Life
- Animals
Science has finally cracked male riflebirds’ flirty secrets
New video upsets the old notion that these birds of paradise use wing clapping to make percussive sounds while courting.
- Environment
An idea to save Mexico’s oyamel forests could help monarch butterflies too
Climate change is putting monarch butterflies’ overwintering forests in Mexico at risk. Could planting new forests solve that problem?
- Oceans
How tiny phytoplankton trek long distances upward in the ocean
Taking in seawater while filtering out dense salts lets unicellular phytoplankton migrate tens of meters vertically toward sunnier seas.
- Life
Here are some stellar picks from Nikon’s top microscopy images of 2024
The annual Small World photomicrography competition, now in its 50th year, puts life’s smallest details under the microscope.
- Plants
Carnivorous plants eat faster with a fungal friend
Insects stuck in sundew plants’ sticky secretions suffocate and die before being subjected to a medley of digestive enzymes.
- Animals
At-home experiments shed light on cats’ liquid behavior
Cats can flow like liquids through tall crevices, but they solidify a bit as they approach short crannies, new research shows.
- Neuroscience
Your brain can perceive subtle odor changes in a single sniff
The speed at which our brain can tell smells apart is on par with color perception, a new sniff device shows.
- Animals
DNA from old hair helps confirm the macabre diet of two 19th century lions
Genetic analysis of cavity crud from two famed man-eating lions suggests the method could re-create diets of predators that lived thousands of years ago.
- Neuroscience
Hair pulling prompts one of the fastest known pain signals
The ouch of hair pulling is transmitted with the help of a protein used to sense light touches. These details could lead to new treatments.
- Health & Medicine
A viral gene drive could offer a new approach to fighting herpes
A new gene drive can copy and paste itself into the genomes of herpes simplex viruses in mice. The end goal is a version that disables the virus in humans.
- Paleontology
The largest arthropod to ever live finally has a head
Fossils of an extinct giant millipede reveal new details about the arthropod’s anatomy.
- Chemistry
Work on protein structure and design wins the 2024 chemistry Nobel
David Baker figured out how to build entirely new proteins. Demis Hassabis and John Jumper developed an AI tool to predict protein structures.
