The origin of Saturn's beautiful rings and the reason for the planet's unusually large 27 degree-tilt on its axis has puzzled astronomers for decades. Scientists had initially believed that the rings had been a part of the planet since its formation billions of years ago. However, recent research indicates that the planet acquired them sometime between 100 and 200 million years ago....

The Polynesian Kingdom of Tonga is home to a new island. The land mass results from the lava and ash spewed by the Home Reef seamount, an undersea volcano that came to life on September 10, 2022. While the volcano has been erupting steadily since, it poses no risk to the residents of the South Pacific archipelago....

Michael Heizer was just 27 years old when he began work on "City" in 1970. Now, 50 years later, the reclusive American artist is finally ready to showcase his life's work. The 1.5-mile-long complex, which cost $40 million to build, opened to the public on September 2, 2022. It is the largest contemporary artwork ever built. The exact location of "City" is a secret. But it lies in a remote valley in Nevada's Great Basin Desert....

Just days after destroying parts of Cuba and leaving much of the country without power, Hurricane Ian pummeled Southwest Florida on September 28, 2022. The powerful storm came ashore with sustained winds of 150 miles per hour. It was just 7 miles short of becoming a Category 5 hurricane....

On September 26, 2022, NASA's golf cart-sized DART (Double Asteroid Redirection Test) spacecraft intentionally crashed into a distant asteroid. The spectacular collision, observed by telescopes worldwide, was NASA's first practical attempt to alter the path of an asteroid. The $325 million mission was part of the space agency's overall planetary defense strategy to protect Earth from the impact of an errant space rock....

Any 25th birthday is a cause for celebration. But it was even more so for Janus, a two-headed Greek tortoise who marked the milestone year on September 3, 2022. The resident of the Natural History Museum in Geneva, Switzerland, is now believed to be the world's oldest two-headed tortoise. The museum celebrated the special occasion with a day-long party filled with fun events, which included taking photos with the birthday "boy."...

A seven-year-old boy's love for corn has made him an Internet celebrity worldwide. Tariq's rise to fame was accidental. The New York resident was at Smorgasburg, a weekly food festival in Brooklyn, this summer when Julian Shapiro-Barnum approached him. The comedian is the host of "Recess Therapy," a fun YouTube series featuring impromptu interviews with kids....

Europe experienced its hottest summer in recorded history in 2022. The high temperatures and arid weather dried up bodies of water, destroyed crops, and sparked several wildfires. The only silver lining? The extreme weather dropped water levels low enough to expose long-lost artifacts from the past....

A "monster monsoon" is wreaking havoc in the South Asian country of Pakistan. The torrential rains, which began in mid-June and continued for eight weeks, have left a third of the country underwater and turned villages into islands. Most recent reports indicate over 1,500 people have died and 30 million — 1 in 7 Pakistanis — have been displaced from their homes....

Yvon Chouinard, the founder and CEO of outdoor apparel and gear company Patagonia, has always been a climate activist. Most of Patagonia's products are made using renewable and recycled raw materials. Additionally, since 1985, the company has been donating one percent of its annual sales to protect and restore the environment....

A local waterway and shipping authority was conducting a routine measurement in northern Germany’s Trave River when they stumbled upon a rare piece of history — a 17th-century shipwreck. Researchers from Kiel University, who revealed the find on July 26, 2022, believe the ship sank during the end of the Hanseatic period. This refers to the time between the 13th to 17th centuries when a network of 190 cities in 16 Northern European countries dominated maritime trade in the Baltic Sea....

The Prophalangopsis obscura (P. obscura) is one of only eight remaining descendants of an ancient katydid family of over 90-known species that lived during the Jurassic period (199.6 million to 145.5 million years ago). However, there is only one known specimen of the grasshopper-like insect. It was discovered in India in the mid-1800s and later donated to London's Natural History Museum. Scientists have now digitally recreated the P. obscura's long-lost call in the hopes of locating the insects in the wild....

The carnivorous pitcher plants obtain nutrition by luring unsuspecting insects inside their unique jug-shaped leaves and devouring them. However, the brightly-colored "pitfall traps" are usually set above the ground. Now, researchers have found a new species that grows its prey-trapping contraptions underground to capture subterranean bugs like ants, mites, and beetles....

Jenn Ross noticed that some buckets in her garage were knocked over when she returned from the gym on the morning of August 22, 2022. Believing it may be the result of the family cat, Coco, chasing after a bird, she did not give it much thought. However, she soon discovered the true culprit lounging in her hallway — an adorable young New Zealand fur seal!...

The metaverse is rapidly being portrayed as the next frontier in the tech, business, and finance world. The concept gained popularity in July 2021, after Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg rebranded the company to Meta to reflect its growing focus on the metaverse. Today, everyone, from major corporations like Microsoft and Disney to innovative startups, is scrambling to enter the lucrative market that is predicted to reach over $780 billion by 2024. But what exactly is the metaverse? How will it affect the way we live and work?...

The 1,450-mile-long Colorado River and its tributaries snake through seven states and two nations — the US and Mexico. They provide water and electricity to about 40 million people in Arizona, California, Nevada, Colorado, New Mexico, Wyoming, and Utah. The country's sixth largest river also irrigates 4 to 5 million acres of farmland in the Southwest....

There have been numerous attempts to create an all-plastic bike. However, most have never made it past the prototype stage. Igus, a Germany-based manufacturer of high-performance plastics, and Dutch start-up MTRL aim to change that with the igus:bike — the world's first urban bike crafted almost entirely from recycled polymer....

Unidentified Flying Objects (UFOs), or Unidentified Aerial Phenomena (UAP) as they are now called, are finally getting the attention they deserve. On June 9, 2022, NASA announced it had commissioned a study to examine observations of events that "cannot be identified as aircraft or known natural phenomena."...

Art experts at the National Galleries of Scotland in Edinburgh made an exciting discovery while preparing for an upcoming exhibition. The reverse side of Vincent van Gogh's 1885 painting, Head of a Peasant Woman, features a portrait of the famed artist....

The beautiful island country of Madagascar has a dire school shortage. About a third of Malagasy children have no access to education because the schools are too far away or severely overcrowded. Thinking Huts, a non-profit dedicated to increasing global access to education, believes that 22,000 new schools are needed to fulfill the demand. The organization plans to tackle the issue with a series of 3D-printed schools, the first of which was completed in April 2022....

A sprawling seagrass meadow has just been declared the "world's largest single living organism" based on area. The Poseidon’s ribbon weed seagrass (Posidonia australis) is located in Shark Bay, a protected body of shallow water in Western Australia. It covers an impressive 77 square miles (200 square kilometers) — the equivalent of about 280 soccer fields! The record was previously held by a 3.7 square-mile mushroom, dubbed "Humongous Fungus," in the Malheur National Forest in Oregon, USA....

There are over 30 meteor showers annually. However, few are as spectacular as the Perseids. The "shooting stars" have been blazing through the sky at a rate of about a dozen an hour since mid-July. But the best time to watch the natural fireworks show will be between August 11 and August 12, 2022. That's when the pace of the meteors will escalate to between 50 and one hundred an hour....

Freya, a 1,300-pound (589 kg) walrus, has been on an epic adventure since leaving her home in the Arctic Ocean in 2019. Over the past three years, the juvenile female has visited the coasts of Sweden, Denmark, England, Germany, the Netherlands, and the Shetland Islands. Freya, who is identified by her small tusks, white scar on her right nostril, and previous injury on her flipper, has now arrived in Norway....

A Roman-era cargo ship that sank near the Greek island of Antikythera over two thousand years ago has been yielding abundant ancient treasures since its discovery in 1900. In late June 2022, researchers revealed their latest find — a marble head depicting the Greek and Roman demigod Hercules. The expedition team believes it belongs to a headless sculpture of Hercules found during the first visit to the shipwreck....