Freshwater mussels have a particularly unusual system of reproduction. Males release their sperm into the water with the hope that a nearby female will siphon them up to fertilize her eggs...
Small changes in the protein sequence of sodium channels of American compared with German cockroaches leave the latter susceptible to a venom that has little effect on the former. Cynthia Graber reports
...
A few days ago customs officials in Vietnam raided a cargo ship from Sierra Leone and seized an astonishing 1.4 tons of dried pangolin scales.
The event you've all been waiting for is here: Simbirskiasaurus and Pervushovisaurus have been resurrected, and we're all wondering what the hell's going on with their absurd, complex nostrils...
Moth eyes absorb almost all incident light, thus reducing reflection that predators would notice. Researchers have now used the moth eye structure as the basis of a highly efficient solar absorbing cell...
Is the planet undergoing the sixth mass extinction in its history courtesy of the human species?
Earlier this week, we learned that female octopuses sometimes strangle—and then possibly eat—their male mates. For a cannibalistic animal with long arms, perhaps we—and the male—should have seen that one coming...
On July 25, French film writer/director Luc Besson's action thriller Lucy opens in theaters nationwide. The premise is that the title character, played by Scarlett Johansson, is exposed to a drug that unlocks her mind, giving her superhuman powers of cognition...
Did you know there are two species of ostrich? Don’t worry if this is news to you—scientists didn’t know that for sure either until this year, when the Somali ostrich (Struthio molybdophanes) of Ethiopia, Somalia, Djibouti and Kenya was declared a separate species from the common ostrich (S...
On a trip to Italy a few years ago, my partner and I peered into the faraway distance at that famously angled phallus that is the Leaning Tower of Pisa, when suddenly we became aware of a small scene unfolding before us...
As sea waters in the South Atlantic warm, the amount of krill available for seals drops, leading to a smaller yet more genetically varied population
Octopuses do the darndest things. Like kill their mate during mating—by strangling him with three arms, according to new observations from the wild.
Hello, giant friend, and welcome. Please step through the hallowed gates of "World's Biggest" and join your freakishly long, abnormally bulky peers.
July 21 is verdict day in the infamous Scopes "Monkey" Trial of 1925. The verdict came in from a jury in Dayton, Tenn., that John Thomas Scopes had committed the crime of teaching evolution to students at his high school, for which transgression he was fined $100...
Modern birds, long thought to have arisen only after the dinosaurs perished, turn out to have lived alongside them
A new arachnid family tree suggests that many spider species evolved away from web-weaving
“Wheat P1210892” by Copyright © 2007 David Monniaux – Own work. Licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0 via Wikimedia Commons. Yesterday scientitsts announced in a quartet of papers in the journal Science that the draft genome of bread wheat — Triticum aestivum — had been decoded and mapped...
A preliminary map of the bread wheat genome includes the locations of more than 75,000 genes. Cynthia Graber reports
Microbes live in dense and diverse communities. There are billions of bacteria from thousands of species living together in your gut or in the soil.
Conservation may be important for human health
