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The national Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration announced on Tuesday that so far in this year they have spotted eighty Guadalupe fur seals stranded on the California coast. It said the sightings are far above the average of 10 to 12.

The agency said when they spotted the seals 42 of them were dead, 38 alive, but only 11 of them lived to be rehabilitated and released. When found most of the seals were emaciated.

NOAA declared that strandings is an unusual mortality event. It also made a similar declaration for California sea lions in 2013, but officials said numbers of sea lions stranded this year are returning to normal.

Alice is the new darling of visitors to Glencoe's Chicago Botanic Gardens. Alice is a titan arum, a corpse flower, a rare plant that belongs to the rain forests of Sumatra Indonesia. Late Monday night, Alice started blooming. It is currently stinking up the Garden's Semitropical Greenhouse.

Horticulturist Tim Pollak said it has been a long night and that he went there around 3 in the morning. He mentioned that they noticed Alice was beginning to open at 11 during night.

Botanic Garden workers pollinated Alice on Tuesday morning with the help of pollen from a titan arum that bloomed in August in Denver and also from Spike.

A new study published on Friday in the Journal Science Advances has suggested that global warming is likely to become double in frequency in this century. As a result, El Niño-La Niña cycles will also become stronger and more common.

According to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), El Niño and La Niña are complex weather patterns that emerge as a result of variations in ocean temperatures in the Pacific. Both of them are opposite phases of El Niño-Southern Oscillation (ENSO) cycle describing the fluctuation in temperature between the ocean and the atmosphere.

It is the first time that researchers studying fossils have come to know about extinct animals' true colors. The scientists researched on two species of bats, Palaeochiropteryx and Hassianycteris. The species of bats lived between the Carboniferous and Miocene eras, 300 million to 20 million years back, along a lake in a tropical forest in Germany.

The study was published on Monday in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. During the study, scientists from the University of Bristol and Virginia Tech examined bat fossils that were preserved in such a brilliant way that they retained melanosome structures.

Researchers think an ancient flea preserved in amber with tiny bacteria could be the oldest evidence of an ancient ancestor of the bubonic plague, as per a report of the Journal of Medical Entomology. The flea in amber could be about 20 million years old.

According to the researchers, the bacterium is a kind of Yersinia pestis, a facultative anaerobic bacterium that can infect animals and humans. Yersinia pestis had caused the bubonic plague in the past, according to historians. The disease that spread in 14th century had killed more than 30 million people in Europe.

Marine biologists have discovered first biofluorescent reptile in Solomon Islands in the South Pacific. The biologists made the discovery when they were capturing a video of coral reefs and small sharks in the island. According to the biologists, they were stunned to see a glowing sea turtle.

They filmed a hawkbill sea turtle that, according to the biologists, was emitting neon green and red light. David Gruber, a researcher from the City University of New York and an emerging explorer for National Geographic, and his team made the discovery in July this year. On Monday, the team released the video of glowing turtle.