Animals
- Life
Fast and furious: The real lives of swallows
In the fields of Oregon, scientists learn flight tricks from swallows.
- Life
Flying animals can teach drones a thing or two
Scientists have turned to Mother Nature’s most adept aerial acrobats — birds, bees, bats and other animals — to inspire their designs for self-directed drones.
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- Animals
Humboldt squid flash and flicker
Scientists capture the color-changing behavior of Humboldt squid in the wild.
- Animals
If pursued by a goshawk, make a sharp turn
Scientists put a tiny camera on a northern goshawk and watched it hunt. The bird used several strategies to catch prey, failing only when its targets made a sharp turn.
- Animals
Diving marine mammals take deep prey plunges to heart
In spite of their diving prowess, Weddell seals and bottlenosed dolphins experience irregular heart rates when they venture beyond 200 meters under the sea.
- Animals
Cringe away, guys — this spider bites off his own genitals
After sex, a male coin spider will chew off his own genitals, an act that might help secure his paternity.
- Animals
Cone snail deploys insulin to slow speedy prey
Fish-hunting cone snails turns insulin into a weapon that drops their prey’s blood sugar and eases capture.
- Animals
Lemurs aren’t pets
The first survey of lemur ownership in Madagascar finds that thousands of the rare primates are held in households.
- Life
Fossilized fish skull shakes up the evolutionary history of jaws
Analysis of a 415-million-year-old fossilized fish skull suggest that the earliest jawed vertebrates probably looked a lot like modern bony fish.
- Animals
Mountain migration is a roller coaster for bar-headed geese
Bar-headed geese rise and fall to match terrain below them when migrating over the Himalayas.
- Animals
Earth’s magnetic field guides sea turtles home
Over 19 years, geomagnetic fields changed slightly and so did loggerheads’ nesting sites.
