Life
- Environment
Making yards more diverse can reap big environmental benefits
Replacing grass with native plants uses less water and fewer chemicals while providing additional benefits to people and wildlife.
- Animals
Rats can bop their heads to a musical beat
Rats’ rhythmic response to human music doesn’t mean they like to dance. But it may shed light on how brains evolved to perceive rhythm.
- Ecosystems
Scientists Say: Food web
All the species in an ecosystem and the feeding relationships between them get summed up with this handy picture.
- Brain
Scientists mapped every nerve cell in this insect brain
Researchers have built a “connectivity map” of all the nerve cells in the larval fruit fly brain and how they link together.
- Health & Medicine
Humans might be able to hibernate during space travel
Scientists are studying how animals hibernate and developing new technologies to help humans sleep through space travel.
- Brain
Let’s learn about the science of language
The languages we speak may help shape how we see, smell and hear the world around us.
- Plants
Analyze This: Plants sound off when they’re in trouble
When dry or cut, tomato and tobacco plants make sounds too high for humans to hear. Such sounds could provide a way to snoop on crops.
- Health & Medicine
Hand dryers can infect clean hands with bathroom germs
Hot-air hand dryers are a haven for microbes. A finalist at Regeneron ISEF found that these machines spray germs all over freshly washed hands.
- Animals
How to tell if cats are having fun — or if fur is flying
Quietly wrestling cats may be hard at play. But if they’re chasing and yowling, you might have a cat fight on your hands.
- Microbes
Scientists Say: Virus
A virus must take over a living cell's machinery to make more viruses.
- Fossils
Ocean life may have bounced back after the ‘Great Dying’
Marine ecosystems may have been back in action just a million years after the most severe extinction event known.
- Ecosystems
Let’s learn about how wildfires keep ecosystems healthy
Wildfires are so important for many ecosystems that sometimes professionals set them on purpose.
