1,500 results
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Promiscuity in guppies has its virtues
Mating with multiple partners benefits the female Trinidadian guppy and her offspring by reducing gestation time and producing youngsters more adept at forming protective schools and at evading capture.
- Animals
Better Than Real: Males prefer flower’s scent to female wasp’s
In an extreme case of sex fakery, an orchid produces oddball chemicals to mimic a female wasp's allure so well that males prefer the flower scent to the real thing.
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Unsure Minds
A controversial set of studies indicates that monkeys and dolphins know when they don't know the answer to certain tasks, an ability that presumably relies on conscious deliberations.
- Ecosystems
The Buzz over Coffee
Most people consider the continued spread of Africanized honeybees in the Americas as horrifying news. Nicknamed killer bees, these notorious social insects rile into stinging mobs with little provocation. But new research finds evidence that these irritable insects have been performing a hitherto unrecognized service for people around the world. They’ve helped keep down the […]
- Animals
The truth is, frogs bluff and crabs cheat
Two research teams say they've caught wild animals bluffing, only the second and third examples (outside of primate antics) ever recorded.
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19129
This article is surely wrong in stating that the honey badger shuns meat. It aggressively attacks snakes and small mammals, as well as invades bees’ nests for honey. Derek WallentinsenSan Pedro, Calif. I was looking at the picture of the animal’s skull and wondering how large it is. There’s no scale for reference, so I […]
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Africanized bees rescue loner trees
Africanized bees pollinate some of the big Brazilian forest trees now stranded in the middle of cleared land away from their native pollinators.
- Earth
Honey may pose hidden toxic risk
Many honeys may contain potentially toxic traces of potent liver-damaging compounds produced naturally by a broad range of flowering plants.
- Health & Medicine
Honey of a Threat
An all-natural, organic food, honey has a benign–if not wholesome–image. Many people consider it a superior alternative to table sugar and corn syrup–two primary sweeteners in the U.S diet. Though attractive to bees, borage may lace its flowers nectar with toxic chemicals that could then show up in honey. James N. Roitman, USDA-ARS Comfrey, formerly […]
- Animals
Homing Lobsters: Fancy navigation, for an invertebrate
Spiny lobsters are the first animals without backbones to pass tests for the orienteering power called true navigation.
- Ecosystems
Making Scents of Flowers
Science gets the tools to start sniffing around the ecology of floral scent.
- Agriculture
Bt corn variety OK for black swallowtails
The first published field study of butterflies and genetically altered corn finds no harm to black swallowtail caterpillars from a common corn variety.
