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Animals

When Ants Squeak

In the past 20 years, researchers studying sound communication in ants have discovered a sort of ant-ernet, zinging with messages about lost relatives, great food, free rides for hitchhikers, caterpillars in search of ant partners, and impending doom.

Astronomy

Milky Way gets a new layer

Astronomers propose that 150 billion corpses of sunlike stars may blanket the visible disk of the galaxy.

Chemistry

Questions of Origin

Two new studies renew controversy about the authenticity of a map that may be the first depiction of North America.

Materials Science

Vision Quest

Increasing numbers of people with less-than-perfect vision can now wear contact lenses, thanks to innovations in lens design and materials.

Animals

Bees log flight distances, train with maps

After decades of work, scientists crack two problems of how bees navigate: reading bee odometers and mapping training flights.

Earth

DDT treatment turns male fish into mothers

Injecting into fish eggs an estrogen-mimicking form of the pesticide DDT transforms genetically male medaka fish into apparent females able to lay eggs that produce young.

Chemistry

Tums of the Sea

Ocean scientists question whether the seas can handle rising carbon dioxide concentrations.

Health & Medicine

Novel diabetes strain has rapid onset

Japanese researchers have confirmed that some patients with type 1 diabetes have a novel form of the disease that's not caused by immune cells attacking the pancreas.

Physics

Black hole recipe: Slow light, swirl atoms

Whirling clouds of atoms may swallow light the way black holes do, possibly giving scientists a way to test the general theory of relativity in the lab, not just in outer space.

Anthropology

Ancient populations were game for growth

Archaeological evidence of a Stone Age shift in dietary preferences, from slow to swift small game, suggests that the human population rose sharply sometime between 100,000 and 50,000 years ago.