Science

Pregnant Sloth Gets a C-Section, A First For Her Species

As founder of Sloth Institute Costa Rica, Sam Trull is a busy woman. But when a pregnant sloth fell out of a tree, her commitment to rehabilitating wildlife reached new levels. The animal got an emergency C-section, perhaps the first ever for a sloth. The newly re-designed BBC Earth reports what happened on September 27…

Not quite the Moon on a stick, but not far off. This is Tethys, one of Saturn’s icy moons, from a perspective that makes it look like it’s stuck to the A and F rings of the planet. [NASA]

Elephants can sense rainstorms from 150 miles away

Elephants are amazing creatures for a lot of reasons. The latest one to be confirmed by science? They can sense rainstorms from 150 miles away. What’s more amazing is that researchers think they do it by simply listening to the sound of the air. This discovery is the result of a seven-year-long study that tracked…

Taking Google Out of Glass Makes It Perfect for Hospitals

Google Glass might get you suspicious looks in a restaurant, but it could save your life on the operating table. Google has a lot of work to do to make Glass something we want to wear. It’s pricy. It’s dorky as shit. The privacy implications freak people out, with good reason. But there’s one place…

One Doctor Is Betting a Scientific Formula Can Fix How Medicine Works

Here’s a startling fact: Doctors sometimes prescribe treatment just to cover their own asses. Or due to tradition or outdated training or even a simple little hunch. But it doesn’t have to be that way, and David Newman is the doctor trying to bring us a better future. Wired published a profile on the New…

Pick Up Your Dog’s Poo. It’s Important for Public Health!

You’re supposed to pick up after your dog. You know this. Everybody does. But it’s late and you’re tired and Fido just left a particularly nasty looking pile. Nobody’s looking. Just leave it there. What’s the worst that can happen? Infection with a zoonotic disease, that’s what. At least, that’s according to US Environmental Protection…

Your Phone Could Become Part of the World’s Largest Telescope

If you could enlist your smartphone to become part of an earth-sized telescope searching for the source of cosmic rays, would you? Researchers at University of California are hoping you’d say yes—they’ve developed an app that will leverage the power of one million smartphone cameras to answer one of the great questions about our universe.…

The Air Force’s Mysterious Spy Plane Is Landing After 2 Years in Space

For nearly two years, the Air Force’s X-37B autonomous space plane has been circling around the Earth doing who knows what. Now it’s finally coming back to Earth, carrying all its secrets with it. The X-37B has been the subject of intense speculation ever since it was launched on its very first mission in April…

This desert outpost is the most cheery place in space

Rod Gillies knows a thing or two about non-standard Lego construction techniques. I have really enjoyed some of his ultra micro-scale builds from the past, but his latest creation is not only super cute and happy, but building with very few exposed studs really hits home with me. You’re reading Leg Godt, the blog with…

Listen to Discussions with Animal Experts Each Week on The Wild Life

Monday is upon us once again … but thanks to The Wild Life, a new podcast hosted by io9 Animals Editor Jason G. Goldman and sponsored by Earth Touch, the most dreaded day of the week is about to get a little more interesting! On each episode of The Wild Life, I’ll be sitting down…

Scientists Are Creating the Coldest Cubic Meter in the Universe

It’s hard to describe exactly how cold the coldest cubic meter in the universe will be. Frozen to just a blip above absolute zero—the temperature at which atoms cannot even vibrate—the CUORE experiment will try to nail down a tiny number that has long eluded physicists: the mass of a neutrino. The CUORE detector, or…

Fireballs and Wolves: The Horrifying Story of the First Spacewalk

Almost 60 years ago, we took our first steps into the big, black nothingness of space. Or more specifically, Soviet cosmonaut Alexei Leonov had the honor of taking the very first space-dip. But this was a rush job—a means for the Soviet Union to shame the US and win the space race once and for…

MIT Study Says Mars One Colonists Would Starve (Among Other Things)

Mars One may have taken us by surprise when the non-profit organization boldly announced that it would put colonists on Mars in the 2020s. We were even more amazed when legions of amateur astronauts signed up for a one-way ticket to the red rock. However, MIT students believe the effort, in its current form, is…

This Stress-Sensing Fitness Tracker Won the Nation’s Top Design Award

The National Design Awards were last night in New York, where 20 products were vying to be named the country’s best. The winner, chosen by public voting, was a fitness tracker called Spire, which claims to keep tabs on your overall well-being by measuring heart rate and breathing patterns to monitor stress. Spire was designed…

Deals: Lego Exo-Suit back in stock on Amazon

Amazon has returned the extremely hard to get Lego Ideas Exo Suit to its online store. At $34.95 they even knocked 4 whole cents off the retail purchase price! Limit 2 per customer on these. I’m guessing they will go really quick as they are extremely hard to find. Classic Space Lego figs in green?…

This Is What a Dead Star Looks Like

Ever wondered what a dead star looks like? Then have a gander at the image above — you’re looking at “Kepler’s Supernova”. First spotted 410 years ago today, it’s the most recent supernova to have been observed without sky-gazing equipment within our own galaxy. Named after Johannes Kepler, the German astrologer and mathematician who first…

How to Measure Distance in Space

Space is expansive: looking up to the stars, it can sometimes feel like everything sits on a single, two-dimensional sheet held up above us. It doesn’t, of course—so how do we measure how far away things are? In this vide, Yuan-Sen Ting explains how everything from trigonometric parallaxes to, um, standard candles can help us…

Holy Crap What Is This Writhing Deep Sea Creature?

Just what exactly is this strange deep sea creature? Before releasing it back into the sea, Facebook user Jr Saim uploaded this video. Can you tell what it is? Turns out its a really big Basket star, a member of a group of echinoderms called Brittle stars. Don’t be confused though. Brittle stars, which are…

6 Real-Life Blood Sucking Animals More Terrifying than Dracula

Dracula is probably best known for drinking blood. But while Dracula might be mostly fictional, the animals that drink blood are very real. Here are six of the world’s finest hematophages. 1. Mosquitoes Let’s start by getting the obvious one out of the way first. Mosquitoes just suck (get it?). They’re the deadliest creatures on…

A Brief History of Scientists Hunting for Time Travelers

Time travel is possible—or at least a lot of serious physicists say so. It’s probably not possible to pull it off in a souped-up Delorean, but there are wormholes, Tipler cylinders, and other Einstein-inspired theories for how it could work. Which raises the question: Why haven’t we met any visitors from another time? It sounds…