2 000 years ago, Roman fishermen knew that some species of fish liked to gather under floating objects.

No one knew why and it didn't matter, that behavioral mechanism was just used to catch more fish in the Mediterranean. Today, artisanal and industrial tuna fisheries exploit this “aggregating phenomenon” in much the same way. Over the last thirty years, seine fishing in particular has developed rapidly through the use of massive floating objects, natural at first, then more recently fish aggregation devices (FADs) remotely monitored using electronic beacons. 

These floating objects help enable 40 % of worldwide tropical tuna catches today.

In J.R.R. Tolkeins's fantasy epic "The Lord of the Rings", a hobbit discovers a giant in the caves under Mt. Doom.

More recently, another famous hobbit helped discover a much smaller kind of spider. And the researchers who get credit for it named Ctenus monaghani after him.

Actor Dominic Monaghan, who played  Hobbit Meriadoc “Merry” Brandybock in the recent motion picture trilogy, has a new nature documentary called “Wild Things” and Dr. Peter Jäger, expert consultant to the “Wild Things” team in the forests and caves of Laos, discovered the new, eight-legged critter and named it after the actor in recognition of Monaghan's natural world enthusiasm, which even extends to inconspicuous and unpopular animals such as spiders.

A year-round ice-free Arctic Ocean surface could explain why the Earth of the Pliocene Epoch had the levels of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere that we have today, but we remain 3 to 9 degrees cooler than the Earth was then.

At a young age, kids learn that the cookies are still there, even though they have been placed in a jar. And they learn that a car driven into a tunnel will reappear on the other side. 

The ability to represent and to track the trajectory of objects which are temporally out of sight is important in many aspects - and also cognitively demanding. In non-human primates, only the great apes have shown convincing abilities there.

Alice Auersperg and her team from the University of Vienna and Oxford have shown that "object permanence" abilities in the Goffin Cockatoo (Cacatua goffini) equals apes and four year old human toddlers. 

A new solar cell and a photo anode made of a metal oxide has resulted in storing nearly five percent of solar energy chemically, in the form of hydrogen.

The solar cell is simpler than that of traditional high-efficiency triple-junction cells based on amorphous silicon or expensive III-V semiconductors.

Like with cigarettes and alcohol, no amount of awareness campaigns about health risks are needed. People know by now and some choose to do it anyway.

Among Swiss men, average age 20, 91 percent drink alcohol, almost half of whom drink six beverages or more in a row and would be categorized as at-risk drinkers. 44 percent smoke tobacco, and are categorized as at-risk smokers (because they smoke at least once a day) and 36 percent smoke cannabis, where over half are at-risk consumers, using the drug at least twice a week.

University of Leicester archeologists lifted the lid of a medieval stone coffin near the final resting place of Richard III this week - and found a mysterious coffin-within-a-coffin.

Though we have access to a seemingly limitless amount of new music each day, we keep coming back to songs or albums, mostly stuff we liked at college age.

It's common to prefer the familiar - even by college students who may self-identify as preferring new music. People pick familiar with even when they believe they would prefer less familiar music. It's one of the reasons why the Pandora algorithm is regarded so highly. Yet we often hear the complaint that radio stations are playing the same songs over and over - and even Pandora plays the same 50 or 100.

The Canadian boreal forest,  stretching from the Yukon in the west to Newfoundland and Labrador in the east, remains one of the world's great natural treasures.

The ecologically diverse region contains the largest blocks of intact forest and wetlands left on Earth and scientists have found 1 billion to 3 billion nesting birds from 300 species there. Its abundant wildlife and freshwater have sustained Aboriginal communities for millennia.

Hemp (Cannabis sp.) has been a fundamental plant for the development of human societies. Its fibers have long been used for textiles and rope making, which requires prior stem retting.

This process is essential for extracting fibers from the stem of the plant but can adversely affect the quality of surface waters. The history of human activities related to hemp - its domestication, spread, and processing - is frequently reconstructed from seeds and pollen detected in archaeological sites or in sedimentary archives, but this method does not always make it possible to ascertain whether retting took place.