1,131 results
- Animals
Dead-ant wall protects young spider wasps
Bone-house wasps probably use a barrier of deceased insects to guard against predators.
- Animals
Caterpillar treats and tricks ants by oozing spiked juice
Caterpillars ooze droplets that lure ants away from colony duties to instead lick and defend their drug source, new lab tests suggest.
- Cosmology
Gravitational wave discovery gives way to Milky Way dust
New polarization maps from the Planck satellite suggest that the BICEP2 announcement this year of primordial gravitational waves might be due entirely to dust in our galaxy.
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- Animals
Pelican spiders: slow, safe assassins
Spiders, thank goodness, haven’t evolved assassin drones. But the specialized hunters of the family Archaeidae can kill at a distance.
- Paleontology
Museum fossil links snakes to lizards
Scientists have discovered the fossilized remains of the first four-legged snake. The fossil bridges the gap between snakes and lizards.
- Animals
Bird dropping disguise proves to be effective camouflage
Several species of spiders and other animals mimic bird poop.
- Genetics
Spider genomes give hints about venom, silk production
The genetic codes identify new proteins that may be involved in making and turning on toxins in venom and also those used to make spider silk.
- Ecosystems
City spiders may spin low-vibe webs
Spider webs built on human-made materials have less background bounce than those built on trees and other natural surfaces, which might shrink the arachnid’s hunting success.
- Animals
Animal moms sacrifice a lot — sometimes even themselves
In the animal kingdom, there are bad mothers and good ones — and then there are those that let their kids eat them.
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For Halloween, Gory Details favorites and farewell
Gory Details blogger Erika Engelhaupt left Science News earlier this year. In a farewell post and in honor of Halloween, she reminisces about some of her favorite, and scariest, posts.
- Neuroscience
A vivid emotional experience requires the right genetics
A single gene deletion gives some people an extra vivid jolt to their emotional experience, a new study shows.
