Nature: quotes, facts and reflections - Page 2

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StillnessScience

Kelp forests grow in cool coastal seas from giant brown algae, not plants, and shelter a great variety of fish, invertebrates, seals and sea otters.

Kelp are large brown algae. Instead of roots they have a grip-like base called a holdfast, and gas-filled bulbs hold their fronds up towards the light. Giant kelp can grow up to about 60 centimetres a day and reach more than 30 metres, forming a canopy at the surface like the treetops of a forest. Kelp forests grow along cool coasts from California and Chile to South Africa, Australia and Norway. In the North Pacific, sea otters help protect them by eating sea urchins, which graze on kelp. Where otters were hunted out for their fur, urchins multiplied and stripped forests down to bare rock, leaving what are called urchin barrens.

NOAA Ocean ServiceRead card

WonderScience

Corals are tiny reef-building animals; on some nights, whole colonies release eggs and sperm into the sea at once.

Scientists call this mass spawning. On Australia's Great Barrier Reef it usually happens between October and December, a few nights after a full moon, once the water has warmed; the release starts after dark, and many species spawn within the same short window. Divers describe the water filling with drifting pink and orange bundles, like snow falling upwards. Releasing everything at once gives predators far more eggs than they can eat, and raises the chance that eggs and sperm from different colonies meet. Fertilised eggs become larvae that drift for days or weeks before settling on the reef to start new corals. Researchers are now studying whether warming seas are disrupting this timing.

NOAA Ocean ServiceRead card

WonderScience

Male zebra finches, small Australian songbirds, are not born knowing their song. They learn it from an adult, usually their father, and practise for weeks until they get it right.

The zebra finch is one of the most studied birds in neuroscience because the way it learns to sing resembles the way a baby learns to talk. While still young, a male listens to an adult 'tutor', usually its father, and memorises his song. Soon it starts making quiet, jumbled sounds called subsong, a little like a baby's babbling, and over the next two months it shapes them until they match the memorised model. By about three months old the song is fixed and stays the same for life. Females do not sing. Because this learning is so regular and easy to record, laboratories such as those at Duke University use the birds to study how the brain learns sequences of sounds and movements.

Current Biology / Duke UniversityRead card

WonderScience

eBird is an online database where birdwatchers log which birds they saw, where and when. Together, their checklists form a worldwide record that scientists use to track migration and rising or falling bird numbers.

The Cornell Lab of Ornithology and the National Audubon Society launched eBird in 2002, when most birdwatchers still kept notes on paper. Use grew fast once sightings could be entered on a phone in the field, and in May 2021 the database passed one billion bird observations. Because each checklist also records how long the observer looked, researchers can turn millions of casual outings into maps showing where each species is found in every week of the year. These maps are used to study how climate change and habitat loss are shifting migration timing and ranges, and to plan conservation.

Cornell Lab of OrnithologyRead card

WonderHistory

Amazonian dark earth, or terra preta, is an unusually fertile black soil made by people. Over generations, charcoal, broken pottery, bones and food waste built up around Indigenous settlements and turned thin rainforest soil rich.

Terra preta is Portuguese for 'black earth'. These soils formed between about 450 BCE and 950 CE at sites across the Amazon Basin, and in places the dark layer reaches one to two metres deep. Ordinary rainforest soil is poor, because heavy rain washes nutrients away, but charcoal barely breaks down and holds nutrients and water in place for centuries. Local farmers still use the soil today. It also changed how archaeologists see the Amazon: not as untouched wilderness, but as a landscape shaped by large, settled communities. Scientists now try to copy the method with 'biochar', charcoal made from farm waste and mixed into poor soils.

MIT / Amazonian dark earth researchRead card

StillnessScience

Light pollution, the glow from artificial light we do not need at night, now hides the Milky Way from about a third of humanity. It also blurs the darkness that birds, insects, plants and people rely on to rest, find their way and tell night from day.

The figure comes from a world atlas of night-sky brightness published in 2016, which found the Milky Way hidden from about 60 per cent of Europeans and nearly 80 per cent of North Americans. Night-migrating birds partly steer by the stars and are drawn towards lit towers and buildings, where many circle until exhausted or fly into glass; US estimates for deaths at towers alone run from four or five million birds a year to ten times that. Insects swarm and die around lamps, and artificial light can shift when some plants come into bud. Programmes such as Toronto's Fatal Light Awareness Program ask building owners to switch off lights during migration.

NASA / DarkSky InternationalRead card

WonderScience

Tree rings can date wood to the year it grew. The science, called dendrochronology, matches ring patterns across living trees, old beams and buried wood to reconstruct past climates, droughts and fires, and to date old buildings.

Each year a tree adds a ring, wide in good years and narrow in dry or cold ones, so a run of rings forms a pattern like a barcode. Overlapping those patterns, from living trees back through old timbers, builds long calendars: in central Europe, a continuous oak and pine record reaches back 12,460 years. The method was founded by the American astronomer A. E. Douglass in the early 1900s. He hoped tree rings would show sunspot cycles affecting climate; that link never held up, but the dating did. In 1929 his tree-ring calendar gave exact dates to ancient Pueblo ruins in the American Southwest, and he later founded the University of Arizona's Laboratory of Tree-Ring Research.

University of Arizona Laboratory of Tree-Ring Research / National Park ServiceRead card

WonderScience

Bacteria can sense how many of their kind are nearby. Each cell releases signal molecules, and once enough have built up, the whole group switches certain behaviours on together. This is called quorum sensing.

The name borrows 'quorum', the minimum number of members a meeting needs before it can take decisions. It was first seen in 1970 in a glowing marine bacterium now called Aliivibrio fischeri, which lights up only when its population is dense, as inside the light organ of the Hawaiian bobtail squid; a single cell glowing alone would waste energy. The term itself was coined in 1994 by the microbiologists Claiborne Fuqua, Stephen Winans and Peter Greenberg. From 1998 to 2001, Bonnie Bassler showed that many kinds of bacteria use such signals, some even across species. Because disease-causing bacteria often wait for a quorum before attacking, researchers are testing drugs that block the signals instead of killing the bacteria.

American Society for Microbiology / NIHRead card

WonderScience

In 2025 researchers read proteins from the tooth enamel of an extinct rhino that lived in the Canadian Arctic 21 to 24 million years ago, several times older than the previous record for ancient proteins.

The tooth came from Haughton Crater on Devon Island in Nunavut, where the cold ground slowed the breakdown of molecules. Enamel, the hardest tissue in the body, locks proteins inside its mineral crystals. The team read the protein fragments with mass spectrometry, which identifies molecules by weighing them very precisely, and used the sequences to place the animal, an early rhino called Epiaceratherium, on the rhino family tree. Before this, the oldest protein sequences came from fossils a few million years old, and the oldest DNA from about 2 million years ago. Proteins could let scientists trace how animals are related far beyond the reach of ancient DNA.

Nature (2025)Read card

WonderScience

In 2025 a study argued that Nanotyrannus, a dinosaur long dismissed as a young Tyrannosaurus rex, was a separate, smaller predator all along.

The key evidence came from 'Bloody Mary', a tyrannosaur skeleton from Montana preserved beside a Triceratops in the famous 'Dueling Dinosaurs' fossil. Writing in Nature, Lindsay Zanno and James Napoli counted growth rings in its bones, which form yearly like tree rings, and found it had died fully grown at about 17 to 22 years old, not as a fast-growing juvenile. It also had more teeth than T. rex and larger arm and hand bones, and no known animal shrinks its limbs as it grows. They named a second species from another skeleton, 'Jane'. Several former sceptics now accept Nanotyrannus, though some still dispute Jane.

Nature (2025)Read card

WonderScience

A single flash of lightning that stretched 829 km across the central United States in October 2017 was certified in 2025 by the World Meteorological Organization as the longest ever recorded.

Flashes this long are called megaflashes: instead of striking straight down, they race sideways through the clouds of huge storm systems for hundreds of kilometres. This one ran from eastern Texas to near Kansas City. It was spotted years later in data from the Geostationary Lightning Mapper, an instrument on a US weather satellite that records lightning across the Americas from about 36,000 km up. The World Meteorological Organization, the United Nations agency that keeps official weather records, checked the measurement, 829 km give or take 8 km, and certified it in 2025. It beat the previous record of 768 km, set over the southern United States in April 2020.

World Meteorological Organization (2025)Read card

WonderScience

In 2025 scientists recovered the oldest RNA yet, from Yuka, a young woolly mammoth frozen in the Siberian permafrost for nearly 40,000 years, and saw which genes were active in its muscles.

DNA is the full instruction book found in almost every cell. RNA is the working copy a cell makes when it actually uses a gene, so it shows what the body was doing at a given moment. RNA falls apart quickly after death, and before this study the oldest sequenced came from a canine frozen about 14,000 years ago. A team led from Stockholm University, writing in Cell, read RNA from Yuka's muscle. It showed muscle genes at work and signs of stress, possibly linked to an attack Yuka is thought to have suffered before dying. It also revealed that Yuka, long thought to be female, was male.

Cell (2025)Read card

WonderNature

Giant South American river turtles gathered in record numbers on the Guaporé River: a 2025 drone survey counted more than 41,000 nesting on a single stretch of riverbank, the largest such gathering known.

The count was made by the Wildlife Conservation Society on the Guaporé River, which forms part of the border between Brazil and Bolivia. The giant South American river turtle is the largest of the side-necked turtles, which tuck their heads sideways under the shell, and its shell can approach a metre long. Each year females crawl onto sandbanks together to bury their eggs. Counting them from drone footage, frame by frame, is far more accurate than counting from the ground and does not disturb them. The species has been hunted for meat and eggs for centuries; in 2011 turtle specialists recommended listing it as critically endangered. Knowing where the big gatherings are shows which beaches most need protecting.

Wildlife Conservation Society (2025)Read card

WonderOcean

When a giant iceberg broke away from Antarctica in 2025, scientists rushed in and filmed a thriving world of life on the seafloor that had been sealed under ice for centuries.

The iceberg, called A-84, broke off the George VI Ice Shelf on the Antarctic Peninsula in January 2025. It covered about 510 square km, roughly the size of Chicago, and uncovered seabed that had been roofed by floating ice for centuries. Soon after, the Schmidt Ocean Institute's research ship Falkor (too) arrived and sent down its underwater robot SuBastian. It found large corals and sponges, icefish, giant sea spiders, octopuses and a ghostly phantom jellyfish. Some animals were so big that they must have been growing there for decades, perhaps centuries, which surprised scientists who had expected little life without sunlight. Ocean currents probably carry food in under the ice.

Schmidt Ocean Institute (2025)Read card

WonderNature

African lions have two distinct kinds of roar, a 2025 study found. Using machine learning, researchers told the two apart and recognised individual lions from their roars with about 94% accuracy.

Lions roar to mark their territory and keep in touch with the rest of the pride, and a roar can be heard several kilometres away. A team at the University of Exeter separated the famous full-throated roar from a flatter, less varied call that always follows it, which they named the intermediary roar. Machine learning, a computer program that learns patterns from examples, sorted the calls into the right type 95.4% of the time using only two measurements: each call's length and its highest pitch. When the program picked out the full-throated roars itself, it identified individual lions with 94.3% accuracy, slightly better than with roars chosen by people. Because lions are hard to count by sight, conservationists hope to estimate their numbers from sound recordings instead.

Bioacoustics research (2025)Read card

WonderScience

In 2025 the company Colossal Biosciences announced three pups made to resemble the dire wolf, an Ice Age predator extinct for more than 10,000 years. They are grey wolves with 20 edits to their DNA.

The company read dire wolf DNA from a 13,000-year-old tooth found in Ohio and a 72,000-year-old skull fragment from Idaho. Its scientists then made 20 changes to 14 genes in grey wolf cells, aiming for traits such as a larger body and a pale coat, cloned embryos from those cells and had them carried by domestic dogs. Two males, Romulus and Remus, were born in October 2024 and a female, Khaleesi, in January 2025; the names come from Roman legend and from Game of Thrones. Many scientists outside the company said the animals are genetically modified grey wolves rather than dire wolves, because the edits cover only a tiny part of the genetic differences between the two species.

Colossal Biosciences (2025)Read card

WonderNature

When a glass frog sleeps, it packs up to 89% of its red blood cells into its liver and becomes far more transparent, hiding the red colour that would give it away.

Glass frogs are small tree frogs of Central and South American rainforests whose skin and muscles let light through. Their blood, however, is red, and that colour would show against the green leaves where they rest during the day. In a 2022 study in Science, a team led by Carlos Taboada and Jesse Delia used photoacoustic imaging, a method that uses light and sound to see blood inside living tissue, and found that sleeping frogs moved most of their red blood cells into the liver, which is wrapped in a mirror-like layer. When the frogs wake and become active, the cells flow back into circulation. Crowding blood like this would cause dangerous clots in most animals, and how the frogs avoid it interests medical researchers.

Science (2022)Read card

WonderScience

In 1822 a white stork turned up in Germany with an African hunting spear through its neck. It was striking proof that European storks spend the winter in Africa.

The stork was found near the village of Klütz in Mecklenburg, on Germany's Baltic coast, carrying a spear about 75 centimetres long made of tropical wood from central Africa. It had survived the wound and flown thousands of kilometres. At the time, where birds went in winter was still debated, and some naturalists believed they turned into other birds or mice, or spent the winter underwater. The bird is known as the Rostock Pfeilstorch, German for 'arrow stork', and is still kept, stuffed and with the spear in place, in the University of Rostock's zoological collection. About 25 such storks have since been recorded in Germany.

University of RostockRead card

WonderHistory

In December 1900 the three keepers of the Flannan Isles lighthouse, off Scotland's Outer Hebrides, disappeared. When the relief ship arrived on 26 December, keeper Joseph Moore found the fire cold for days, the clock stopped and the beds empty. James Ducat, Thomas Marshall and Donald McArthur were never seen again.

The last log entry was for 13 December; notes for the 14th and the morning of the 15th were still on the slate, and the morning's work had been done. Marshall had gone out in sea boots and oilskins, Ducat in sea boots and an old waterproof. McArthur's coat was still indoors. At the west landing, iron railings had been torn from their footings and a box of mooring ropes washed away. Superintendent Robert Muirhead concluded that the men had gone down to secure the gear and that an unexpectedly large roller swept them off the rock. The untouched dinner of the legend appears in Wilfrid Gibson's 1912 poem, not in the record: Joseph Moore found the kitchen utensils clean, a sign, he said, that the men had left some time after dinner.

Northern Lighthouse BoardRead card

WonderTechnology

In 1941 the Swiss engineer George de Mestral came home from a walk in the Alps curious about the burrs stuck to his dog. Under a microscope he saw tiny hooks catching in loops of fur, and he spent the next decade turning that idea into Velcro.

The burrs came from burdock, a common wayside plant whose seed heads are covered in tiny hooks that cling to passing animals. De Mestral worked for years with weavers in Lyon to copy the hooks and loops in fabric; nylon, sewn under infrared light, finally worked. He patented the system in the 1950s and named it Velcro, from the French velours (velvet) and crochet (hook). Textile experts at first laughed at it, and it only took off after NASA used it to hold objects in place in weightlessness on the Apollo missions. It is often cited as an early example of biomimicry, the practice of copying designs found in nature.

Invention historyRead card

WonderHistory

Every year Nova Scotia gives Boston a Christmas tree to thank the city for its help after the Halifax Explosion of 6 December 1917, when a munitions ship blew up in Halifax harbour. Boston sent a relief train with doctors, nurses and supplies that same night.

The French cargo ship Mont-Blanc, loaded with wartime explosives, collided with the Norwegian ship Imo in the harbour's narrows and caught fire. When it blew up, it was the largest explosion people had ever caused, and remained so until the first atomic bombs. Nearly 2,000 people died, about 9,000 were injured, and more than 12,000 buildings were destroyed or badly damaged. A blizzard the next day slowed the Boston train, but it arrived with medical teams and supplies. Halifax sent a tree in thanks in 1918, and in 1971 Nova Scotia revived the gift as a yearly tradition. The tree, usually a tall spruce or fir, becomes Boston's official Christmas tree on Boston Common.

HistoryRead card

WonderHistory

Cher Ami, a US Army homing pigeon, was credited with saving the 'Lost Battalion', American soldiers cut off in France's Argonne Forest in October 1918 and shelled by their own artillery. Shot through the breast, it was said to have carried their plea 40 km to headquarters.

The battalion, more than 500 men under Major Charles Whittlesey, was cut off on 2 October 1918; when it was relieved six days later, 194 were able to walk out. On 4 October American shells began falling on them, and the note they sent by pigeon read, in part, 'Our own artillery is dropping a barrage directly on us.' Cher Ami reached its loft with a breast wound and a shattered leg that army medics could not save. It received the French Croix de Guerre, died in 1919 and has been on display at the Smithsonian since 1921; a 2021 DNA test showed it was male. The same year, Smithsonian curator Frank Blazich found no firm evidence tying the bird to the battalion's rescue and concluded that the Army had polished the story to promote its pigeon service.

Military historyRead card

WonderSpace

On 30 June 1908 a space rock, probably a stony asteroid 50 to 60 metres wide, exploded in the air above the Tunguska region of Siberia and flattened about 2,000 square kilometres of forest. No impact crater has ever been found.

The asteroid is thought to have burst 5 to 10 kilometres above the ground, so the blast knocked trees down instead of digging a hole. They fell in a vast butterfly-shaped area about 70 kilometres across, all pointing away from the centre, while some trees right below the blast stayed upright, stripped of their branches. Estimates of the energy range from 3 to 50 megatons of TNT, hundreds of times the Hiroshima bomb. The region was so remote, and Russia so shaken by war and revolution, that Leonid Kulik's expedition reached the site only in 1927. Witnesses at a trading post 65 kilometres away felt the heat. It is still the largest impact event in recorded history.

NASARead card

WonderNature

Jonathan, a giant tortoise on the island of St Helena, hatched around 1832, which makes him the oldest known living land animal. He was already an adult when the telephone was invented, and he still lives on the lawn of the governor's house.

Jonathan, a Seychelles giant tortoise, was brought to St Helena in 1882 as a gift, already fully grown. A photograph taken in 1886 shows him mature, which is why his hatching is put at around 1832, before the first photograph of a person and before Darwin's On the Origin of Species. Since arriving he has lived through the terms of more than 30 governors and the reigns of seven British monarchs. Now blind and without a sense of smell, he is fed by hand. In April 2026 the St Helena government had to confirm he was alive after a fake social media account announced his death. He appears on the reverse of the St Helena five-pence coin.

Guinness World RecordsRead card