Imagine it’s the early 1900s and you’re a giant blue whale basking in the warm waters of the Santa Barbara Channel, just off the coast of Southern California. What do you hear? Fellow whale songs, ...

A mysterious sound heard booming from deep under the ocean waves has finally been traced to a fascinating source. First recorded in 2014 in the west Pacific, the "biotwang" is actually the call of the ...

Theories about the sound's origins included an undiscovered sea creature. By 2011, NOAA scientists concluded the sound was the cracking of an ice shelf during an icequake. In the summer of 1997, ...

The Pacific Ocean waters off Southern California used to be much quieter hundreds of years ago. Then came the Industrial Revolution, commercial shipping and about 15 extra decibels (dB) of noise. That ...

As Ireland's Dara Ó Briain once joked on YouTube, "Science knows it doesn't know everything, otherwise it'd stop." The world is full of mysteries to solve and curious subjects to study, and no part of ...

The urge to explore the cosmos has always been an irrepressible part of humankind's curiosity. But while venturing into space ...

If you hold up a seashell to your ear and listen, you may hear what sounds like rolling waves and wind. But it’s not actually the ocean. Now that we’ve got that out of the way, what exactly is it that ...

When you purchase products through the Bookshop.org link on this page, Science Friday earns a small commission which helps support our journalism. One summer day when we were kids, my brother and I ...