Animals
- Animals
Bugs may have made us brainy
Finding and eating bugs when other food was scarce helped primates — including our ancestors — evolve bigger and better brains. At least that’s the conclusion of a new study in Costa Rica.
- Animals
Keep the lights on for National Moth Week
Helping scientists is as easy as leaving your porch light on. Photograph the moths you see and upload them to the Internet for science.
- Animals
Teen shows salty lionfish are getting fresh
Lauren Arrington kept spotting lionfish in rivers near her Florida home. Her science fair project probed how much fresh water these ocean fish could stand — and led to a published research paper.
- Animals
Cool Jobs: A whale of a time
Studying blue whales, spinner dolphins and other cetaceans demands clever ways to unveil the out-of-sight behaviors of these marine denizens.
- Animals
Explainer: What is a whale?
Can a dolphin be a whale — or a whale be a dolphin? Yes, because the terms used to describe the biggest marine mammals are quite elastic and fuzzy.
- Fossils
Hot-blooded dinos? Try lukewarm
New study finds these reptiles may have had an internal furnace that sort of resembled some sharks. It appeared to run neither hot nor cold.
- Animals
Salted butterflies
The salt used on winter ice can alter the bodies of summer's butterflies. Males develop larger muscles and females get bigger brains.
- Animals
Stalking squirrels for science
A scientist noticed the squirrels in his family’s town, and began studying them. His results show why squirrels are such good city dwellers, and prove that science is right outside your door.
- Animals
A library with no books
The Macaulay Library at Cornell University has no books. Instead, the audio library has been accumulating sound recordings since 1929.
- Animals
A library of tweets (and howls and grunts)
The Macaulay Library houses a world of animal sounds. And now anyone with an Internet connection can check out this audio collection.
- Animals
Free app tracks fireflies
Scientists are worried about firefly populations. Now you can use a free app to map firefly flashes, and contribute data to tracking the health of this popular summertime bug.
- Animals
Decoding bee dances
Biologists have started eavesdropping on bees — or their dancing sign language — to identify where these buzzers prefer to forage. This info is pointing to which bee-friendly habitats may be most important to preserve.
