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WonderLanguage

Yakamoz is the Turkish word for the glitter that appears in dark seawater when fish, oars or waves stir it. The light comes from tiny marine organisms that glow when disturbed.

The word came into Turkish from Greek, and the Turkish Language Association's dictionary gives it two meanings: the glitter made in the sea by moving fish or oars, and the drifting sea creature that gives off light when something touches it. That creature is most often Noctiluca scintillans, a single-celled plankton known in English as sea sparkle. One alone is invisible, but millions together make a boat's wake shine. Light made by a living thing is called bioluminescence. Many people use yakamoz for moonlight shimmering on the water, yet the real thing is easiest to see on dark, moonless nights, because moonlight and city lights drown it out.

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WonderScience

There are more trees on Earth than stars in the Milky Way: about 3 trillion trees, against an estimated 100 to 400 billion stars.

The tree count comes from a 2015 study in the journal Nature, led by the ecologist Thomas Crowther, then at Yale University. His team combined more than 400,000 ground measurements of forest density with satellite images and arrived at about 3.04 trillion trees, roughly 420 for every person alive. Earlier estimates, based on satellite images alone, had put the figure near 400 billion. The study also measured losses: about 15 billion trees are cut down each year, and the number of trees on Earth has fallen by around 46 per cent since the start of human civilisation.

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WonderScience

Horseshoe crab blood clots at the faintest trace of toxins from bacteria. Since the 1970s an extract of it, called LAL, has been used to check that injectable medicines and implants are free of them.

Horseshoe crabs are not true crabs; they are closer relatives of spiders and scorpions. Their blood is blue because it carries oxygen with haemocyanin, a copper-based molecule. In 1956 the American scientist Frederik Bang found that bacteria make the blood gel. The toxins behind this, endotoxins, are fragments of the outer wall of certain bacteria and can cause dangerous fevers in the bloodstream. LAL stands for Limulus amebocyte lysate, an extract of the crab's blood cells; the United States approved it in 1977. Collecting it means bleeding wild crabs, and studies suggest up to about 30 per cent may die afterwards. A synthetic alternative, recombinant factor C, has been sold since 2003 and was accepted in the official rulebooks for medicine testing, the European Pharmacopoeia in 2016 and the US Pharmacopeia in 2025.

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WonderScience

Pando, a grove of about 47,000 aspen trunks in Utah, is a single organism: every trunk grows from one shared root system and carries the same genes.

Pando, Latin for 'I spread', is a clone of quaking aspen covering about 43 hectares of Fishlake National Forest in Utah. Aspens can reproduce by sending up new shoots from their roots, so what looks like a forest is one plant with many stems. Foresters Jerry Kemperman and Burton Barnes identified it as a single organism in 1976, and the ecologist Michael Grant later gave it its name. Weighing an estimated 6,000 tonnes, it is among the heaviest living things known. Its age is uncertain: charcoal studies from 2022 point to at least 9,000 years, and a 2024 genetic study suggested 16,000 years or more. Today Pando is thinning, because deer, elk and cattle eat its young shoots.

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WonderScience

Wombats, burrowing marsupials from Australia, are the only animals known to produce cube-shaped droppings.

A team led by Patricia Yang and David Hu at the Georgia Institute of Technology studied wombats that had died in road accidents in Tasmania. They found that the last part of the intestine has stiffer and more elastic bands side by side, and as the droppings slowly dry and move along, those uneven walls press them into cubes with fairly sharp corners. A wombat can leave 80 to 100 cubes a night, often on rocks and logs where it marks its territory, and the flat sides may help stop them rolling away. The work won the 2019 Ig Nobel Prize in physics, a light-hearted award for research that makes people laugh, then think.

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WonderScience

Flamingos are not born pink. Their chicks hatch grey, and the adults' pink comes from pigments in the algae and tiny shrimp they eat.

The pigments are carotenoids, the same family that colours carrots and tomatoes. Flamingos filter tiny algae, brine shrimp and other small creatures from shallow, salty water, and enzymes in the liver turn the carotenoids into the pinks and reds laid down in growing feathers. Chicks take a few years to reach full adult colour. The amount of pigment in the diet shows: American flamingos of the Caribbean are the reddest, while the lesser flamingo is much paler. Parents feed their chick a pigment-rich 'crop milk' made in the throat, and often fade while doing so. In zoos, flamingos are given carotenoid supplements; without them they gradually turn pale.

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WonderScience

Some freshwater turtles can take in oxygen through the cloaca, the opening under the tail, which helps them stay underwater for long periods.

The cloaca is the single opening that amphibians, reptiles and birds use both to pass waste and to reproduce. In some turtles it leads to thin-walled pouches packed with blood vessels, where oxygen dissolved in the water passes into the blood; biologists call this cloacal respiration. Australia's Fitzroy River turtle relies on it so heavily that it can stay underwater for long stretches, pumping water in and out of these pouches. In North America, painted turtles and some other species spend the winter under the ice of frozen ponds, where they cannot reach the surface at all. Their bodies slow right down, and they take in small amounts of oxygen through the skin and the cloaca.

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WonderScience

Iceland was long one of the very few inhabited places with no mosquitoes; the first ones were found there in October 2025.

Biologists' main explanation for Iceland's long mosquito-free record is its changeable winters: repeated cycles of freezing, thawing and freezing again can kill larvae before they grow into flying adults. On 16 October 2025, at Kiðafell in the Kjós district north of Reykjavík, a local insect enthusiast caught several mosquitoes, which experts identified as Culiseta annulata, a large, cold-hardy species common across Europe. Both males and females were among them, and they were the first confirmed in the country. No more were found during the summer of 2026, so for now this looks like a one-off arrival rather than a settled population, although warmer winters could make one more likely in future.

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WonderScience

A hummingbird can fly backwards, and its heart can beat over 1,000 times a minute.

Hummingbirds, found only in the Americas, are the only birds that can hover for long periods and fly backwards. Their wings trace a figure of eight in the air, and small species beat them up to about 80 times a second. All this takes enormous energy: in flight a hummingbird's heart can beat more than 1,000 times a minute, among the fastest heartbeats of any animal. To get through the night without running out of fuel, many species enter torpor, a deep, cold state like a short hibernation. Heart rate and body temperature fall sharply, sometimes close to the temperature of the surrounding air, and the bird uses far less energy until morning.

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WonderScience

Mangroves, trees that grow in salt water on tropical coasts, protect shorelines by slowing waves and store large amounts of carbon in the mud beneath them.

Mangrove roots, some sticking up out of the mud like snorkels to take in air, slow waves, trap sediment and limit erosion, and their tangle of underwater roots shelters fish, crabs and young sea creatures. Mangrove forests also hold large amounts of 'blue carbon', the name for carbon stored by coastal and ocean ecosystems. Much of it lies in the waterlogged, oxygen-poor mud, where dead plant matter rots so slowly that carbon can stay buried for centuries. Studies of tropical forests have found that, area for area, mangroves are among the most carbon-rich forests on Earth. Clearing them for shrimp farms or building therefore releases carbon as well as destroying habitat and natural coastal defences.

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WonderScience

Peatlands cover only about 3 percent of the world's land, yet hold roughly twice as much carbon as all its forests. They form as partly rotted plants pile up in waterlogged ground over thousands of years.

Peat is the dark, spongy material that builds up where waterlogged, oxygen-poor ground slows the decay of dead plants almost to a stop; mosses, especially sphagnum, are often its main source. It grows very slowly, around a millimetre a year, so a few metres of peat can hold thousands of years of history. Peatlands range from the bogs of Ireland and Scotland to vast areas of Siberia and Canada, and to tropical peat swamps in Indonesia and the Congo Basin. When they are drained for farming or forestry, or catch fire, carbon that took millennia to build up can escape within years. That is why rewetting drained peatlands is now part of many countries' climate plans.

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WonderScience

The Svalbard Global Seed Vault, dug into a mountain on a Norwegian Arctic island, stores duplicate seed samples from genebanks around the world. The original collections stay in use elsewhere; Svalbard is the safety copy.

A genebank keeps seeds of crop varieties and their wild relatives so that breeders and researchers can use them. The Svalbard vault opened on 26 February 2008 and is run jointly by the Norwegian government, the Crop Trust and the Nordic Genetic Resource Center (NordGen). The seeds are kept at about -18°C, and depositors keep ownership under a 'black box' system: only the institution that deposited a box can open or withdraw it. The backup has been needed. When the war in Syria cut off the main genebank of the international research centre ICARDA near Aleppo, ICARDA withdrew samples from Svalbard in 2015, and again in 2017, to rebuild its collection in Lebanon and Morocco. These remain the only withdrawals.

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WonderScience

Lake Baikal in Siberia, 25 to 30 million years old and 1,642 metres deep, is the world's oldest and deepest lake.

Baikal lies in a rift, a place where the Earth's crust is slowly pulling apart; the gap still widens by about 4 millimetres a year. The lake holds more than a fifth of all the fresh water in the world's lakes and rivers, more than North America's five Great Lakes put together. Millions of years of isolation have produced plants and animals found nowhere else, including the Baikal seal, the only seal species that lives entirely in fresh water, and more than 350 kinds of small, shrimp-like creatures called amphipods. In winter the surface freezes so thick that marked roads run across the ice.

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WonderScience

Some Great Basin bristlecone pines in the western United States are more than 4,800 years old, older than Egypt's Great Pyramid of Giza.

The oldest known living one, nicknamed Methuselah, grows in the White Mountains of eastern California; counting its growth rings shows it is more than 4,850 years old, and its exact location is kept secret to protect it. The Great Pyramid was built around 2560 BCE, a few centuries after Methuselah sprouted. Bristlecones grow extremely slowly on thin, dry dolomite soil, a rock similar to limestone, where few other plants survive, which spares them competition and fire. Their dense, resin-filled wood resists insects, fungi and rot, and dead trees can stand for thousands of years. In 1964 a researcher in Nevada cut down one tree, later called Prometheus, and counted at least 4,862 rings, making it the oldest tree then known.

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WonderScience

A dead whale that sinks to the deep seafloor can feed a succession of animals and microbes for decades, becoming a rich island of food where food is scarce.

Scientists call such a carcass a 'whale fall', and it is used up in stages. First, scavengers such as sleeper sharks strip most of the soft tissue over a period of months to about two years. Next, worms, crustaceans and other small animals colonise the bones and the surrounding mud, which the remains have enriched. In the longest stage, which can last decades, bacteria break down the fats inside the bones and release hydrogen sulphide; other bacteria draw energy from this chemical, and mussels and clams that carry such bacteria inside them live on it, in a food chain that does not depend on sunlight. Bone-eating Osedax worms, discovered on a whale fall off California in 2002, bore into the bones with the help of bacteria that digest them.

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WonderScience

In October 2022, a bar-tailed godwit only a few months old flew non-stop from Alaska to Tasmania: 13,560 km in 11 days, without once landing to eat, drink or rest.

The bird, a juvenile known as B6 (tag number 234684), had hatched in Alaska that summer. Researchers had fitted it with a small solar-powered satellite tag, so every stage of the flight was recorded. It set off on 13 October 2022 and came down in north-east Tasmania 11 days and 1 hour later. Guinness World Records lists the 13,560 km journey as the longest non-stop flight recorded for any bird. Godwits cannot rest on the sea, so a crossing like this has to be made in one go. Before leaving, they store more fat for their size than any other migrating bird studied so far, and their digestive organs shrink, which saves weight for the flight.

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WonderScience

About 2.4 billion years ago, oxygen made by microbes began to build up in Earth's air for the first time, poisoning many of the organisms that lived then.

Scientists call this the Great Oxidation Event. The oxygen came from cyanobacteria, microbes that use sunlight to make food and give off oxygen as waste. For a long time the gas was used up as fast as it formed, much of it by iron dissolved in the oceans, which rusted and settled as striped rocks called banded iron formations, today a major source of iron ore. Once that buffer ran out, oxygen collected in the air. Many microbes that lived without oxygen died or retreated to mud and deep water, which is why some call it the 'oxygen catastrophe'. The oxygen also destroyed much of the methane that had kept the planet warm, and may have helped set off the long Huronian ice ages. In the long run it made aerobic respiration possible, which gets far more energy from food and later powered complex life.

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StillnessMind

Awe, the feeling we get before something vast such as a mountain range or a starry sky, often makes people feel briefly smaller and, in some studies, more humble and more helpful.

In 2003 the psychologists Dacher Keltner and Jonathan Haidt described awe as having two parts: a sense of vastness, and a need to rethink how we see the world in order to take it in. Later studies measured the 'small self' feeling it brings. In a 2015 experiment led by Paul Piff, students who spent one minute looking up into a grove of very tall eucalyptus trees then picked up more pens for a stranger who had dropped them than students who had looked up at a tall building. Other work has linked people who often feel awe with lower levels of a marker of inflammation in the blood. The effects are usually modest, and results vary between studies and cultures.

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WonderScience

Periodical cicadas in eastern North America spend 13 or 17 years underground, then emerge together in their millions for a few weeks of song and mating.

Periodical cicadas belong to the genus Magicicada. Their young, called nymphs, live underground and feed on sap from tree roots. All the cicadas of one generation in an area, known as a brood, surface within the same few weeks, sometimes several million on a single hectare. Birds and other predators soon eat their fill, so most cicadas survive long enough to mate, a strategy called predator satiation. The adults live only a few weeks. Both 13 and 17 are prime numbers, and one idea is that such cycles rarely line up with predators that breed on shorter cycles, or with neighbouring broods.

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WonderScience

Many fig trees can be pollinated only by tiny fig wasps, which crawl inside the closed fig to reach the hundreds of flowers hidden within.

A fig is not a single fruit but a closed cluster of flowers, lined inside with tiny blossoms. A female fig wasp, only one or two millimetres long, pushes in through a narrow opening at the tip, often losing her wings, then pollinates the flowers, lays her eggs and dies inside. Her young hatch and mate within the fig, and the new females leave carrying pollen to another tree. Most fig species rely on their own wasp species, a partnership thought to be tens of millions of years old. In western Turkey, around Aydın, growers still hang branches of wild male figs in their orchards so the wasps can pollinate the Smyrna-type figs grown for drying; this is called caprification. Many common garden figs ripen with no wasp at all.

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StillnessScience

Seagrass meadows cover only about 0.1% of the seafloor, yet they account for roughly a tenth of the carbon buried in ocean sediments. Seagrasses are flowering plants that grow underwater along coasts.

Unlike seaweeds, which are algae, seagrasses have roots, leaves and flowers, and they grow in shallow coastal water on every continent except Antarctica. Their leaves slow the current so fine particles settle, and their roots bind the seabed. Dead leaves and roots are buried in mud with little oxygen, where they rot very slowly, so their carbon can stay locked away for centuries. Carbon stored by coastal plants in this way is called blue carbon. In the Mediterranean, including the Turkish coast, Posidonia oceanica meadows build thick mats of roots and sediment over thousands of years. Since the late nineteenth century, more than a fifth of the world's known seagrass area has been lost to dredging, pollution and coastal building.

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DriveScience

Beavers build dams of branches and mud that turn streams into ponds and wetlands, raising the water table and reshaping whole valleys.

Beavers build dams to create deep water around their lodges, where they can hide from predators and store branches for winter. The ponds slow floods, trap silt and keep the ground wet through dry spells, making room for fish, frogs, insects and birds. Because their work creates habitat for so many others, ecologists call beavers ecosystem engineers. A 2020 study of wildfires in the western United States found that stretches of stream dammed by beavers stayed green while the land around them burned. Some land managers now reintroduce beavers, or build simple beaver-style dams of posts and branches, to restore streams. Beavers can also flood farmland and roads, so they are not welcome everywhere.

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WonderScience

Every year the Arctic tern flies from its Arctic breeding grounds to the edge of Antarctica and back, following summer across the planet on a round trip that can exceed 70,000 kilometres.

Arctic terns nest around the Arctic during the northern summer, then fly south to spend the southern summer near the Antarctic pack ice. Living through two summers a year, they see more daylight than any other animal. Small light-sensitive tags called geolocators, which work out a bird's position from the times of sunrise and sunset, showed in 2010 that terns from Greenland and Iceland averaged about 70,900 kilometres a year. A tern tagged on the Farne Islands off north-east England flew about 96,000 kilometres in ten months, because the birds take winding routes that follow winds and food. Many live 15 to 30 years, and over a lifetime a tern may fly some 2.4 million kilometres, more than three return trips to the Moon.

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WonderScience

Salmon may cross the ocean with a magnetic compass, then use smell to find the stream where their life began.

Pacific salmon hatch in rivers, spend several years at sea, then return to spawn, often in the very stream where they were born. Scientists think they use at least two senses. At sea, the Earth's magnetic field seems to guide them: a 2013 study of sockeye salmon returning to Canada's Fraser River found that the route they took around Vancouver Island shifted with slow changes in the magnetic field, as if they had memorised the field at their river mouth. Near the coast, smell takes over. In the 1950s the American biologist Arthur Hasler found evidence that young salmon learn the particular scent of their home stream and follow it back as adults.

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