Life

  1. Animals

    First mammal joins the eusocial club

    Because naked mole rats exhibit permanent physical traits that distinguish certain castes of a colony, they belong to the same grouping as so-called eusocial insects such as bees, ants, wasps, and termites.

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  2. Animals

    Bird Calls

    The Macaulay Library at Cornell University has the largest collection of animal sounds in the world. More than 67 percent of the world’s birds are represented in the center’s 160,000 recordings, along with sounds made by insects, fish, frogs, and mammals. The Library also archives and preserves a sampling of the behaviors of different animal […]

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  3. Animals

    Separate Vacations: Birds winter apart but return in sync

    Mated pairs of black-tailed godwits may fly off to winter refuges a thousand kilometers apart but can still arrive back at their breeding site the next spring within a few days of each other.

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  4. Animals

    Beat Goes On: Carp heart keeps pace when fish lacks oxygen

    Without oxygen, a Scandinavian fish not only can survive but also maintains a normal heartbeat for days.

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  5. Plants

    Morphinefree Mutant Poppies: Novel plants make pharmaceutical starter

    A Tasmanian company has developed a poppy that produces a commercially useful drug precursor instead of full-fledged morphine, and a research team now reports how the plant does it.

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  6. Paleontology

    Big Gulp? Neck ribs may have given aquatic beast unique feeding style

    The fossilized neck bones of a 230-million-year-old sea creature have features suggesting that the animal's snakelike throat could flare open and create suction to pull in prey.

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  7. Animals

    Pirates of the Amphibian: Males fertilize eggs of another guy’s gal

    For the first time among amphibians, scientists have found frogs that sneak their sperm onto egg clutches left by another mating pair.

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  8. Plants

    A new, slimy method of self-pollination

    When all else fails for pollination, a Chinese herb in the ginger family resorts to something botanists say they haven't seen before: a do-it-yourself oil slick.

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  9. Animals

    Super Bird: Cooing doves flex extra-fast muscles

    Muscles that control a dove's cooing belong to the fastest class of muscles known.

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  10. Animals

    Owls use tools: Dung is lure for beetles

    Burrowing owls' habit of bringing mammal dung to their burrows attracts edible beetles and counts as form of tool use.

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  11. Animals

    Mom bears more sons when she gets extra bouquets

    When researchers spiff up a male starling's courtship by delivering some extra bouquets to his mate on his behalf, the couple tends to produce more sons than usual.

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  12. Animals

    Policing egg laying in insect colonies

    Kinship by itself can't explain the vigilante justice of some ant, bee, and wasp workers.

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