science

All Spix’s macaws are majestically blue in the blazing sun of Brazil’s Northeast, but each bird is distinct to Candice and Cromwell Purchase. As the parrots soar squawking past their home, the couple can readily identify bird No. 17 by its smooth feathers and can tell No. 16 from No. 22, which has two beads attached to its radio collar. …

A massive cradle of baby stars has been observed in new detail by a European space telescope, adding to its celestial collection of images. The European Space Agency released the photos from the Euclid observatory on Thursday. They were taken following the telescope’s Florida launch last year as a warm-up act to its main job currently underway: surveying the so-called …

High in the evergreen canopy of General Sherman, the world’s largest tree, researchers searched for evidence of an emerging threat to giant sequoias: bark beetles. The climbers descended the towering 2,200-year-old tree with good news on Tuesday. “The General Sherman tree is doing fine right now,” said Anthony Ambrose, executive director of the Ancient Forest Society, who led the expedition. …

Cicadas are beginning to emerge throughout the Southern and Midwestern parts of the United States of America. Billions of the buzzing insects are expected thanks to a ‘double brood,’ a rare occurrence not seen in centuries, where the 13-year cicadas and the 17-year cicadas will pop up at the same time. “They’re your new neighbors and you can’t pound on …

The death of a British man and injuries impacting dozens of others on a Singapore Airlines flight that hit severe turbulence Tuesday is the latest incident to spotlight the potential dangers of flying through unstable air. While turbulence-related fatalities are quite rare, injuries resulting from in-flight turbulence have piled up over the years. Such incidents are usually minor, and carriers …

New research indicates the sun’s magnetic field originates much closer to the surface than previously thought, a finding that could help predict periods of extreme solar storms like the ones that slammed Earth earlier this month. The magnetic field appears to generate 20,000 miles beneath the sun’s surface. Previous calculations put the roots of this process more than 130,000 miles …

They’re six-legged, hairy home invaders that just won’t die, no matter how hard you try. Cockroaches are experts at surviving indoors, hiding in kitchen pipes or musty drawers. But they didn’t start out that way. A new study uses genetics to chart cockroaches’ spread across the globe, from humble beginnings in southeast Asia to Europe and beyond. The findings span …

You may have heard of white noise used to mask background sounds. Now, it has colorful competition. There’s a growing buzz around pink noise, brown noise, green noise — a rainbow of soothing sounds — and their theoretical effects on sleep, concentration and relaxation response. The science is new with only a few small studies behind it, but that hasn’t …

Ocean temperatures that have gone “crazy haywire” hot, especially in the Atlantic, are close to making the current global coral bleaching event the worst in history. It’s so bad that scientists are hoping for a few hurricanes to cool things off. More than three-fifths — 62.9% — of the world’s coral reefs are badly hurting from a bleaching event that …

The Webb Space Telescope has discovered the earliest known merger of black holes. These two gigantic black holes and their galaxies consolidated just 740 million years after the universe-forming Big Bang. It’s the most distant detection ever made of merging black holes, scientists reported Thursday. One black hole is 50 million times more massive than our sun. The other is …