Traps

Disney’s Shanghai park opened in June, but it has struggled to consistently stay open due to China’s “zero-covid” policy.Photo: Hu Chengwei (Getty Images)Like a scene straight out of a B-horror movie, Disney announced Monday they had locked its gates to its Shanghai Disney park, keeping current and aspiring Disneyphiles out while also reportedly trapping guests inside.The house of mouse wrote on its Shanghai Disney Resort website that due to the city’s stringent anti-covidpolicies, but while they were offering those with…

In 2016, wildlife biologist Clayton Lamb was securing a GPS collar to a tranquilized grizzly bear in southeastern British Columbia when he noticed one of its paws was missing three toes. Weird, he remembers thinking, but not surprising for the rough-and-tumble animals. Then, three more grizzlies popped up sporting similarly mangled paws. Anxious to solve the mystery behind this grisly trend, Lamb and colleagues launched a yearslong investigation. Now, they’re pointing a finger…

Image: Shutterstock (Shutterstock)Anyone who’s ever had a sense of trepidation about jumping inside a bounce house will likely feel vindicated by recent research. Astudy found that there have been hundreds of injuries and at least 28 deaths worldwide over the past two decades that were caused by bounce houses set up or not properly secured during windy conditions. Both figures are likely an underestimate, the authors say, and don’t account for other bounce house-related injuries, which primarily occur among children.The…

Ocean oddities called mixoplankton are organisms that can get energy both through photosynthesis and by eating other microbes. Now new research published in Nature Communications suggests that one such species, Prorocentrum cf. balticum, displays a bizarre and clever hunting technique—one that significantly contributes to the crucial cycling of carbon through land, atmosphere and oceans. Study lead author Michaela Larsson, a marine biologist at the University of Technology Sydney, and her colleagues were studying marine…