animal behavior, animal navigation, animal perception, animal sensory abilities, animals' sixth sense, cat island, cryptochrome, earth's magnetic field, earthquake, environmental awareness, magnetite in animals, magnetoreception, natural disaster prediction, nature's mysteries, oscar the therapy cat, quantum biology, sensory biology, wildlife research

Unlocking the Mystery of Animals’ Sixth Sense: Magnetoreception and Beyond

Animals’ sensory capabilities extend far beyond the familiar five senses of sight, smell, taste, touch, and hearing. They are endowed with what can be termed a “sixth sense,” a complex array of extraordinary perceptions that transcend human understanding. Magnetoreception — a unique ability to detect Earth’s magnetic field — is a prominent example of this ...

Max Lu

European robin sitting on a tree branch.

The Legend of Jinxiu Creek: ‘Watch for the Earthquake’

Jinxiu Creek, located in the southwest of Wuwei County, Anhui Province, covers an area of 4.55 hectares with a water surface of 30 acres. It is a quiet and tranquil environment, and it is the main place for local people to relax and have fun. Historically, Jinxiu Creek was quite large, and it was given ...

Jack Roberts

Hong Cun Old Village Water Town in Anhui, China.

Dark Fiber Network Finds Missed Aftershocks in Chinese Earthquake

Just days after a 2020 magnitude 5.1 earthquake in Tangshan, China, researchers turned nearly 8 kilometers of unused telecom fiber optic cable, known as “dark fiber,” into a seismic array that detected dozens of aftershocks that were missed by permanent seismic stations. The rapid deployment of the distributed acoustic sensing (DAS) technology doubled the total ...

Troy Oakes

Cracked stone wall.

What Happens Below Earth’s Surface When the Most Powerful Earthquakes Occur

At 03:34 local time on February 27, 2010, Chile was struck by one of the most powerful earthquakes in a century. The shock triggered a tsunami, which devastated coastal communities. The combined events killed more than 500 people. So powerful was the shaking that, by one NASA estimate, it shifted Earth’s axis of spin by a full 8 ...

Troy Oakes

A cracked brick wall.

Melting Glaciers Contribute to Alaskan Earthquakes

In 1958, a magnitude 7.8 earthquake triggered a rockslide into Southeast Alaska’s Lituya Bay, creating a tsunami that ran 1,700 feet up a mountainside before racing out to sea. Researchers now think the region’s widespread loss of glacier ice helped set the stage for the quake as well as other Alaskan earthquakes. In a recently published ...

Troy Oakes

The Yakutat Glacier.

Google Turning Android Phones Into Earthquake Warning Network

Google recently launched a new feature in android — a global earthquake detection system. With this new technology, Google is turning Android phones into seismometers and the company is essentially creating the biggest identification network in the world. Android seismograph to measure earthquakes Google is able to transform Android phones into seismometers because of the ...

Armin Auctor

Google's Android earthquake detection system.

Earth’s Spin May Spark Earthquakes and Volcanic Eruptions at Mount Etna

New research suggests forces pulling on Earth’s surface as the planet spins may trigger earthquakes and eruptions from volcanoes. Seismic activity and bursts of magma near Italy’s Mount Etna increased when Earth’s rotational axis was furthest from its geographic axis, according to a new study comparing changes in Earth’s rotation to activity at the well-known ...

Troy Oakes

Mount Etna.

Predicting Earthquake Hazards From Wastewater Injection

A byproduct of oil and gas production is a large quantity of toxic wastewater called brine. Well-drillers dispose of brine by wastewater injected into deep rock formations, where its injection can cause earthquakes. Most quakes are relatively small, but some of them have been large and damaging. Yet predicting the amount of seismic activity from ...

Troy Oakes

Gas facilities in Europe.