Olehka Studio

03/12/2021

23/09/2021

There may not be any red-billed queleas in your neighborhood, but that's not because there aren't an abundance of them. These birds, which live in sub-Saharan Africa, are considered agricultural pests because their massive flocks can obliterate entire crops. Although their numbers fluctuate, there are around 1 to 10 billion queleas, which leads scientists to believe that there are more of them than any other bird on Earth, according to Audobon.

22/09/2021

Finding previously undiscovered organisms in the depths of the ocean may sound like something straight out of a sci-fi horror film, but a 2020 study of a deep-sea volcano near New Zealand, published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, uncovered "over 90 putative bacterial and archaeal genomic families and nearly 300 previously unknown genera." Some research has linked hydrothermal vents, like deep-sea volcanoes, to the "origin of life." So are we looking at the early signs of future land-dwellers? We'll have to wait and see.

17/09/2021

Fin whales are basically the Barry White of the ocean. The deep, bellowing songs that males use to attract mates are considered to be the loudest of all marine life and can be "heard up to 1,000 kilometers (600 miles) away," according to Scientific American. They can also be used to sonically map out the ocean floor thanks to the fact that the sound can reach depths of 2.5 kilometers (1.6 miles) under the water, which bounces back and provides researchers with accurate measurements. Beyond that, a 2021 study in Science showed how using a fin whale's song can be far more useful and have less of a negative impact on sea life than using a large air gun, which is the typical tool researchers rely on.

15/09/2021

15/09/2021

Hang on to your hats because this isn't your average wind storm. In 1996, a tropical cyclone named Olivia hit off the coast of Barrow Island, Australia with such a force that it broke an incredible record. According to The Weather Channel, "Olivia's eyewall produced five extreme three-second wind gusts, the peak of which was a 253 mph gust," which blew past the previous wind record of 231 mph set in Mount Washington, New Hampshire back in 1934.

14/09/2021

Some countries are hundreds of years old, while others can trace their nation's history back for thousands of years. But South Sudan in North Africa just gained its independence from Sudan in 2011, which currently makes it the youngest country in the world.

14/09/2021

Due to overfishing and disease, the oyster population in Maryland's Chesapeake Bay was seriously suffering. But thanks to dedicated work by scientists at the Horn Point Laboratory, the Army Corps, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, and the Nature Conservancy, the state is now home to the world's largest man-made oyster reef. Home to more than one billion oysters, the area is a no-fishing zone, which will hopefully give the population a chance to recover.

14/09/2021

Step aside John, James, Mary, and Jane—the most popular name in the world is believed to be Muhammad. According to The Independent, an estimated 150 million men and boys around the world share this name. The popularity is thanks to a Muslim tradition of naming every first-born son after the Islamic prophet.

13/09/2021

Not all bacteria are bad. In fact, some of those itty-bitty biological cells are actually good for us and aide the world in various and complex ways. And that's nice to know, considering there are around 4 quadrillion quadrillion individual bacteria on our planet, according to NPR.

13/09/2021

The recovery is thanks in large part to the Montreal Protocol of 1987, which put a global ban on the use of one of the main culprits for the damage: chlorofluorocarbons (CFOs). Previously, CFOs had been common in refrigerators, aerosol cans, and dry-cleaning chemicals.