A beloved beluga whale with a mysterious past was found dead in the waters of Norway over the weekend. Admirers are paying tribute as authorities investigate.
Authorities issued a warrant in May for Deario Wilkerson's arrest in connection with a fatal shooting. They finally captured him in Memphis this week, after he fell, so to speak, into their laps.
The appearance of hundreds of whales was amazing, rower Tom Waddington said. But when one slammed into his boat, "suddenly it turned from David Attenborough into Moby Dick. And I was really scared."
Metallic prisms have been appearing across the world since one was found in Utah in 2020, but in many cases it’s still unclear who created them and why.
Wally has many fans in Pennsylvania and across social media. His owner is enlisting their help, saying Wally was kidnapped, located by a trapper and released into a swamp while vacationing in Georgia.
This wild case emphasizes the serious potential for criminal misuse of artificial intelligence that experts have been warning about for some time, one professor said.
Five military horses got spooked during a training exercise, bolting and weaving a path of destruction across the city before being captured. Several people and horses are being treated for injuries.
A new single, "Primrose Hill," was co-written by Sean Ono Lennon and James McCartney, the youngest sons of Beatles musicians John Lennon and Paul McCartney.
500 million years ago, the world was a very different place. During this period of time, known as the Cambrian period, basically all life was in the water. The ocean was brimming with animals that looked pretty different from the ones we recognize today — including a group of predatory worms with a throat covered in teeth and spines.
Researchers thought these tiny terrors died out at the end of the Cambrian period. But a paper published recently in the journal Biology Letters showed examples of a new species of this worm in the fossil record 25 million years after scientists thought they'd vanished from the Earth. One of the authors of the paper, Karma Nanglu, tells us how this finding may change how scientists understand the boundaries of time.
Curious about other weird wonders of the ancient Earth? Email us at shortwave@npr.org.
Some 200 servers speed-walked through Paris balancing trays of beverages and croissants on Sunday. Paris hasn't held a waiters race since 2011, but brought it back ahead of the Olympics.
Washington, D.C.'s famous cherry blossoms hit peak bloom this week. This will be the last season for about 150 of the famous flowering trees — they'll soon be cut down to adjust to sea-level rise.
Neuroscientist Nathan Sawtell has spent a lot of time studying the electric elephantnose fish. These fish send and decipher weak electric signals, which Sawtell hopes will eventually help neuroscientists better understand how the brain filters sensory information about the outside world. As Sawtell has studied these electric critters, he's had a lingering question: why do they always seem to organize themselves in a particular orientation. At first, he couldn't figure out why, but a new study released this week in Nature may have an answer: the fish are creating an electrical network larger than any field a single fish can muster alone, and providing collective knowledge about potential dangers in the surrounding water.
Want to hear us cover more animal news? Email the show at shortwave@npr.org to let us know!
