Environment Animals Pets Dogs Cortisol could impact your dog's behavior Just like in humans, stress and mood hormones might play a role in your pet's temperament. Breakthroughs, discoveries, and DIY tips sent six days a week. For dogs, good training and responsible ownership impact their behavior, but their life experiences and genetics can also affect temperament. Hormones may also play a role and could offer a new way to assess our canine companions. In a small study published today in the journal more well-behaved dogs generally had lower levels of cortisol--an important stress hormone--and higher levels of serotonin, a neurotransmitter associated with happiness.

Dreading negative outcomes is six times more powerful than anticipating the positive ones. Breakthroughs, discoveries, and DIY tips sent six days a week. Dread shapes our decision making and new research published in the journal explores why spinning those negative scenarios affects us more than the possible positive outcomes. The team from the University of Bath in England and the University of Waterloo in Canada analyzed data from the British Household Panel Survey (BHPS). The team looked at roughly 14,000 individuals between 1991 and 2024, tracking emotional responses to real-world economic choices including investing, changing jobs, or making health decisions.

Why do elephants have such big ears? The multi-use appendages are kind of like their superpower. The African elephant has some of the world's biggest ears, measuring more than six feet long and more than four feet wide. Breakthroughs, discoveries, and DIY tips sent every weekday. While real life elephants can't fly, they certainly have enormous ears.

You should start taking "Fart Walks" The name may inspire snickers, but the benefits are no joke. Take a brisk walk after meals to help your guts. Breakthroughs, discoveries, and DIY tips sent every weekday. Founding father Benjamin Franklin secured the alliance with France that led to victory in the Revolutionary War, negotiated the Treaty of Paris ending said war, signed the Declaration of Independence the U.S Constitution, discovered that lightning was electrical, invented bifocal glasses, wrote the famous, and ran newspapers. He also had some thoughts on farting.

Why do we have five fingers and toes? It all goes back to our fishy ancestors. The answer to why we have five fingers and toes is surprisingly difficult to suss out. Breakthroughs, discoveries, and DIY tips sent every weekday. The popular nursery rhyme is an early childhood memory for many of us.

Apennine brown bears have been isolated from their European counterparts since the Roman Empire. Breakthroughs, discoveries, and DIY tips sent every weekday. While bear attacks seem to have become a significant problem in Japan--with the country going as far as deploying the army --new research reveals that an Italian bear species has evolved to be less aggressive. Apennine brown bears () have been in close contact with humans for generations. Their small, endangered population exists only in central Italy, and previous research suggests that this population split off from other European brown bears 2,000 to 3,000 years ago .

Ant evolution favored large colonies over individual strength. Breakthroughs, discoveries, and DIY tips sent every weekday. Here's a fun (and creepy) fact: The Earth is home to approximately 20 quadrillion ants . To put zeroes on it, that's around 20,000,000,000,000,000 of the six-legged insects living all around us. How did such diminutive creatures attain their prominent--and ecologically vital -role on the planet?

In some remarkable cases, people have survived after their core temperature has plummeted into the 50s. The human body needs to maintain the same internal body temperature or else many vital systems fall apart. Breakthroughs, discoveries, and DIY tips sent every weekday. Whether you prefer sweltering summers or frigid winters, significant temperature changes mean only one thing to your body: bad news. Humans are homeotherms, meaning that our core body temperature stays roughly constant.

A 20,000 year old fossil uncovered in a tarantula-filled cave has paleontologists stunned. Breakthroughs, discoveries, and DIY tips sent every weekday. Bees are frequently associated with large queen-serving colonies featuring hundreds if not thousands of insects . They lay their eggs in small cavities, and they leave pollen for the larvae to eat," explained paleontologist Lazasro Viñola López . "Some bee species burrow holes in wood or in the ground, or use empty structures for nests." Viñola López, a researcher at Chicago's Field Museum, added that some European and African species even construct nests inside vacant snail shells. That said, a beehive inside a bone is a new one even for seasoned researchers. Estimated to be around 20,000 years old, this newly discovered specimen is also the first known example of such a home, past or present. The findings are detailed in a study published on December 16 in the journal . Researchers located the unique find while exploring the many limestone caves that dot the southern Dominican Republic. Sinkholes are common across the Caribbean island of Hispaniola, and are often so well sheltered from the elements that they function like underground time capsules. These windows into the past are largely thanks to the work of the island's owls . The predatory birds often make their nests inside these caves, where they regularly cough up owl pellets filled with the undigested bones of their prey. Over thousands of years, these layers of bones fossilize atop one another across carbonate layers created from rainy periods. "The initial descent into the cave isn't too deep-we would tie a rope to the side and then rappel down," Viñola López said. "If you go in at night, you see the eyes of the tarantulas that live inside." After proceeding past the large spiders through about 33 feet of underground tunnel, the paleontologists began finding various fossils. Many belonged to rodents, but there were also bones from birds, reptiles, and even sloths for a total of over 50 different animal species. "We think that this was a cave where owls lived for many generations, maybe for hundreds or thousands of years," said Viñola López. "The owls would go out and hunt, and then come back to the cave and throw up pellets.

Our nostrils share the workload like coworkers on rotation. Each of our two nostrils smells the world differently. Breakthroughs, discoveries, and DIY tips sent every weekday. If you close one eye or put a finger to your ear, there's an immediate sense of loss. Two eyes help us see the world while two ears enable us to locate sounds.