Airplanes can punch holes in clouds and make it rain, new research shows. As propeller or jet airplanes pass through the right atmospheric conditions, they make liquid water droplets freeze and immediately drop as snow, leaving a circular fissure behind. Odd clouds can sometimes elude explanation for decades, and these mysterious gaps in the sky, aptly called hole-punch clouds or channel clouds, have... 

With sea ice levels in the Arctic at record lows this month, a new report comparing scientists’ predictions calls for caution in over-interpreting a few weeks worth of data from the North Pole. The Sea Ice Outlook, which will be released this week, brings together more than a dozen teams’ best guesses at how much sea ice will disappear by the end of the warm season in September. This year began... 

Like vacationers taking a pit stop on a long road trip, zircon mineral grains from the northern Appalachians may have stopped off in Michigan before ending up on the Colorado Plateau, a new study suggests. The finding, reported in the June Geology, is a major boost to the notion that a continent-spanning, Amazon-like river system once carried sediments west across North America. sciencenewsA large... 

Honeybee remains found in a 3,000-year-old apiary have given archaeologists a one-of-a-kind window into the beekeeping practices of the ancient world. “Beekeeping is known only from a few Egyptian sources, from a few tombs and paintings. No actual hives have been found,” said Hebrew University of Jerusalem archaeologist Amihai Mazar. The hives were uncovered in 2007 at an excavation in Tel Rehov,... 

New Hubble images reveal what happened to one of Jupiter’s main cloud belts: It’s hiding behind ammonia clouds. “Weather forecast for Jupiter’s Southern Equatorial Belt: cloudy with a chance of ammonia,” planetary scientist Heidi Hammel of the Space Science Institute in Boulder, Colorado said in a press release Wednesday. The gas giant’s characteristic band of dark clouds started fading... 

The Cassini spacecraft made its deepest dip ever into the atmosphere of Titan, Saturn’s largest moon, at 8:28 p.m. Eastern time on June 20. The data it collected will help determine whether the moon has its own magnetic field. “For Titan scientists, this is one of the most anticipated flybys of the whole mission,” wrote space physicist Cesar Bertucci of the Institute of Astronomy and Space Physics... 

To watch the uncanny synchronization of a starling flock in flight is to wonder if the birds aren’t actually a single entity, governed by something beyond the usual rules of biology. New research suggests that’s true. Mathematical analysis of flock dynamics show how each starling’s movement is influenced by every other starling, and vice versa. It doesn’t matter how large a flock is, or if... 

BOULDER, Colorado — Oil gushing from the Deepwater Horizon site in the Gulf of Mexico will reach the Atlantic Ocean within six months, says oceanographer Synte Peacock. Exactly when is all down to an eddy that broke off of the infamous Loop Current southwest of Florida on June 12. sciencenewsPeacock, of the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, Colorado, usually studies how the ocean’s... 

A 3.6 million-year-old fossil from one of humanity’s earliest ancestors is more human-like than expected — and much taller. The discovery makes Lucy, the best-known fossil of all, appear to be exceptionally short by comparison. Lucy and the new skeleton are both Australopithecus afarensis, the first fully bipedal primate and a direct ancestor of humanity. Unlike Lucy and every other A. afarensis... 

While the oil disaster’s terrible toll on birds and turtles will at least be measured, less charismatic creatures tend to be ignored. That’s why conservationists are organizing a citizen science project to count the Gulf Coast’s ghost crabs. Also known as sand crabs, they’re not classically cute, but they’re an important part of coastal food webs. Because the crabs are relatively easy to... 

Giant planets with wonky orbits mostly circle blistering-hot stars, two new studies find. This pattern could explain why some “hot Jupiters” — planets from a third to 12 times the mass of Jupiter that sit scorchingly close to their stars — orbit the way their star spins, while others tilt so far that they orbit backward. “It’s a possible resolution of what would otherwise be a weird fluke,”... 

Wear patterns on ancient antelope teeth have allowed researchers to reconstruct Europe’s environment 8 million years ago, when the continent’s great apes vanished. One of those ape species could have given rise to the human lineage, making the circumstances of their disappearance especially interesting. “Some kind of homogeneity happened around that time,” said anthropologist Gildas Merceron... 

New fossils have provided a snapshot of proto-human diets during a critical evolutionary moment, when better fare helped our small-brained ancestors boost their cognitive capacity. Two-million-year-old bones that belonged to fish, crocodiles and turtles — aquatic animals rich in brain-fueling fatty acids — were found together with stone tool fragments near Kenya’s Lake Turkana. “We know that... 

Human eyes can detect the spooky phenomenon of quantum entanglement — but only sometimes, a new study on the physics preprint website arXiv.org claims. While eyes can help determine if two individual photons were recently entangled, they can’t tell if the brighter bunch of photons that actually hit the retina are in this bizarre quantum state. “In general you think these quantum phenomena that... 

A landmark decision has excluded fMRI lie-detection evidence from a federal court case in Tennessee. The defense tried to use brain scans of the defendant to prove its client had not intentionally defrauded the government. In a 39-page opinion, Judge Tu Pham provided both a rebuke of this kind of fMRI evidence now, and a roadmap for how future defendants may be able to satisfy the Daubert standard,... 

Oyster shells excavated from a well in Jamestown, Virginia, the first permanent British settlement in North America, bolster the notion that the first colonists suffered an unusually deep and long-lasting drought. sciencenewsThe shells reveal that water in the James River near the colony, where many of those oysters were harvested, was much saltier then than along that stretch of the estuary today,... 

An Alaskan bay bitterly contested by fishermen and miners has become the site of a landmark study on population dynamics — and the findings favor the fish. Published June 2 in Nature, the analysis of Bristol Bay salmon quantifies a common-sense tenet of population dynamics: Diversity produces resilience. Had the proposed Pebble Mine been built in earlier decades, it’s possible the bay’s sockeye... 

A thick haze of organic material let the early Earth soak up the sun’s warmth without absorbing harmful ultraviolet rays, according to a new study. The model offers a new twist on an old puzzle: Although the sun was so dim billions of years ago that the Earth should have been a ball of ice, the young planet had liquid oceans capable of supporting life. “Given these recent papers, we can probably... 

The picture of the Guatemala sinkhole you see below is a real picture released by the Government of Guatemala. This huge Guatemala crater according to Gizmodo “is a natural depression caused by the removal of soil by water. This process can happen slowly, but sometimes the land just cracks open. In this case, the sinkhole happened suddenly.” The Guatemala sinkhole appeared after the zone was...