galaxy that has a defined center. The spiral arms are made up of stars that can be wound tightly or loosely.

Elliptical galaxies may just be spiral galaxies with their arms lobbed off

By Laura Baisas

A serotine bat with its mouth open, showing teeth. Serotine bats are widely spread throughout Europe and Asia and have a 15 inch wingspan.

Scientists are confounded by the sex lives of serontine bats

By Laura Baisas

A woman in a puffy coat points in a direction. Her small dog looks excitedly in that direction. They are sitting in a park with oranges leaves on green grass.

Why dogs usually can’t tell what you’re pointing at

By Laura Baisas

An extreme close up of a mosquito biting human skin.

How ingredients in everyday soap could help fight malaria

By Laura Baisas

A researcher handles a petri dish while observing a CRISPR/Cas9 process through a stereomicroscope at the Max-Delbrueck-Centre for Molecular Medicine.

The UK becomes the first country to approve CRISPR treatment

By Laura Baisas

Two wild bonobos sit in a tree. Researchers examined pro-social behaviors of the smaller species of great ape in the Democratic Republic of Congo.

Wild bonobos show surprising signs of cooperation between groups

By Laura Baisas

A black and white photograph of the The HMAS Culgoa. The vessel was a Modified River Class Frigate, sometimes known as the Bay Class. The Australian naval vessel was launched in September 1945 and was decommissioned in April 1954.

Lung cancer in naval personnel linked to asbestos exposure

By Laura Baisas

A bioluminescent sea cucumber called Scotoplanes or the “sea pig.”

Surprise! These sea cucumbers glow

By Laura Baisas

A piping plover walks along L Street Beach in South Boston. The bird is small, with white and grey plummage.

Piping plovers are in trouble, but there’s some good news

By Laura Baisas

UNCOVER z-13 and UNCOVER z-12 are the second and fourth most distant galaxy ever observed. The James Webb Space Telescope’s Near-Infrared Camera (NIRCam) helped confirm their existence within Pandora’s Cluster (Abell 2744). They are shown here as near-infrared wavelengths of light that have been translated to visible-light colors.

Space Telescope

JWST spots two of the most distant galaxies astronomers have ever seen

By Laura Baisas

Attenborough's long-beaked echidna, photographed by a camera trap.

Elusive egg-laying mammal caught on camera for the first time

By Laura Baisas

Space Telescope with visible-light data from NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope. The resulting wavelength coverage, from 0.4 to 5 microns, reveals a vivid landscape of galaxies whose colors give clues to galaxy distances: The bluest galaxies are relatively nearby and often show intense star formation, as best detected by Hubble, while the redder galaxies tend to be more distant, or else contain copious amount of dust, as detected by JWST.

Space Telescope

‘Christmas tree’ galaxy shines in new image from Hubble and JWST

By Laura Baisas

A lateral view of Loncovilius carlsbergi. It is a six-limbed beetle less than an inch long, with two antennae protruding from its head.

These newfound beetles have male genitals shaped like a bottle opener

By Laura Baisas

An Anna’s hummingbird with bright pink plumage flies near some leafy green trees.

Hummingbirds have two creative strategies for flying through tight spaces

By Laura Baisas

A horizonal view of an injectable medication called Zepbound from pharmaceutical company Eli Lilly.

What is Zepbound? Here’s how the newly FDA-approved weight loss drug works.

By Laura Baisas

A colorized image of the newly discovered satellite virus latched onto its helper virus. The helper virus is larger and shown in a dark blue, while the satellite virus is smaller and purple. It is attached at the "neck" of the helper virus.

Virus observed sucking on another virus’ ‘neck’ for the first time

By Laura Baisas

A side view of a great white shark. Regional endothermy in fish has been seen in apex predators like the great white sharks or giant tuna.

Megalodon’s warm-blooded relatives are still circling the oceans today

By Laura Baisas

A louse on human hair under a microscope. Humans and lice have coevolved for thousands of years. The oldest human louse known to scientists is a 10,000 year-old specimen from Brazil.

What head lice can tell us about human migration

By Laura Baisas

This square astronomical image is divided horizontally by a waving line between a white-orange cloudscape forming a nebula along the bottom portion and a comparatively blue-purple-pink upper portion. From the nebula in the bottom half of the image, an orange cloud shaped like a horsehead sticks out. In the bottom left of the image, a white round glow is visible. The clouds from the bottom half of the image shine purple/blue light into the upper half. The top of the image shows the black expanse of space. Speckled across both portions is a starfield, showing stars of varying sizes and colors. Blue stars are younger and red stars are older.

Space Telescope

Euclid telescope spies shimmering stars and galaxies in its first look at the ‘dark’ universe

By Laura Baisas

Astronomers found the most distant black hole ever detected in X-rays (in a galaxy dubbed UHZ1) using the Chandra X-Ray Observatory and the James Webb Space Telescope. X-ray emission is a telltale signature of a growing supermassive black hole. This result may explain how some of the first supermassive black holes in the universe formed. These images show the galaxy cluster Abell 2744 that UHZ1 is located behind, in X-rays from Chandra and infrared data from JWST, as well as close-ups of the black hole host galaxy UHZ1.

Farthest black hole ever recorded by astronomers is nearly as old as our universe

By Laura Baisas

A sample of Asteroid Bennu is put on public display for the first time at the Museum of Natural History in Washington, DC, on November 3, 2023. A sample collected from the 4.5-billion-year-old asteroid Bennu contains abundant water and carbon, NASA revealed, offering more evidence for the theory that life on Earth was seeded from outer space. The small black rock is located in a glass viewing pain.

Smithsonian unveils a very small sample of the 4.5-billion-year-old Bennu asteroid

By Laura Baisas

A baby loggerhead turtle pokes out of a shell on the sand. Its head and front flippers are out of the shell, with the lower half remaining inside.

Endangered sea turtles build hundreds of nests on the Outer Banks

By Laura Baisas

An illustration of Ekgmowechashala, the last primate to inhabit North America before humans. The animal has a white furry face, with a pink nose, and large dark eyes like a lemur. It is sitting in a leafy tree.

North America was once home to some unusual wild monkeys

By Laura Baisas

A large asteroid with a smaller asteroid orbiting it. This image shows the “moonrise” of the satellite as it emerges from behind asteroid Dinkinesh as seen by the Lucy Long-Range Reconnaissance Imager. This image was taken by NASA’s Lucy spacecraft at 12:55 p.m. EDT on November 1, 2023, within a minute of closest approach, from a range of approximately 270 miles. From this perspective, the satellite is behind the primary asteroid. The image has been sharpened and processed to enhance contrast.

First NASA images from Lucy’s flyby reveal that ‘Dinky’ is not alone

By Laura Baisas

A black and white cat with a large mid-section sits on a kitchen floor.

Overfeeding cats will mess with their guts and poop

By Laura Baisas

The synthetic melanin is being applied to Inflamed skin. Just under the surface of the skin are green free radicals, also known as ROS, or "reactive oxygen species."

Lab-made ‘super melanin’ speeds up healing and boosts sun protection

By Laura Baisas

A white rat pops its head out of a black box. Like in humans, the rat’s hippocampus is the part of the brain where mental maps of the world are stored.

Rats may have imaginations

By Laura Baisas

yeah! caption is A size comparison of Dinkinesh (shown in blue) and other main asteroid belt objects Bennu and (2867) Steins.

NASA spacecraft Lucy says hello to ‘Dinky’ asteroid on far-flying mission

By Laura Baisas

Photograph of the skeletal mount of an Allosaurus specimen (AMNH 5753), from William Diller Matthew's 1915 book “Dinosaurs.”

When a Jurassic giant died, predatory dinos probably feasted on the carcass

By Laura Baisas

An orange starfish, or sea star, on a black backgorund. The unusual five-axis symmetry of sea stars has long confounded our understanding of animal evolution.

The sea star’s whole body is a head

By Laura Baisas

Several blooming yellow sunflowers under a blue sky with white clouds.

We still don’t fully know how sunflowers turn toward the sun

By Laura Baisas

An artist's illustration of an early lamprey's teeth and sucker. The Jurassic lampreys Yanliaomyzon had a feeding apparatus that surprisingly resembles that of the pouched lampreys. It foreshadows the ancestral flesh-eating habit of present day. lampreys.

Giant prehistoric lamprey likely sucked blood—and ate flesh

By Laura Baisas

Beaver moon sets behind Rocca Calascio castle in Calascio, Italy, on November 9, 2022. November full moon takes this name because during this month beavers fill the banks of rivers and build their dams and dens to take refuge in view of winter.

You can see three meteor showers at their peak and a full Beaver Moon this November

By Laura Baisas

An artist's rendition of the infrared aurora superimposed on a Hubble Space Telescope photograph of Uranus. The planet is blue with a white ring around it and the aurora is shown in red at its poles.

Uranus has a weird infrared aurora

By Laura Baisas

An artist’s illustration of two Jormungandr walhallaensis mosasaurs fighting. The extinct creatrue is a long sea serpent with flippers, a shark-like tail, and narrow jaws. One is seen biting the other in the next, while pterosaurs fly above it.

Newfound mosasaur was like a giant Komodo dragon with flippers

By Laura Baisas

A computer-generated three-dimensional perspective view of the surface of Venus. Venus has a surface temperature of over 800 degrees Fahrenheit.

Earth-like plate tectonics may have shaped Venus billions of years ago

By Laura Baisas

The Asian Lady Beetle (Harmonia axyridis) aka the Halloween beetle looks very similar to more common ladybugs, but they are generally bigger and with more spots. The bug is sitting on a yellow flower.

Why ladybugs and ‘Halloween beetles’ are everywhere right now

By Laura Baisas

Ma Rainey, a post-reproductive female of the Ngogo community of chimpanzees in Kibale National Park, Uganda, and her adult son Wes. The two are sitting among trees in a forest.

Wild chimpanzees show signs of potential menopause—a rarity in the animal kingdom

By Laura Baisas

A long torpedo-shaped fish swims among green plants. Knifefish like the black ghost knifefish are known for their shimmying motions and electrical pulses. and live in freshwater lakes and rivers in Central and South America.

Why electric knifefish ‘shimmy’

By Laura Baisas

A steak with kelp on top is plated by a chef holding a sauce pan.

This sea-to-farm-to-table restaurant wants kelp to catch on

By Laura Baisas

Ancient rock carvings that reappeared in the region of the Lajes Archaeological Site due to the severe drought affecting the region's rivers on the banks of the Negro River in Manaus, Brazil, on October 21, 2023. The carvings feature depictions of human faces.

Drought reveals ancient rock carvings of human faces in Brazil

By Laura Baisas

A woman wearing over the ear headphones leans her head back and closes her eyes.

Your favorite, bittersweet tunes may help relieve pain better than unfamiliar, relaxing music

By Laura Baisas

A kingfisher with blue and yellow feathers and outstretched wings dives through the air.

How kingfishers pull off breakneck dives without hurting their brains

By Laura Baisas

A fuzzy yellow and black bumblebee foraging on a green plant.

Bumblebees carbo-load on the fly

By Laura Baisas

A life-sized reconstruction of the head and jaws of the oldest megapredatory pliosaur called Lorrainosaurus. The reptile is long and torpedo shaped, with closed jaws and sharp exposed teeth.

This Jurassic-era ‘sea murderer’ was among the first of its kind

By Laura Baisas

A view from the summit of Volcán Salín, one of three Andean volcanoes where researchers uncovered the mummified cadavers of mice. Analyses of the mummies, combined with the capture of live specimens, suggest that the rodents scaled the Mars-like peaks on their own — and are somehow managing to live on them.

How did mummified mice end up on volcanoes in the Atacama Desert?

By Laura Baisas

NASA astronaut Harrison Schmitt is standing on the moon’s surface next to a large split lunar boulder, with a roving vehicle on the other side of the boulder.

The moon is 40 million years older than we thought, according to crystals collected by Apollo astronauts

By Laura Baisas

A box of a nasal decongestant called SudafedPe on a store shelf.

CVS to stop selling cold and allergy pills that FDA warns don’t work

By Laura Baisas

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