Score one for the country mouse. People who grow up outside of cities are better at finding their way around than urbanites, a large study on navigation suggests. The results,…
Category: Life
We finally have a fully complete human genome
Researchers have finally deciphered a complete human genetic instruction book from cover to cover. The completion of the human genome has been announced a couple of times in the past,…
Mammals’ bodies outpaced their brains right after the dinosaurs died
Modern mammals are known for their big brains. But new analyses of mammal skulls from creatures that lived shortly after the dinosaur mass extinction shows that those brains weren’t always…
Here are the Top 10 times scientific imagination failed
Science, some would say, is an enterprise that should concern itself solely with cold, hard facts. Flights of imagination should be the province of philosophers and poets. On the other…
Here are the Top 10 times scientific imagination failed
Science, some would say, is an enterprise that should concern itself solely with cold, hard facts. Flights of imagination should be the province of philosophers and poets. On the other…
New images reveal details of two bacteria’s molecular syringes
Some bacteria carry tiny syringes filled with chemicals that may thin out competitors or incapacitate predators. Now, researchers have gotten up-close views of these syringes, technically known as contractile injection…
Invasive jorō spiders get huge and flashy — if they’re female
Some thumbnail-sized, brown male spiders in Georgia could be miffed if they paid the least attention to humans and our news obsessions. Recent stories have made much of “giant” jorō…
How scientists found an African bat lost to science for 40 years
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…
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…
