Animals
- Animals
Peacock spiders’ superblack spots reflect just 0.5 percent of light
By manipulating light with tiny structures, patches on peacock spiders appear superblack, helping accentuate the arachnids’ bright colors.
- Genetics
Tweaking one gene with CRISPR switched the way a snail shell spirals
The first gene-edited snails confirm which gene is responsible for the direction of the shell’s spiral.
- Animals
Deep-sea fishes’ eye chemistry might let them see colors in near darkness
An unexpected abundance of proteins for catching dim light evolved independently in three groups of weird deep-sea fishes.
By Susan Milius - Earth
A belly full of wriggling worms makes wood beetles better recyclers
Common beetles that eat rotten logs chew up more wood when filled with a roundworm larvae, releasing nutrients more quickly back to the forest floor.
- Ecosystems
War wrecked an African ecosystem. Ecologists are trying to restore it
Bringing back big predators to Gorongosa, once a wildlife paradise in Mozambique, is just one piece of the puzzle in undoing the damage there.
By Jeremy Rehm - Animals
These award-winning photographs capture rarely seen wildlife and landscapes
Winners of the California Academy of Sciences’ annual photo contest dove deep underwater and hiked to great heights to create these striking images.
By Maanvi Singh - Animals
Pandas’ share of protein calories from bamboo rivals wolves’ from meat
The panda gut digests protein in bamboo so well that the animal’s nutritional profile for calories resembles a wolf’s.
By Susan Milius - Paleontology
A dinosaur’s running gait may reveal insights into the history of bird flight
In what may have been a precursor to avian flight, a flightless winged dinosaur may have flapped its wings as it jogged.
- Agriculture
Can Silicon Valley entrepreneurs make crickets the next chicken?
Entrepreneurs are bringing automation and data analysis to insect agriculture to build a profitable business that helps feed the planet.
By Susan Milius - Animals
Hippo poop cycles silicon through the East African environment
By chowing down on grass and then excreting into rivers and lakes, hippos play a big role in transporting a nutrient crucial to the food web.
- Animals
How aphids sacrifice themselves to fix their homes with fatty goo
Young aphids swollen with fatty substances save their colony by self-sacrifice, using that goo to patch breaches in the wall of their tree home.
By Susan Milius - Animals
Endangered green sea turtles may be making a comeback in the U.S. Pacific
The numbers of green sea turtles spotted around Hawaii, American Samoa and the Mariana Islands have increased in the last decade.
By Maanvi Singh