Stories by Karen Hopkin

What shape do you see when you hear “bouba”? What about “kiki”? It turns out that nonsense words that evoke certain shapes have something to say about the origins of language.

You might not think that you can generate more body acceleration than a big-league baseball pitcher, but new research shows you can.

A new study finds that, for robots, overlords are less persuasive than peers.

You read that right. Researchers have taken the chemical defenses of some insects and turned them into sounds, which, it turns out, repel people just as well.

New research using a camera that can “see" sound” shows some elephants can produce high-pitched buzzing with their lips.

New research uses night vision to see how nocturnal bees navigate the dark.

New research shows that the prehistoric giants were even cooler than we thought

One researcher’s poorly timed attention lapse flipped a car—and pushed science forward.

The last time this tiny wheel animalcule was moving around, woolly mammoths roamed the earth.

New research finds they fly around on noise-cancelling wings

New research shows that lightning-quick neural rehearsal can supercharge learning and memory.

Human children: please take note of the behavior of prebirth zebra finches

Researchers in the happiest lab in the world tested 375 pups and found they connected with people by eight weeks

A new experiment shows that bats are born with a fixed reference for the speed of sound—and living in lighter air can throw it off.

It seems like the males will do anything, even fake nearby danger, to get females to stick around to mate.

The two cities’ rock doves are genetically distinct, research shows.

Decoy sea turtle eggs containing tracking tech are new weapons against beach poachers and traffickers.

Bee larvae and pupae appear to secrete a chemical that does the work of a late-night cup of coffee for their nurses.

Nanoparticles that attach to photoreceptors allowed mice to see infrared and near-infrared light for up to two months.

Many of the statues not along the coast are in places that featured a resource vital to the communities that lived and worked there.

Soap bubbles are sticky enough to carry a pollen payload and delicate enough to land on flowers without harm.

Individuals aren’t very good at judging whether someone coughing or sneezing has an infectious condition or is simply reacting to something benign.

Analyzing keywords on Twitter can offer a loose measure of the subjective well-being of a community, as long as you don’t count three words: good, love and LOL.

A gene whose mutated form is associated with cancer in humans turns out to have a role in burning calories over a long evolutionary history.