Life
- Plants
Microbes give plants a way to make ‘meaty’ nutrients
Enzymes from animals helped a test plant make two nutrients essential for a balanced diet. Normally, those nutrients would only be found in meat.
- Animals
A surprising number of animals eat poop
A new tally finds more than 150 vertebrate species willing to snack on feces. Eating poop offers nutrients and other benefits.
- Chemistry
Let’s learn about chocolate
Humans have been making chocolate for millennia. Now scientists are investigating how to make this tasty treat more abundant and nutritious.
- Chemistry
Behold the world’s thinnest pasta
Made from white flour and formic acid, the nanofibers average just 370 nanometers across. That’s two-hundredths the thickness of a human hair.
- Brain
Scientists are exploring why some people don’t have a mind’s eye
A researcher with aphantasia is studying how different senses work together in the brain — and when they don’t.
- Animals
Meet some of the longest-lived animals
Think a 100-year-old person is old? Not compared to the world’s longest-lived animals — some of which have lifespans of thousands of years.
- Brain
Purple exists only in our brains
Most colors represent a single wavelength of light. But your brain invents purple to deal with wavelengths from opposite ends of the visible spectrum.
- Oceans
The world’s largest coral is longer than a blue whale
Scientists found the coral off the coast of the Solomon Islands.
- Life
Scientists Say: Chimera
What does it mean to be an individual? The genetic mashups called chimeras might challenge your assumptions.
- Climate
Meet Chonkus, a mutant microbe that could help fight climate change
A hulking marine cyanobacterium, Chonkus has traits that appears to make it especially good for storing away carbon on the ocean floor.
- Ecosystems
Analyze This: In movies, wetlands often get a bad rap
Swamps in films are often linked to danger, death and strange things. But movies also highlight wetlands’ biodiversity and resources.
- Brain
A single sniff is enough to detect slight odor changes
The speed of our ability to perceive odors is on par with that of color perception, a new sniff device shows.
