Skip to main content

Subscribe to Smithsonian magazine and get a FREE tote.

Smart News / Smart News Science

A 38-foot male whale washed up along Sandy Key in the Florida Everglades in January 2019. Researchers have now determined that the whale is a member of a previously unknown species they've dubbed Rice's whale. A necropsy revealed a 3-inch hunk of plastic lodged in its gut that may have contributed to its demise.

New Research

Large New Whale Species Identified in the Gulf of Mexico

Named Rice’s whale, the species can reach lengths of 42 feet and lives in the Gulf’s warm waters all year

A new study suggests cities across the United States may be underreporting their carbon emissions. The study suggests Los Angeles' self-reported emissions could be 50 percent below the metropolis' true carbon footprint.

New Research

U.S. Cities Are Underestimating Carbon Emissions, New Research Shows

Forty-eight cities across America have shorted their emissions by nearly 20 percent

Researchers were first intrigued by the social structure of the mole rats in the 1970s because, like bees and termites, naked mole rats have a single-breeding queen and have non-breeding worker rats

Naked Mole Rats Speak in Dialects Unique to Their Colonies

The accent is influenced by each group’s queen but can vary if the monarch is overthrown

Female Mediterranean field crickets (Gryllus bimaculatus) crickets can tell male cricket qualities and fitness through their courtship songs.

Noise Pollution Interrupts Crickets’ Sex Lives

Anthropogenic noise is affecting the female cricket’s ability to hear the male’s courting song

Titan's largest lake, Kraken Mare, is larger than the five Great Lakes combined.

New Research

Titan’s Largest Methane Lake May Be One Thousand Feet Deep

NASA’s Cassini probe flew just 600 miles above Saturn’s largest moon to gather the data

The male of a newly discovered species named Brookesia nana may be the smallest adult reptile ever found.

New Research

Chameleon Discovered in Madagascar May Be World’s Smallest Reptile

The male of the newly described species measured just half an inch long from his nose to the base of his tail

The four-inch-long footprint happened to be in a rock at about the height of a four-year-old child's shoulder.

Cool Finds

Four-Year-Old Lives Every Child’s Dream and Discovers a Dinosaur Footprint

Found on a beach in Wales, the fossil is 220 million years old and shows the details of the muscles and joints in the reptile’s foot

A group of perovskite solar cells that have been treated with capsaicin.

New Research

Chili Pepper Compound Increases Solar Cell Efficiency

Adding capsaicin, the chemical responsible for making chili peppers spicy, improved the efficiency of solar cells in experiments

The study analyzes thousands of records to understand how many species of bees are spotted by scientists each year.

New Research

Thousands of Wild Bee Species Haven’t Been Seen Since 1990

Between 2006 and 2015, researchers worldwide observed 25 percent fewer bee species than they had before 1990

During fall migration, nearly 40 percent of Anna’s Hummingbirds (Calypte anna) migrate through California’s Central Valley

California’s Central Valley and the Colorado River Delta Are Epicenters for North America’s Migratory Birds

A database called eBird reveals as many as 65 million birds fly through these Western migration zones

All dogs with the genetic signature A2b descended from the same Siberian canines roughly 23,000 years ago

How Dogs Migrated to America From Ice Age Siberia 15,000 Years Ago

Northern Siberians and ancestral native Americans may have traded pups at the time

An oceanic whitetip shark swimming in the open ocean. This species was common in the 1970s but its population has since declined by 98 percent, according to a new study.

New Research

Oceanic Sharks and Rays Have Declined 70% Since 1970

Fishing fleets have indiscriminately slaughtered sharks for decades and a new study catalogues the environmental damage done

Rescuers found the Dyatlov group's abandoned tent on February 26, 1959.

New Research

Have Scientists Finally Unraveled the 60-Year Mystery Surrounding Nine Russian Hikers’ Deaths?

New research identifies an unusual avalanche as the culprit behind the 1959 Dyatlov Pass Incident

The tasty fungi are naturally found deep within the roots of various trees, like oaks, hazels, spruces, and pines, because of the two organisms share a symbiotic relationship.

In Central Europe, Climate Change Could Boost Truffle Cultivation by 2050

Fancy fungi grown in the Czech Republic may benefit from global warming

Onlookers identified the snowy owl as a young female because of its thick black stripes.

Snowy Owl Stops in Central Park for the First Time Since 1890

The bird attracted a crowd of about 100 birdwatchers, a territorial hawk and several crows

The Bloodhound supersonic car reached 628 miles per hour in 2019, but the team hopes to pass 1,000 miles per hour with the addition of a rocket

Supersonic Car Designed to Break Land Speed Record Is for Sale Again

A businessman bought it in 2018 to keep the project alive but the pandemic has thrown off the schedule

A stream of meltwater cuts through the Greenland ice sheet.

New Research

Earth Loses 1.2 Trillion Tons of Ice Per Year, a Nearly 60% Increase From 1994

A pair of studies paint a worrying picture of accelerating ice loss around the world, with serious consequences for projections of sea level rise

Passengers need to eat and drink on a long-haul flight, which means they remove their masks and risk spreading or catching Covid-19.

New Research

What One Covid-19 Cluster on an Airplane Tells Experts About Risk Factors While Flying

When one person with Covid-19 took an 18-hour flight from Dubai to New Zealand, several people got sick

Currently accessible Covid-19 vaccines seem to protect people against the emerging variants so far.

What Experts Know About the Current Coronavirus Variants

The appearance of highly transmissible versions of the pandemic coronavirus has the world’s medical community on high alert

Three adult gray whales photographed via drone in 2017, 2018 and 2019 in Laguna San Ignacio off the coast of Mexico. The three shots show increasingly skinny whales, a bad sign for an animal that needs to make a 10,000-mile return trip to reach its feeding grounds.

New Research

Nearly 400 Gray Whales Have Died Off the West Coast Since 2019

Scientists say the die-off, which is entering its third year, is likely due to a scarcity of food in the animals’ cold water feeding grounds

Page 212 of 538