Life
- Animals
Spider males good for mating, food
Expectant mothers, including spiders, need to eat well. For Mediterranean tarantulas, a male suitor tastes just fine.
- Life
Heat sensors guide insects to a hot meal
Bugs home in on seeds by detecting infrared radiation.
- Life
Avian airlines: Alaska to New Zealand nonstop
Tracked bar-tailed godwits break previous nonstop flight record for birds.
- Humans
Elephants’ struggle with poaching lingers on
Even as African elephants struggle to recover from decades-old poaching, the animals face new and renewed threats today.
- Life
A more fearsome saber-toothed cat
Analyses of fossils reveal that a third, newly recognized type of saber-toothed cat — one that killed by biting large chunks of flesh from its victim instead of biting its neck and slashing the major blood vessels there —roamed the Americas about a million years ago.
- Paleontology
How pterosaurs took flight
Extinct flying reptiles known as pterosaurs may have taken to the air with a technique akin to leapfrogging, new research suggests.
- Earth
An electronic nose that smells plants’ pain
Device can detect distress signals from plants that are harmed, under attack.
- Life
Fossil find may document largest snake
Rocks beneath a coal mine in Colombia have yielded fossils of what could be the world's largest snake, a 12.8-meter–long behemoth that's a relative of today's boa constrictors.
- Health & Medicine
Bacteria that do logic
A team engineers microbes to perform AND, OR, NAND and NOR logic operations.
- Life
How Tiktaalik got its neck
The oldest fossil with a neck, Tiktaalik roseae, shows how animals developed a head for living on land.
- Humans
Bypassing paralyzed nerves
Implanted electrode helps paralyzed monkey clench its forearm muscles.
- Life
Grunting humans, moles scare earthworms
Science tackles the old mystery of why worm grunters who rub a stake in the ground can catch earthworms.
