Animals
- Animals
Elephants can tell men’s voices from women’s
Amboseli elephants may pick out age and gender — and even distinguish between languages — when listening to human voices.
- Animals
Spotted seals hear well in and out of water
Spotted seals, native to the northern parts of the Pacific, hear frequencies that may mean they are susceptible to the effects of anthropogenic noise.
- 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.
- Plants
Australian flowers bloom red because of honeyeaters
Many flowering plants converged on similar a color to attract the common birds.
- Animals
Chemical in male goat odor drives the lady goats wild
A new study shows that male goats exude pheromones from their skin that could make female goats ready to roll in the hay.
- Physics
Flying snakes get lift from surrounding air vortices
When a paradise flying snake leaps into and glides through the air, it’s getting lift from small, swirling vortices in the air around it.
- Animals
Peacocks sometimes fake mating hoots
Peacocks may have learned a benefit of deception by sounding their copulation calls even when no peahens are in sight.
- Animals
Algal blooms created ancient whale graveyard
Whales and other marine mammals died at sea and were buried on a tidal flat in what's now in the Atacama Desert in Chile.
- Life
Rivalry helps fruit flies maintain brainpower
In lab tests, males dim mentally after generations without competitors.
- Animals
The mystery of the missing fish heads
When scientists opened up the stomachs of shortfin mako sharks, they found that nearly all of the digesting fish had no heads or tails.
- Animals
Methylation turns a wannabe bumblebee into a queen
Epigenetic changes to bumblebee DNA turns a worker into a reproductive pseudo-queen, suggesting that genomic imprinting could be responsible for the bumblebee social system.
- Animals
A tiny ocean vortex, with pop art pizzazz
Coral polyps kick up a whirling vortex of water by whipping their hairlike cilia back and forth in the photography winner of the 2013 International Science & Engineering Visualization Challenge.
