Life
- Animals
This spider slingshots itself at extreme speeds to catch prey
By winding up its web like a slingshot, this spider achieves an acceleration rate far faster than a cheetah’s.
- Animals
Spiders’ weird meals show how topsy-turvy Amazon food webs can be
Rare sightings of invertebrates eating small vertebrates upend some assumptions about who eats who in the Amazon rainforest’s complex ecosystem.
- Animals
The world’s largest bee was lost, but now it’s found
Wallace’s giant bee hadn’t been spotted in the wild in almost 40 years. Now, scientists have found it again.
- Animals
How these maggots efficiently demolish a pizza
Mobs of black soldier fly larvae create a living fountain that lifts slowpoke noneaters out of the way.
- Animals
Hermit crabs are drawn to the smell of their dead
A new study finds that the smell of hermit-crab flesh attracts other hermit crabs desperately looking for a larger home.
- Environment
Life on Earth is mostly green
A new survey of life on Earth finds that plants and microbes dominate. But even though humans are in the minority, they still play a major role.
- Life
Explainer: Prokaryotes and Eukaryotes
Prokaryotes tend to be small and simple, while eukaryotes have embraced a highly organized lifestyle. These divergent approaches to life have both proved very successful.
- Animals
Could an elephant ever fly?
Dumbo is known as the only elephant to take flight. He’s not real. But could he be?
- Fossils
Mini tyrannosaur fills big evolutionary gap
A newfound dinosaur named “omen of doom” fills a gap in tyrannosaur evolution. It helps to narrow when the group sized up.
- Psychology
What part of us knows right from wrong?
Our conscience may have evolved from our need to cooperate. Scientists are learning where the brain’s moral centers are, and how they make us human.
- Health & Medicine
Fevers can have some cool benefits
Fever boosts the immune system by zipping germ-busting cells to the site of an infection, new data show.
- Animals
Scientists Say: Okapi
Okapis are African mammals that look a bit like horses and a bit like zebras. But they’re most closely related to giraffes.
