Animals
- Animals
Sharks follow their noses home
Leopard sharks draw on scents to navigate back to shore, study suggests.
- Animals
When tarantulas grow blue hair
Azure coloring is surprisingly common in the spiders, though they themselves are colorblind.
- Physics
Aircraft industry could take tips from penguins
Tiny grooves and an oily sheath prevent water droplets from freezing on the feathers of some penguins.
- Animals
Ants’ size and profession controlled by chemical tags on DNA
Epigenetic marks determine whether female Florida carpenter ants are soldiers or foragers.
- Paleontology
12 amazing fossil finds of 2015
From an ancient sponge ancestor to the Carolina Butcher, scientists learned a lot about life on Earth this year.
- Animals
Lemurs chat only with their best friends
Ring-tailed lemurs maintain friendships built with grooming by calling to each other, a new study finds.
- Science & Society
These truisms proved false in 2015
Don’t always believe what you hear. These truisms turned out to be false in 2015.
- Animals
Puff adders appear ‘invisible’ to noses
The snakey scent of puff adders proves difficult for even sensitive animal noses to detect.
- Agriculture
Number of wild bees drops where they’re needed most
Wild bee abundance in the United States is lowest in agricultural regions, according to a new model.
- Life
Tweaking the pattern equations
A more than 60-year-old theory about how patterns in nature form gets an update.
- Animals
Fog ferries mercury from the ocean to land animals
Scientists have traced mercury in the waters of the Pacific Ocean to animals, including mountain lions, in California.
- Genetics
Roosters run afoul of genetic rules
Moms aren’t always the only ones that pass mitochondrial DNA to offspring, a study of chickens finds.
