Animals
- Animals
Parenting chores cut into how much these bird dads fool around
Frantic parenting demands after eggs hatch curtail male black coucals’ philandering excursions the most, a study finds.
- Health & Medicine
Testing mosquito pee could help track the spread of diseases
A new way to monitor the viruses that wild mosquitoes are spreading passes its first outdoor test.
- Animals
Cats recognize their own names
A new study suggests that cats can tell their names apart from other spoken words.
- Plants
A major crop pest can make tomato plants lie to their neighbors
Insects called silverleaf whiteflies exploit tomatoes’ ability to detect damage caused to nearby plants.
- Animals
Tiny pumpkin toadlets have glowing bony plates on their backs
Pumpkin toadlets are the first frogs found to have fluorescent bony plates that are visible through their skin under ultraviolet light.
- Animals
Watch a desert kangaroo rat drop-kick a rattlesnake
Desert kangaroo rats have a wide arsenal for dodging rattlesnake ambushes. But the most dramatic might be their powerful midair kick.
- Animals
Chytrid’s frog-killing toll has been tallied — and it’s bad
Losses due to the amphibian-killing chytrid fungus are “the greatest documented loss of biodiversity attributable to a pathogen,” researchers find.
- Animals
Geneticists close in on how mosquitoes sniff out human sweat
A long-sought protein proves vital for mosquitoes’ ability to detect lactic acid, a great clue for finding a human.
- Paleontology
Saber-toothed cats were fierce and family-oriented
New details shift the debate on whether Smilodon lived and hunted in packs, and answer questions about other behaviors and abilities.
- Animals
How a tiger transforms into a man-eater
‘No Beast So Fierce’ examines the historical and environmental factors that turned a tiger in Nepal and India into a human-killer.
- Animals
Meet India’s starry dwarf frog — a species with no close relatives
The newly identified starry dwarf frog represents a new species, genus and potentially even a new family.
- Genetics
Resurrecting woolly mammoth cells is hard to do
Japanese scientists say some proteins in frozen mammoth cells may still work after 28,000 years. But that activity may be more mouse than mammoth.
