ScienceBlog

Every spring, the same headline goes around the world: Finland is the happiest country on Earth. In the latest World Happiness Report, it took the top spot for the ninth year in a row. You’ve probably seen it. That ranking comes from a single question. People imagine a ladder, from 0 (the worst possible life for them) to 10 (the best), and say which step they’re on. It’s a good question. But you can put yourself on a solid seven and still wake up exhausted every morning. You ca

Look at two shapes. One is round and soft, like a cloud. The other is sharp and jagged, like broken glass. Now someone tells you that one is called “bouba” and the other is called “kiki”. Which is which? You probably did not have to think. Bouba is the round one. In a study of people who speak 25 different languages, about 72% made the same call. It is strange when you stop to think about it. Both words are made up. Nobody taught you what they mean. And still the answer a

In 2020, ecologist Daniela Rößler was stuck at home during the COVID-19 pandemic and wanted some company. So she collected a few jumping spiders, put them in clear boxes, and lined them up on her windowsill. One evening she looked over, and every spider was hanging upside down from a single thread of silk. Completely still. “I had never seen this,” she told Science. That evening started a six-year hunt for the answer to a simple question: do spiders sleep? The twitching eyes Her firs

“Stop that, you’ll get arthritis.” It is a familiar warning for anyone who grew up cracking their knuckles, and Donald Unger heard it from several people close to him. His mother, several aunts and, later, his mother-in-law all believed the habit would damage his fingers. Unger, a physician, decided to test the claim with the hands available to him. For 50 years, he deliberately cracked the knuckles on his left hand while leaving his right as a comparison. When he reported the result in 1998, ne

You give a tiny snake a gentle tap. You expect it to slither off, like every snake in every nature documentary you have ever seen. It does not. Instead, it curls the back half of its body into a loop, shoves off with its tail, and takes to the air for a split second. Then it lands and starts rolling away like a runaway wheel. Left side, right side, left side, right side. All the while, its head stays up and steady, like a tiny driver steering a tiny car. Then it often dives under the nearest thi

By 1902, the French had spent years transforming Hanoi, convinced they knew how to build a better city. Doctors, engineers and colonial officials had arrived in Vietnam with grand plans. They wanted to turn Hanoi into a showcase of French architecture, culture and modern infrastructure. They called it their mission civilisatrice, or “civilizing mission.” The idea was that French rule would introduce the Vietnamese population to European ways of living, including modern sanitation. At

Being in your 30s is a funny place to watch the generations from. You catch yourself marvelling at how the older lot take life’s knocks – the redundancies, the family dramas, the boiler packing in the week before Christmas – with barely a raised eyebrow. So I started asking. Over cups of tea and over the garden fence, I put the same question to anyone born in the 1960s and 70s who’d humour me: did your childhood make you tougher? What surprised me was how similar the answ

When I was a child, I visited Monkey World, the ape rescue centre in Dorset, and I’ve never forgotten one particular moment. I was standing at the glass of the orangutan enclosure when one of them came right up to the window. She was watching me just as intensely as I was watching her. But what struck me was the warmth in her eyes – honey-coloured, curious, and almost knowing. I’ll never forget the expression on her face. Monkey World was set up in 1987 to take in primates that

Wild sharks turned away from an underwater speaker from at least 62 metres (about 203 feet) off, more than half the length of a football pitch. The farthest reaction came at 74 metres, nearly 250 feet. Florida Atlantic University (FAU) calls it the first quantified evidence that free-swimming sharks react to sound from that far out, which makes the study worth knowing about. Its headline went one step further: “Sharks Can Hear Sounds Nearly 250 Feet Away and Find the Source.” The stu

I grew up with a cat called Raani. She was our family cat, she lived to the grand old age of 17, and I shared a home with her from my teens until I left for uni. And yet, we never had much of a bond. Raani was aloof. Sassy. I loved her, but we just… coexisted. As an adult, I got my first two cats, Athena and Ruski, and everything was different. Athena came on daily walks with me (yes, a cat on walks). Ruski sat on my lap for hours every day while I worked. We were a pack. After my separati

It’s one of those stories that sounds almost too good to be true. Eight Burmese pythons, released into a fenced research area for a university tracking study in 1992. Then, just weeks later, Hurricane Andrew tears through South Florida, flattens the enclosure, and sets the snakes loose. Fast forward a few decades and their descendants have taken over the Everglades. It’s got everything – science gone wrong, a natural disaster, and a monster ending. The trouble is, when I went l

Watch a wild elephant fling its trunk or spread its ears at a rival and you know it means business. That is how Vesta Eleuteri of the University of Vienna puts it: “you intuitively understand that ‘they mean business’.” Intuition is not evidence, though, so she spent about 91 hours filming elephants in two South African parks to find out whether those gestures are deliberate messages or just dramatic habits. The answer, published on 25 September in Animal Cognition, is th

A honey bee stinger keeps pumping venom after it has been separated from the bee. In a study published in PNAS on 12 October 2026, Fiorella Ramirez-Esquivel and colleagues at Macquarie University and UNSW Canberra set detached stingers in a clear, skin-like gel and filmed them at high speed as they drove themselves deeper. Inside each one, two flexible valves take turns pushing venom towards the tip, working like a double-piston pump. The footage shows how that pump runs once a sting is under wa

I live in one of the places in Singapore where mosquitoes are released on purpose, and lately I have been seeing a lot more of them. I have also not been bitten. Let us look at how this works, and how effective it really was. The released mosquitoes are males, so they do not bite, and the wild females they mate with lay eggs that never hatch. In a trial across eight clusters of homes, researchers estimated that the releases averted 2,351 cases of dengue, according to a paper in eBioMedicine publ

Ranches in north Texas that moved cattle quickly through many small paddocks held 3.61 per cent soil organic matter, against about 2.4 per cent on neighbouring ranches under heavy continuous grazing, according to a 2011 study led by Richard Teague, a professor emeritus at the Texas A&M AgriLife Research and Extension Center at Vernon. A 2026 systematic review of 70 grazing studies, led by Jonathan Sanderman, vice president of science at the Woodwell Climate Research Center, found no chang

Imperial College London’s press release put the drop in clearance of a dye at “about 30% in sleeping mice”. Nicholas Franks, the Imperial biophysicist who co-led the study, said in an email that the effect was “a relatively small reduction in brain clearance during sleep (about 20%)”. The paper itself gives a third number. The paper, published in Nature Neuroscience in May 2024, gives the raw figures in its Extended Data Table 1. At the dye’s peak, mice kep

It often starts as a painless lump or swelling. Within about four weeks it can break open into an ulcer that eats into skin and soft tissue, and without early treatment it can leave permanent disfigurement and long-term disability. The disease is called Buruli ulcer, and in the Australian state of Victoria it is now reaching into the inner suburbs of Melbourne. A sore that starts with a bite It is caused by a bacterium, Mycobacterium ulcerans, a relative of the germs behind tuberculosis and lepr

The Tidal Thames was declared biologically dead in 1957 with zero fish species, and over 115 species have been recorded in it since, according to The State of the Thames 2nd Edition, a report from the Zoological Society of London (ZSL). ZSL published the report on 19 January 2026, five years after the first edition, its project page says. The Tidal Thames is the stretch of river that rises and falls with the tide, from Teddington through London to the sea. Why, then, has the average number of sp

A Suffolk County jury has found that Kristin Knouse, an assistant professor of biology at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, defamed the biologist David Sabatini, and has awarded him $6 million plus interest, the Boston Globe reported. The verdict was returned on 16 October 2026 at Suffolk County Superior Court in Boston. Judge Christopher K. Barry-Smith presided, according to a verdict summary from Sabatini’s lawyers. The jury also rejected Knouse’s counterclaims, the cla

California released a family of seven beavers into a mountain meadow in Plumas County on 18 October 2023, the state’s first beaver conservation translocation in nearly 75 years, the California Department of Fish and Wildlife said. Between 1923 and 1945, government programmes relocated 338 beavers to 29 of California’s 58 counties, according to a 1946 state report, as summarised in a 2012 review in California Fish and Game. That earlier effort aimed to extend the beaver’s