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Weeping whales: Stillborn humpback whale grieving documented
Researchers document a humpback whale appearing to grieve a stillborn calf, adding rare observational evidence to debates about cetacean emotion and maternal behavior.
2 min · 407 words
The Millennium Problems for Biology
A proposed set of millennium-scale open problems for biology—framed as hard, motivating challenges analogous to the Clay Mathematics Millennium Prize Problems.
7 min · 1,615 words
Do birds have accents? The fascinating regional differences in birdsong
Zoologist Louise Gentle explains how birdsong dialects vary by region—why accents form, how they spread, and what they reveal about learning and culture in birds.
4 min · 910 words
Learning another language may be one of the best ways to keep your brain healthy as you age
Linguist Karen Stollznow surveys evidence that bilingualism and later-life language learning support cognitive reserve, even though adult acquisition looks different from childhood learning.
4 min · 976 words
Human brain is two separate organs, Stanford Medicine-led research finds
Stanford Medicine–led research finds the human brain is two distinct organs—the cerebrum and the brainstem—opening new avenues for studying diseases that selectively affect the brainstem.
5 min · 1,248 words
Meet the First New Cat Species Discovered in 100 Years
Jason Bittel reports on a small spotted tiger cat from Bolivia—identified through sanctuary work and genetics—that may signal a broader wave of newly recognized small-cat species.
7 min · 1,553 words
Ctenophores Aren’t Just Beautiful. They’re Biological Wonders.Comb jellies illuminate early nervous systems and bioluminescence
Marlowe Starling reports how comb jellies (ctenophores) help biologists probe the earliest animal nervous systems, membrane chemistry, and bioluminescence—organisms as distant from us as we are from jellyfish.
2 min · 465 words
Black Holes or Black Hole Stars? Astronomers Spar Over Webb Telescope's Little Red Dots
Charlie Wood explains the debate over James Webb's mysterious little red dots: whether they are standard supermassive black holes or black hole stars—colossal hydrogen shells powered by hidden black holes—and what that would mean for how the first big black holes formed.
12 min · 2,798 words
Simulating Airband AM Radios Warning: Contains many annoying sounds. In a slight departure from my usual code monkey content, let’s talk about airplanes! And radios!
15 min · 3,432 words
Stars in the sky: The top secret URSALA, RAQUEL, and FARRAH satellites
A deep history of the classified URSALA, RAQUEL, and FARRAH ocean-surveillance satellites—from 1970s origins through later generations—and what open sources reveal about them.
28 min · 6,327 words
Gregory Gundersen on engineering memory: how he trained to memorize the first 100 digits of pi, what techniques transferred, and what the process teaches about learning hard material.
6 min · 1,437 words
Investigative essay tracing why Wikipedia, CIA Factbook, and UN figures overstate Yemen’s area by ~100,000 km²—from Ottoman vilayet tables and a 1976 World Bank double-count to post-unification copy-paste.
1 min · 319 words