EarthDate

True to its name, the Venus Flytrap looks like it came from another planet, and it eats bugs. It may seem alien, but carnivorous plants are surprisingly common. There are 750 species, living on every continent but Antarctica. They exist wherever the soil can’t provide all the nutrients that plants need. So they look to other sources—often insects. The Venus Flytrap is the most well-known. Its “jaw...

Pause for a moment to ponder what a mummy smells like. Stinky? Musty? Dusty? What if I told you ‘woody, spicy and slightly sweet.’ Apparently, that’s what mummy archeologists and scent-expert ‘super-sniffers’ find. The discovery of an Egyptian undertaker’s 3,500-year-old workshop helped researchers understand why. When pharaohs or Egyptian nobles died, they could afford elaborate embalming rituals...

Animals evolved their colors to be sexy. But mostly, to be dangerous. Amphibians, reptiles, fish, insects, birds and even mammals sometimes use bright colors to attract mates. Think of the iridescent plumage of peacocks. Or the bright greens, yellows and oranges of a male iguana. But animals are about five times as likely to use bold color—especially red, yellow, black and white—to warn predators...

Rabies is almost 100% fatal. It can affect any warm-blooded creature and is transferred by any bodily fluid – though most commonly by a bite that passes saliva from the infected animal to the blood of another. It takes days or even months for the virus to incubate. But once active, it attacks the nervous system causing paralysis, coma and eventually death. Rabies kills 60,000 people annually world...

Cow manure. Garlic breath. Asparagus pee. What do they have in common? They all stink. And that stink comes from sulfur. Hydrogen sulfide is a very pungent gas that forms when plant matter decomposes, and gives its telltale fragrance to sewage, rotting garbage, and swamps. Sulfur dioxide – the smell of burned matches – is a gas produced when fossil fuels burn, metals are smelted, volcanoes erupt o...

As you listen to these words, you’re using energy. The radio in your car is powered by gasoline. Your EV, phone or computer runs on electricity. We rarely stop to think about the massive amounts of energy we use, 24-7-365. And we rarely think about where it comes from. But I can tell you in one word. Because all energy comes from one place: Earth. Oil, gas and coal are fossil fuels, made of ancien...

Scientists studying Ponderosa pines in a Colorado forest were interrupted by a wildfire – which led them to a surprising discovery. The researchers were investigating the trees’ photosynthesis, during which they take in CO2 through pores in their needles, called stoma. When heavy smoke from the wildfire filled the forest, the scientists had their equipment in place and operating, and witnessed som...

Imagine taking a photo of a speeding car. A fast shutter freezes the car in position but gives no idea of its speed. A slow shutter produces a blurred streak, suggesting speed but not much about position. This analogy applies to electrons. In the 1920s, German physicist Werner Heisenberg was studying them. The closer he came to measuring their positions, the less he could measure their speed. And...

Water bears are so hardy that researchers are studying them to try to advance human medicine. Scientifically they’re called tardigrades. There are over a thousand species living in wet environments, from the deep sea to moss beds in the Himalayas. They may look like bears, but there’s no relation. To begin, they’re microscopic, usually less than a millimeter in length. They have a digestive tract,...

The dark side of the moon isn’t really dark. It has a lunar day just like the near side. The far side just seems dark to us, because it faces away from Earth and we never see it. US space missions never landed there, but China was determined to explore it. So, they began a multi-decade, unmanned lunar program, named after the Chinese moon goddess, Chang’e. In 2007 and 2010, Chang’e 1 and 2 spacecr...

Earth may once have had rings, like Saturn – and all the more distant planets of our solar system. Saturn’s are just the most visible, and therefore the most famous. Rings are made of debris – from asteroids, moons, or from the formation of the planets themselves. Scientists think the rings around Saturn are the remains of one of its moons that was torn apart by the giant planet’s gravity. They th...

In the 1970s, Roger Payne had a multi-platinum record, a surprise hit for two big reasons: Payne was a marine biologist, not a musician. And the singers on the album… were whales. Payne’s “Songs of the Humpback Whale” revealed that other creatures may have complex language. It raised interest in whale intelligence, and led to the passage of laws protecting them. It also encouraged scientists from...

A million Americans listen to this show each week. Some at Earthdate.org. But the huge majority on the radio. That’s because, in our increasingly online world, radio is still the leading way people consume media. It began when an engineer named Reginald Fessenden improved on early transmitters to create a continuous stream of radio waves. In 1906, he made the first broadcast, of himself playing th...

Amber is a “gem” that’s often a window into the ancient past. For thousands of years it’s been valued for its beauty, collected by humans and formed into jewelry and other treasures. But amber is actually not a gemstone, or a mineral at all. It’s fossilized tree resin. Trees secrete resin in reaction to damage. The resin hardens like a scab to seal the injury and protect the tree from disease. But...

Sixty years ago in central Turkey, a homeowner made a remarkable discovery. When remodeling his basement, he knocked down a wall and found a tunnel. He followed the tunnel to find one of the largest underground cities in the world, abandoned long ago. When scientists explored it, they discovered it went down 18 levels, 280 feet into the ground, and was once home to some 20,000 underground dwellers...

The most extreme, most inhospitable lands on Earth are the McMurdo Dry Valleys, near the coast of Antarctica, just inland from the McMurdo science base. We normally think of Antarctica as covered in ice. But the dry valleys are surrounded by mountains, which block precipitation. What little water does accumulate is blown away by the constant winds. And yet, there is life. From December to March, t...

When plastics were introduced, they replaced glass, metal, paper and wood in many applications. That’s because plastic is a miracle. It’s cheap, light, can be formed into millions of products, and is incredibly durable. But these big benefits have led to a very big problem. Plastic pollution is now everywhere. And because it’s so durable, it’s not going away. Plastic pollution starts with us, most...

Gold has been valued by humans for at least 7,000 years. The earliest gold items were found in Bulgaria, from the 5th millennium BC. The first mines were likely in the ancient African kingdom of Nubia. Egyptians created great wealth, and great art, from gold. Gold is valuable because it’s so unusual. It’s very dense, even denser than lead. It’s very durable, yet also very soft. It’s the most malle...

One night in the mid-1800s, a naturalist in a boat saw something mysterious. The surface water was teeming with daphnia, zooplankton more commonly known as ‘sea fleas.’ The next morning, they had disappeared. The next night, they were there again. Where did they come from? Where did they go? For a century, this was a mystery. Then navy ships, using sonar to track submarines, found that the deep oc...

On the island of Flores, in Indonesia, a team of anthropologists made a discovery so surprising, they kept it a secret for a year. In a cave called Liang Bua, they had uncovered 100 skeletal fragments of about 14 individuals – so small, that at first, they thought they might be the remains of children. But more investigation showed wisdom teeth and wear on bones that definitively marked these skel...

You may have seen sunscreens that claim to be “reef safe.” Which may have made you wonder, are sunscreens dangerous to coral? If so, could they be dangerous to me? Sunscreens come in two basic types. Inorganic, which are mineral based, using white zinc or titanium oxides to physically block the sun’s rays. And organic, using oxybenzone or octinoxate to absorb UV rays and turn them into heat. You’d...

Mosses are small but mighty. We don’t think much about them, since they grow so close to the ground. But there are an estimated 22,000 species of moss, living on every continent including Antarctica, covering 2% of Earth’s surface. That’s the size of Canada! The soil under mosses globally can store 6 billion tons more carbon than bare soil. That’s more than the U.S. emits each year. After lichen,...

Amazingly, the structure of most living things, and many other things as well, conforms to one sequence of numbers. It was described in the 1200s by Italian mathematician Leonardo Pisano, also called Fibonacci, working from earlier Indian ideas. The Fibonacci Sequence is 1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13 and onward – where the first two numbers, one and one, add up the next number, two. The next two numbers, o...

What’s the world’s most dangerous animal? Sharks? Nope, they bite only 70 people a year, with just six fatalities. Poisonous snakes? They kill about 50,000. But far and away the most dangerous is the mosquito. It kills a million people a year, and sickens 250 million more! But we may be able to stop it, with an even tinier creature. There are 3,000 species of mosquito. Different ones can carry mal...

Thought to have been extinct for over 2 million years, a cluster of Wollemi pine was discovered by hikers in a secluded canyon outside of Sydney, Australia in 1994. Guarding this area from humans and fire along with cultivation and conservation efforts by botanical gardens have safeguarded this unique species. Now, advances in decoding the Wollemi pine genome may provide the secret to successfully...