Some fish can recognize their own faces in photos and mirrors, an ability usually attributed to humans and other animals considered particularly brainy, such as chimpanzees, scientists report. Finding the ability in fish suggests that self-awareness may be far more widespread among animals than scientists once thought. “It is believed widely that the animals that […]

In the early morning of February 6, a devastating magnitude 7.8 earthquake struck southern Turkey, near the border with Syria. Numerous aftershocks followed, the strongest nearly rivaling the power of the main quake, at magnitude 7.5. By evening, the death toll had climbed to more than 3,700 across both countries, according to Reuters, and was […]

Pfizer is racing to get approval for its COVID-19 vaccine, applying for emergency use authorization from the U.S. Food and Drug Administration on November 20. But the pharmaceutical giant faces a huge challenge in distributing its vaccine, which has to be kept an ultrafrosty –70° Celsius, requiring special storage freezers and shipping containers. It “has […]

Fritillaria plants should be simple to spot. The usually bright green plants often stand alone amid the jumbled scree that tops the Himalayan and Hengduan mountains in southwestern China — easy pickings for traditional Chinese medicine herbalists, who’ve ground the bulbs of wild Fritillaria into a popular cough-treating powder for more than 2,000 years. The […]