Nature

Let’s face it. Sex isn’t always worth the effort. For many animals, the whole mating game is so inconvenient, going it alone and reproducing asexually is the best option. As appealing as it might sound, however, evolution puts a heavy price on a population that gives up sex for too long. Sooner or later, a

Researchers have managed to keep tabs on 1 million different neurons in the brains of mice at one time – taking scientists an impressive step closer towards one day being able to track the very-complex activity of human brains. The key is an innovation that’s being called ‘light beads microscopy’. It improves on current two-photon

The magnificently long, spined tails of ancient dinosaurs are unlike anything that’s alive today. New research suggests that they elegantly swished side-to-side while their owners walked, and enthusiastically wagged when they ran. It took around 80 million years for the bird lineage of dinosaurs to lose such lengthy tails, which they did in line with

Scientists are working on rechargeable, glow-in-the-dark plant life that could one day replace some of the inefficient, energy-intensive electric lights that we currently rely on for modern-day living. The technology works through embedded nanoparticles that sit near the surface of leaves. A charge from an LED light lasting 10 seconds is enough for the plant

The biodiversity of the deep ocean is difficult to track, given its inhospitality to us – soft, air-breathing land dwellers. Down in the darkness, there’s much more life than we have accounted for. Nevertheless, a new discovery is an exciting one: six new species and one previously unknown genus of glass sponge, at depths up

Apart from the global catastrophe that killed off most of the dinosaurs, some experts think almost all the mass extinctions in Earth’s history were followed by a proliferation of microbes in rivers and lakes. After the Permian extinction event 252 million years ago – the largest mass extinction event in Earth’s history – there appears

Researchers have observed it in the wild many times: Primates from baboons to apes carrying around their infants after they’ve died. This happens regularly across non-primate species as well, but what’s not clear is the motivation or reason behind it. In the largest analysis of this kind of behavior in primates so far, a new

The world’s longest known cave system just set a new record after surveyors spent hours mapping an additional 8 miles (13 kilometers) of the passageways at Mammoth Cave National Park in Kentucky. The corridors at Mammoth Cave now measure a whopping 420 miles (676 kilometers) in length, according to the National Park Service (NPS). That’s

The scars on dozens of Tyrannosaurus rex skulls suggest these apex predators repeatedly bit one another’s faces once they hit reproductive age. When paleontologists analyzed 202 T. rex fossils of various sizes and ages, they found evidence of tooth marks in 60 percent of the adult specimens. Some 66 million years ago, T. rex were

Nothing quite says ‘look at me!’ like an extravagant set of tail feathers. Plenty of modern birds sacrifice agility to a chance to grab attention, but examples of among relatives in the fossil record have been harder to come by. Scientists have now described the remains of a 120-million-year-old feathered dinosaur roughly the size of

Ancient New Zealand has been home to an incredible array of absurdly large birds. This has included a waist-high parrot, nicknamed Squawk-zilla (Heracles inexpectatus) – the largest parrot ever known on Earth, possibly hunting for flesh around 20 million years ago. Two-meter-high flightless Moa also made their home there, along with their predator, Haast’s Eagles

A stunning new video shows the giant ice sheet that molded the Scottish landscape during the last ice age, and it looks like something out of Game of Thrones.  The film recreates how the 0.6-mile-thick (1 kilometer) glacier would have looked atop the modern-day city of Dundee. The glacier looms over the city like the Game of Thrones

The natural world holds beauty even at a microscopic scale, and each year, Nikon’s Small World photo competition opens our eyes to a whole new realm of diminutive detail. In its 47th year, the contest continues to celebrate the intricacies of nature and the artistry of careful microscopic investigation. Whether it be a kaleidoscopic slice

The outer parts of long-dead creatures don’t easily make it into the fossil record. That’s why this incredibly well-preserved skin of an iconic carnivorous dinosaur is such a treat – a new analysis reveals a complex coat of scales, studs, thorns, bumps and wrinkles. The remains of this bizarre-looking predator, known as the horned abelisaurid

It all happened in just an evolutionary moment. Sixty-six million years ago, a huge asteroid burned its way into Earth’s atmosphere and annihilated the non-avian dinosaurs. The survivors – mammals, frogs, reptiles and more – spread out, diversified, and became many of the species we know today. But new research has zeroed in on what

There’s nothing better than a nice exfoliation to clean your parrot self after a long day. Apparently, that holds true even if you’re a parrot with only half a beak. Biologists have discovered that Bruce – a disabled New Zealand kea (Nestor notabilis) at the Willowbank Wildlife Reserve in Christchurch – has been using tiny

Several gorillas at Zoo Atlanta in the southern US state of Georgia have tested positive for the COVID-19 virus, the zoo said. The western lowland gorillas were tested after keepers saw them coughing and other symptoms, it said. Initial tests indicated they were positive for the SARS-CoV-2 virus that causes COVID-19 and the zoo said

Humans aren’t the only animals with big personalities. Individual traits, temperaments, and coping styles have been observed among an enormously diverse range of animals, including sea anemones, fish, birds, mammals, spiders, and lizards. In fact, there are some experts who think personality exists across the entire animal kingdom. Squirrels, it would seem, are no exception. Over three

Something strange often happens just before a severe thunderstorm produces a tornado, high winds, or hailstones: A plume of ice and water known as an Above-Anvil Cirrus Plume (AACP) billows up above the top of the storm clouds and head downwind, acting as a sort of early warning system for extreme weather events. For the

A mere 13 days after conception, a rice-grain-sized pink blob, striving to become a dunnart joey, heaves itself out of its mother’s birth canal, drags its gelatinous body through a forest of fur using its stubby translucent forelimbs to reach its mother’s pouch and latch onto her sustenance-providing teat. These undercooked (by most mammal standards)

The fossilized web of a 385-million-year-old root network has scientists reimagining what the world’s first forests might once have looked like. The picture they have painted couldn’t be more different to what now sits in its place. Near the small town of Cairo in upstate New York, under an old highway department quarry, scientists have

A ghastly bout of food poisoning isn’t an experience to forget. The commonly studied microscopic nematode Caenorhabditis elegans not only ensures it remembers, it genetically embeds the threat of skanky meals into its kids to force them to stay clear as well. And if by some misfortune one of those worms goes belly-up anyway? The

Nearly a century ago, a filmmaker captured a short black-and-white movie of the last known thylacine, also known as a Tasmanian tiger, as it padded around its enclosure at the Beaumaris Zoo in Hobart, Australia. Now, that long-dead animal, which his keepers named Benjamin, has “come back to life” in a new colorized version of the

The hidden scars left on the landscape during ice ages thousands to millions of years ago have now been imaged in spectacular detail. Using a technique called reflection seismology, a team of scientists has imaged enormous gouges carved by subglacial rivers, buried hundreds of meters below the floor of the North Sea. Called ‘tunnel valleys’,

A new study has found migrating birds can read and ride patterns in the wind to breeze across the sea. When researchers attached GPS trackers to five different species of globe-trotting bird, they found that the wind was the greatest force supporting the animals on their non-stop overseas flights. “Our findings suggest that the energetic

About 90 million years ago, a gigantic apex predator – a meat-eating dinosaur with serrated shark-like teeth – prowled what is now Uzbekistan, according to a new study of the behemoth’s jawbone. The 26-foot-long (8 meters) beast weighed 2,200 pounds (1,000 kilograms), making it longer than an African elephant and heavier than a bison. Researchers named it Ulughbegsaurus uzbekistanensis, after Ulugh Beg,

It’s obvious that the information coming through our eyes is a fundamental way in which we navigate the world, but what’s less clear is exactly how this visual data is processed in the brain to stop us walking into walls and off the edges of cliffs. A new study looking at the behavior of fruit

Amid the swarms of small surreal things scuttling and swimming across planet Earth 500 million years ago, a giant loomed. Titanokorys gainesi, newly discovered in the Burgess Shale fossil formation, would have been a Cambrian colossus, measuring a gobsmacking estimated half a meter (1.64 feet) in length. That may seem small to us now, but

Supervolcano eruptions have caused some of the greatest catastrophes in the history of our planet, and yet we still don’t really know how to predict when or how they will strike. Instead of slipping into a quiet recovery period, new research suggests some of these large volcanoes can remain active for thousands of years after

Songbirds usually need very little instruction to belt out the tunes of their kin, but the right melody doesn’t necessarily come to them ‘out of the blue’ the moment they hatch. Instead, a new study suggests most baby birds start listening and responding to surrounding birdsong as mere embryos, while still tucked inside their eggs.

Ask any cat person to describe their feline friend, and they’ll likely affectionately say “jerkface”. Cat people also know, however, that each little fuzzy jerkface is its very own idiosyncratic self. Or are they? According to new research, each cat’s personality and behavior can be defined using a combination of just seven traits. But before

You wouldn’t miss one of Australia’s musk ducks if you saw it. The name comes from the musky smell the ducks waft around during the breeding season, and the males have a large, black lobe below their bill. But if the musk duck you’re hanging out with is called Ripper, the other dead giveaway is…

Fixing breaks in genes with speed and perfection can be a matter of life and death for most organisms. Even the simplest changes in a sequence risk catastrophe, especially if the altered code is responsible for a critical function. Over the past half a century, biologists have studied the mechanisms involved to piece together most of

A wild boar carried out a daring mission to free two piglets from a trap, demonstrating high levels of intelligence and empathy, a new paper published in Scientific Reports shows. The incident, which occurred in January 2020, was documented by a team of scientists from the Czech University of Life Sciences at the Voděradské Bučiny National Nature

Your dog sees you, there’s no doubt about that. These beautiful animals are ever watchful, ever devoted to us. But despite their loving (and food-obsessed) gaze, just how keenly can they identify what we do? Can they discern the meaning and intention behind our actions? Perhaps they can, at least to some extent, according to

Goffin’s cockatoos, so adept at toolmaking in a laboratory setting, have now demonstrated their engineering chops in the wild. In their natural habitat on the Tanimbar Islands in Maluku, Indonesia, scientists have finally observed the birds (Cacatua goffiniana) making tools that help them gain better access to food. The results demonstrate that the previous behavior

Some birds are renowned for the beauty of their songs, but the bird with arguably the most complex song in the world doesn’t pen its own ditties. The superb lyrebird (Menura novaehollandiae) of Australia mimics the sounds in its environment with exquisite skill and accuracy, building a spectacular repertoire. Its song, according to Sir David

As a tree grows and branches, we know it consumes and stores carbon from the atmosphere in its wood. But what happens when a tree dies? Believe it or not, we still don’t really understand how the whole process unwinds. Deadwood, which includes fallen trees, standing dead trees, trunks and fallen branches, is currently thought

None of us would be around if organisms hadn’t been sparked into life billions of years ago. The question of just how that spark came about continues to fascinate scientists. New research looking at how the conditions on primordial Earth might have produced life has identified a mixture of salts that, mixed with heat flows

We think of DNA as the vitally important molecules that carry genetic instructions for most living things, including ourselves. But not all DNA actually codes proteins; now, we’re finding more and more functions involving the non-coding DNA scientists used to think of as ‘junk’. A new study suggests that satellite DNA – a type of non-coding

When it comes to getting rid of an annoying pest, sometimes subtlety just won’t cut it. Sometimes you just have to throw everything or anything within reach, pelting the offender with shells and debris until they scuttle off back to their hole. OK, that approach probably isn’t great for humans. But for octopuses, it seems

Snakes living in the Fukushima Exclusion Zone can be used to track radioactive contamination, scientists have learnt. Ten years after one of the biggest anthropogenic radioactive disasters in history, a new study describes how the radionuclides accumulated by Japanese rat snakes (Elaphe climacophora and E. quadrivirgata) are uniquely positioned to help map varying levels of

Tardigrades are undoubtedly weird. Dehydrate them into glass, then fire them out of a gun, and once you rehydrate them you can still have a living creature. Their outsides aren’t the only thing that’s tough either, with scientists finding last year that they also have special DNA armor proteins. But if we take a step

Scientists say a rare shark “virgin birth” may be the first of its kind after a baby shark was born in an all-female tank in an Italian aquarium. The baby smoothhound shark, named Ispera, which means hope in Sardianian, was born at the Acquario di Cala Gonone in Sardinia, Italy, according to Italian outlet AGI. Its

Most life needs oxygen to thrive, and science shows that O2 began to show up in Earth’s atmosphere in serious amounts some 2.4 billion years ago. However, there was also a small injection of oxygen around 100 million years earlier than that – and the origin of that earlier breath has so far been a

Scientists have discovered what is believed to be the world’s northernmost landmass – a yet-to-be-named island north of Greenland that could soon be swallowed up by seawaters.  Researchers came upon the landmass on an expedition in July, and initially thought they had reached Oodaaq, up until now the northernmost island on the planet.  “We were

Cookiecutter sharks are elusive deep-sea fish, seemingly only coming to the surface at night. As a result, we don’t know much about them. Yet if there’s one thing we can say for certain, it’s that they like to bite. Over the years, scientists have found tiny, cookiecutter-shaped chunks taken out of the bodies of dolphins,

While no one enjoys seeing carefully nurtured crops destroyed by hordes of hungry insects, the most common way to prevent it – the use of insecticides – is causing massive ecological problems. Some are wreaking havoc on bee populations globally, killing birds and piling onto the challenges already faced by endangered species. Thankfully, insecticides are