Senior physics writer Emily Conover has a Ph.D. in physics from the University of Chicago. She is a two-time winner of the D.C. Science Writers’ Association Newsbrief award and a winner of the Acoustical Society of America’s Science Communication Award. More
Controlling sound has long been a staple of science fiction and fantasy. In Dune, the cone of silence allows characters to converse privately, even in open spaces. The eerie billboards of Blade Runner 2049 whisper advertisements into the ears of those passing by.
In the real world, quirks of architecture, intentional or not, can direct where sound goes. In the U.S. Capitol’s hall of statues, for example, a whisper can travel silently across the room from one spot to another. The sound waves interact with curved surfaces to focus the audio. Now, scientists are looking to precisely control sound, perhaps one day resulting in a world without earbuds, but directing sound waves is a challenge. More
Wavelike patterns in 115-million-year-old amber suggest that a long-ago tsunami inundated what is now northern Japan, researchers report May 15 in Scientific Reports.
Tsunamis can be destructive and, to anything alive nearby, often terrifying. But the physical damage wrought by these giant waves eventually erodes away, typically leaving behind little evidence of their passage. As a result, there’s scant records of tsunamis stretching back beyond the current geologic epoch, which began roughly 12,000 years ago. More
Add a little-known species of assassin bugs to the list of animals that can fashion and wield tools. And true to their name, the insects use that tool to draw their prey into an ambush, researchers report May 12 in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
Found in Thailand and China, Pahabengkakia piliceps is a species of predatory insects called assassin bugs that has a taste for the region’s stingless bees. When researchers at Xishuangbanna Tropical Botanical Garden in China began studying the assassin bugs in 2021, they became intrigued by how P. piliceps hunt. While lying in wait at a hive’s entrance, the assassin bugs use their front legs to proficiently pick off bees that fly by. More
Sprinklings of life appear key to the recipe for rain.
Lofted flecks of organic material like bacteria, pollen and fungal spores play a profound role in regulating rainfall patterns, a new study suggests. These bioparticles can make up a major portion of all the particles that can seed rain in the sky, and their levels fluctuate in a daily cycle, researchers report May 5 in npj Climate and Atmospheric Science.
The study is the first to clearly show that the movements of bioparticles drive daily fluctuations of rainmaking particles more broadly. “This really has not been included in any [weather] models before,” says atmospheric scientist Athanasios Nenes of EPFL, the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Lausanne. “It’s something we need to start thinking about.” More
Ancient oxygen-making microbes may have oxygenated large swaths of Earth’s seafloor hundreds of millions of years before the element filled the atmosphere.
Geochemical analysis of sediments deposited roughly 2.6 billion years ago reveals that pulses of oxygen may have swept through large regions of the ocean, researchers report April 26 in Nature Geoscience. The findings suggest that cyanobacteria, the microorganisms responsible for oxygenating Earth’s atmosphere, were more widespread at the time than previously believed.
This shows that not only had cyanobacteria already evolved, but they were around in vast numbers and had even oxygenated the seafloor, says geochemist Kurt Konhauser of the University of Alberta in Edmonton, Canada, who was not involved in the study. And that, he says, means aerobic organisms might have evolved on the seabed long before oxygen permeated the sky. More
This year may already be on track to be the second hottest on record, after 2024. Floods and tornadoes are wracking wide swathes of the United States. And more wild weather is expected to be on the horizon.
But the federal government’s ability — and long-standing charge — to warn the nation about the future impacts of climate change is in jeopardy. On April 28, the Trump administration abruptly dismissed the hundreds of U.S. scientists working on the sixth National Climate Assessment, a congressionally mandated interagency report. The latest report was expected to be released in 2028, but now its future is in doubt. And that could greatly hobble the nation’s ability to prepare for future climate-related extreme events. More
A mysterious disease that has plagued sea stars for more than a decade may have met its match in the fjords of British Columbia.
Sunflower sea stars discovered thriving in the frigid waters suggest that cooler temperatures provide protection from sea star wasting disease, or SSWD. The finding, reported in the April Proceedings of the Royal Society B, is a valuable clue about what causes SSWD in the first place, researchers say.
Sea star wasting disease has stumped scientists since the first big outbreak emerged in 2013 off North America’s Pacific coast. “We initially thought it was a virus, but went back on that, because the data was either flawed or the results couldn’t be repeated,” says Ian Hewson, a marine ecologist at Cornell University who was not involved in the new study. His follow-up research into possible microbial or environmental causes has been inconclusive. More
