Odd Creatures: Earth & Climate

August 5, 2025

Top Headlines

515-Mile Lightning Flash Caught from Space

Aug. 1, 2025 — A jaw-dropping 515-mile lightning bolt lit up the skies from Texas to Kansas City, smashing previous records and reshaping our understanding of extreme weather. Thanks to advanced satellite tech, scientists like Randy Cerveny and Michael Peterson ...

The Real-Life Kryptonite Found in Serbia—and Why It Could Power the Future

July 28, 2025 — Deep in Serbia's Jadar Valley, scientists discovered a mineral with an uncanny resemblance to Superman's Kryptonite both in composition and name. Dubbed jadarite, this dull white crystal lacks the ...

These Dogs Are Trained to Sniff out an Invasive Insect—and They're Shockingly Good at It

July 17, 2025 — Dogs trained by everyday pet owners are proving to be surprisingly powerful allies in the fight against the invasive spotted lanternfly. In a groundbreaking study, citizen scientists taught their ...

Bigger Crops, Fewer Nutrients: The Hidden Cost of Climate Change

July 10, 2025 — Climate change is silently sapping the nutrients from our food. A pioneering study finds that rising CO2 and higher temperatures are not only reshaping how crops grow but are also degrading their nutritional value especially in vital leafy greens ...

Melting Glaciers Are Awakening Earth's Most Dangerous Volcanoes

July 8, 2025 — As glaciers melt around the world, long-dormant volcanoes may be waking up beneath the ice. New research reveals that massive ice sheets have suppressed eruptions for thousands of years, building up underground pressure. But as that icy weight ...

What Happens When Bees Can’t Buzz Right? Nature Starts Falling Apart

July 8, 2025 — High heat and heavy metals dampen a bumblebee’s trademark buzz, threatening pollen release and colony chatter. Tiny sensors captured up-to-400-hertz tremors that falter under environmental stress, raising alarms for ecosystems and sparking ideas ...

Where Wild Buffalo Roam Free — and Collide With City Life in Hong Kong

July 8, 2025 — Feral water buffalo now roam Hong Kong s South Lantau marshes, and a 657-person survey shows they ignite nostalgia, wonder, and worry in equal measure. Many residents embrace them as living links to a fading rural past and potential conservation ...

From Air to Stone: The Fig Trees Fighting Climate Change

July 6, 2025 — Kenyan fig trees can literally turn parts of themselves to stone, using microbes to convert internal crystals into limestone-like deposits that lock away carbon, sweeten surrounding soils, and still yield fruit—hinting at a delicious new weapon in ...

Multisensory VR Forest Reboots Your Brain and Lifts Mood—study Confirms

July 6, 2025 — Immersing stressed volunteers in a 360° virtual Douglas-fir forest complete with sights, sounds and scents boosted their mood, sharpened short-term memory and deepened their feeling of nature-connectedness—especially when all three senses were ...

Avocado Alert! DNA Reveals How Native Plants Keep Brunch on the Menu

July 4, 2025 — Preserving strips of native vegetation beside avocado orchards gives insects a buffet of wild pollen when blossoms are scarce, doubling their plant menu and boosting their resilience. Using cutting-edge eDNA metabarcoding, Curtin scientists revealed ...

A Giant Pulse Beneath Africa Could Split the Continent — and Form an Ocean

June 27, 2025 — Beneath the Afar region in Ethiopia, scientists have discovered pulsing waves of molten rock rising from deep within the Earth — a geological heartbeat that could eventually split Africa in two. ...

Tiny Creatures, Massive Impact: How Zooplankton Store 65 Million Tonnes of Carbon Annually

June 27, 2025 — Zooplankton like copepods aren’t just fish food—they’re carbon-hauling powerhouses. By diving deep into the ocean each winter, they’re secretly stashing 65 million tonnes of carbon far below ...

Latest Headlines

updated 1:40pm EDT

Scientists Modeled Nuclear Winter—the Global Food Collapse Was Worse Than Expected

July 26, 2025 — What would happen if a nuclear war triggered a climate-altering catastrophe? Researchers have modeled how such a scenario could devastate global corn ...

NASA Discovers Link Between Earth’s Core and Life-Sustaining Oxygen

June 27, 2025 — For over half a billion years, Earth’s magnetic field has risen and fallen in sync with oxygen levels in the atmosphere, and scientists are finally uncovering why. A NASA-led study reveals a ...

This Breakthrough Turns Old Tech Into Pure Gold — No Mercury, No Cyanide, Just Light and Salt

June 27, 2025 — At Flinders University, scientists have cracked a cleaner and greener way to extract gold—not just from ore, but also from our mounting piles of ...

Can These Endangered Lizards Beat the Heat? Scientists Test Bold Relocation Plan

June 26, 2025 — South Australia’s tiny pygmy bluetongue skink is baking in a warming, drying homeland, so Flinders University scientists have tried a bold ...

Ancient Carbon ‘burps’ Caused Ocean Oxygen Crashes — and We’re Repeating the Mistake

June 24, 2025 — Over 300 million years ago, Earth experienced powerful bursts of carbon dioxide from natural sources—like massive volcanic eruptions—that ...

Scientists Create Living Building Material That Captures CO₂ from the Air

June 21, 2025 — Researchers at ETH Zurich have developed an astonishing new material: a printable gel that’s alive. Infused with ancient cyanobacteria, this "photosynthetic living material" not only grows but also ...

Plants’ Secret Second Roots Rewrite the Climate Playbook

June 21, 2025 — Beneath the forest floor lies an overlooked secret: many plants grow a second set of roots far deeper than expected sometimes over three feet down tapping into hidden nutrient stores and potentially ...

Gravity, Flipped: How Tiny, Porous Particles Sink Faster in Ocean Snowstorms

June 21, 2025 — In a twist on conventional wisdom, researchers have discovered that in ocean-like fluids with changing density, tiny porous particles can sink faster ...

The Atlantic's Chilling Secret: A Century of Data Reveals Ocean Current Collapse

June 20, 2025 — A century-old mystery of a stubborn cold patch in the North Atlantic is finally being unraveled. A new study links this anomaly to a long-term ...

The AI That Writes Climate-Friendly Cement Recipes in Seconds

June 19, 2025 — AI researchers in Switzerland have found a way to dramatically cut cement s carbon footprint by redesigning its recipe. Their system simulates thousands of ingredient combinations, pinpointing those ...

Thinking AI Models Emit 50x More CO2—and Often for Nothing

June 19, 2025 — Every query typed into a large language model (LLM), such as ChatGPT, requires energy and produces CO2 emissions. Emissions, however, depend on the model, the subject matter, and the user. ...

Fruit-Eating Mastodons? Ancient Fossils Confirm a Long-Lost Ecological Alliance

June 14, 2025 — Ten thousand years after mastodons disappeared, scientists have unearthed powerful fossil evidence proving these elephant cousins were vital seed spreaders for large-fruited trees in South America. ...

Space-Laser AI Maps Forest Carbon in Minutes—a Game-Changer for Climate Science

June 14, 2025 — A pioneering study reveals how archaeologists' satellite tools can be repurposed to tackle climate change. By using AI and satellite LiDAR imagery from NASA and ESA, researchers have found a ...

Something More Toxic Than Gators Is Hiding in the Swamps

June 12, 2025 — Mercury contamination is surfacing as a serious concern in parts of Georgia and South Carolina, particularly in regions like the Okefenokee Swamp. University of Georgia researchers found alarmingly ...

83% of Earth’s Climate-Critical Fungi Are Still Unknown

June 15, 2025 — Underground fungi may be one of Earth s most powerful and overlooked allies in the fight against climate change, yet most of them remain unknown to science. Known only by DNA, these "dark ...

Forever Chemicals' Toxic Cousin: MCCPs Detected in U. S. Air for First Time

June 17, 2025 — In a surprising twist during an air quality study in Oklahoma, researchers detected MCCPs an industrial pollutant never before measured in the Western Hemisphere's atmosphere. The team suspects ...

Earth's Core Mystery Solved: How Solid Rock Flows 3,000 Kilometers Beneath Us

June 8, 2025 — Beneath Earth s surface, nearly 3,000 kilometers down, lies a mysterious layer where seismic waves speed up inexplicably. For decades, scientists puzzled over this D' layer. Now, groundbreaking ...

How Outdated Phones Can Power Smart Cities and Save the Seas

June 8, 2025 — In a world where over a billion smartphones are produced yearly, a team of researchers is flipping the script on electronic waste. Instead of tossing out older phones, they ve demonstrated a ...

First Direct Observation of the Trapped Waves That Shook the World in 2023

June 3, 2025 — A new study has finally confirmed the theory that the cause of extraordinary global tremors in September -- October 2023 was indeed two mega tsunamis in Greenland that became trapped standing waves. ...

Long Shot Science Leads to Revised Age for Land-Animal Ancestor

May 29, 2025 — The fossils of ancient salamander-like creatures in Scotland are among the most well-preserved examples of early stem tetrapods -- some of the first animals to make the transition from water to land. ...

Birds Nested in Arctic Alongside Dinosaurs

May 29, 2025 — Spring in the Arctic brings forth a plethora of peeps and downy hatchlings as millions of birds gather to raise their young. The same was true 73 million years ago, according to a new article. The ...

Europe's Most Complete Stegosaurian Skull Unearthed in Teruel, Spain

May 28, 2025 — Palaeontologists have analyzed the most complete stegosaurian skull ever found in Europe and rewritten the evolutionary history of this iconic group of ...

Chemists Recreate How RNA Might Have Reproduced for First Time

May 28, 2025 — Chemists have demonstrated how RNA (ribonucleic acid) might have replicated itself on early Earth -- a key process in the origin of ...

Cryogenic Hydrogen Storage and Delivery System for Next-Generation Aircraft

May 27, 2025 — Researchers have designed a liquid hydrogen storage and delivery system that could help make zero-emission aviation a reality. Their work outlines a scalable, integrated system that addresses several ...

Oldest Whale Bone Tools Discovered

May 27, 2025 — Humans were making tools from whale bones as far back as 20,000 years ago, according to a new study. This discovery broadens our understanding of early human use of whale remains and offers valuable ...

Why Some Spiders Are More Venomous Than Others

May 21, 2025 — A new study has revealed why some spiders possess venom that is far more potent than others. By analyzing the venoms of more than 70 different spider species, the team explored whether factors such ...

Extreme Weather Cycles Change Underwater Light at Lake Tahoe

May 21, 2025 — Large shifts in UV radiation at Lake Tahoe are associated with wet and dry climate extremes, finds a new ...

A Head and a Hundred Tails: How a Branching Worm Manages Reproductive Complexity

May 19, 2025 — Scientists have uncovered the genetic underpinnings of one of the ocean's most bizarre animals: a branching marine worm named Ramisyllis kingghidorahi that lives inside sea sponges and ...

Nimble Dimples: Agile Underwater Vehicles Inspired by Golf Balls

May 19, 2025 — Underwater or aerial vehicles with dimples like golf balls could be more efficient and maneuverable, a new prototype has ...

Light-to-Electricity Nanodevice Reveals How Earth's Oldest Surviving Cyanobacteria Worked

May 16, 2025 — Scientists have decoded the atomic structure of Photosystem I from a 3-billion-year-old cyanobacteria lineage, offering a unique look at early oxygen-producing photosynthesis. The ancient nanodevice, ...