Category: Shorts

Pando, the largest organism on Earth Pando, a stand of quaking aspen clones, may be the longest-living organism known to science. It has spread its roots for thousands of years and can live up to 14,000 years. What gives? The secret to a long life might as well be asking the world’s largest organism: Pando,…

End Times, by Peter Turchin, ed. Peter Turchin, a Russian-American complexity scientist and emeritus Professor at the University of Connecticut, is one of the leaders in a new scientific field called cliodynamics, which uses big data and statistical methods to predict the future. His latest book, End Times, looks at the crisis facing US democracy…

Night Sky Grief (Nyctalgia) Noctalgia is the new term they’ve invented to describe the feeling of loss of the dark skies. More and more people are experiencing sky grief due to light pollution, and increasingly, it’s being felt by people all over the world. The solution to this is to reduce light pollution from land-based…

The Tasmanian Tiger (thylacine) More than a century after its extinction, the thylacine has gone from reviled to beloved. Sports teams are named after the extinct carnivore, and theater performed about them. Even implausible reports of sightings stimulate waves of excitement. Now that it’s extinct, scientists are trying to figure out what happened to the…

Bison Bonasus (bison bonasus) Beefalo are a breed of cattle bred by humans to produce more economical and easier to manage cattle. They are also known as cattalo in the United States, but in Europe they are known as European bison. It has been a long time since Europeans have seen wild bison, and in…

The Sahara Desert Becomes a Green Forest A new study shows that the Sahara Desert changes from barren savannah to lush green woodland every 21,000 years or so. It wasn’t just an odd blip, though–this shift is part of a cyclic transformation that has changed the area from arid to humid roughly every seven thousand…

The Atacama Desert: The Age of Violence The hunter-gatherers in the Atacama Desert of northern Chile did not live in perfect harmony, according to new research published today. Instead, they were immersed in millennia-old endemic violence, which was a consistent part of life in these ancient societies. Using a three-pronged approach, which explored bioarchaeology, geomorphology,…

Dark Earth, Amazonian Rainforest New research shows that ancient peoples have been using dark earth, or Amazonian dark earth, to build settlements throughout the Amazon rainforest for thousands of years. Dark earth is rich in vital nutrients like carbon, phosphorus, and potassium, and would have allowed people to grow crops in areas that otherwise would…

Reverse Reactions (Reverse Reactions) The origin of life on Earth is still a mystery, and the question remains what were the conditions that made it possible for life to happen here. We also don’t know if those conditions are an absolute requirement or if there are different ways to mix them together. A new approach…

Coffee Poops: The Coffee Poops Effect Coffee drinkers are familiar with the phenomenon of coffee poops, the poops you suddenly have the urge to have after drinking your morning macchiato. While interesting and/or annoying, finding out how many people need to poo shortly after a cappuccino isn’t scientists’ number one priority. IFLScience is not responsible…