Julius Nziza still remembers the moment vividly. Just before dawn on a chilly January morning in 2019, he and his team gently extracted a tiny brown bat from a net…
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‘Vagina Obscura’ shows how little is known about female biology
Vagina ObscuraRachel E. GrossW.W. Norton & Co., $30 More than 2,000 years ago, Hippocrates, the Greek physician often considered the father of modern medicine, identified what came to be known…
Wally Broecker divined how the climate could suddenly shift
It was the mid-1980s, at a meeting in Switzerland, when Wally Broecker’s ears perked up. Scientist Hans Oeschger was describing an ice core drilled at a military radar station in…
Social mingling shapes how orangutans issue warning calls
Human language, in its many current forms, may owe an evolutionary debt to our distant ape ancestors who sounded off in groups of scattered individuals. Wild orangutans’ social worlds mold…
How a virus turns caterpillars into zombies doomed to climb to their deaths
Higher and higher still, the cotton bollworm moth caterpillar climbs, its tiny body ceaselessly scaling leaf after leaf. Reaching the top of a plant, it will die, facilitating the spread…
Lost genes may help explain how vampire bats survive on blood alone
Surviving on blood alone is no picnic. But a handful of genetic tweaks may have helped vampire bats evolve to become the only mammal known to feed exclusively on the…
How I’ll decide when it’s time to ditch my mask
For weeks, I have been watching coronavirus cases drop across the United States. At the same time, cases were heading skyward in many places in Europe, Asia and Oceania. Those…
Here’s how boa constrictors squeeze their dinner without suffocating themselves
The boa constrictor’s choke hold is an iconic animal attack. By coiling around its prey, a snake can squeeze the life out of a victim in mere minutes before gulping…
Forests help reduce global warming in more ways than one
When it comes to cooling the planet, forests have more than one trick up their trees. Tropical forests help cool the average global temperature by more than 1 degree…
Forests help reduce global warming in more ways than one
When it comes to cooling the planet, forests have more than one trick up their trees. Tropical forests help cool the average global temperature by more than 1 degree…
