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Michael Dalder / Reuters Infants Can Learn the Value of Perseverance by Watching Adults
After observing grown-ups struggling with tasks, 1-year-old babies make more effort themselves.
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Peter Holderness, Caltech Even Jellyfish Sleep
Three Caltech students have shown that these brainless animals have their own version of slumber.
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West Coast Wildlife Center How to Raise the Rarest Kiwi
Thanks to a long-running plan to rear their chicks in captivity, these national icons are bouncing back from the edge of extinction.
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Robert Reed Scientists Can Now Repaint Butterfly Wings
Thanks to CRISPR, scientists are studying animal evolution in ways that were previously thought to be impossible.
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Leore Geller How Bacteria Could Protect Tumors From Anticancer Drugs
The success of a treatment might depend on a person’s microbes.
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Andrew Digby / New Zealand Department of Conservation Every One Of These Endearing Parrots Will Have Its Genome Sequenced
It’s an endearing, giant, flightless, New Zealand parrot, and it’s a poster child for the quantified-self movement.
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Silvae / Wikipedia The Parasite That Wires Plants Together
By draining the fluids from several hosts, dodder vines inadvertently allow plants to communicate with each other and share alarm signals.
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David Gray / Reuters A Grand Unified Theory of Unhealthy Microbiomes
The Anna Karenina hypothesis says that every unbalanced microbiome is unbalanced in its own way.
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Jerry Lampen / Reuters How Mushrooms Became Magic
Did they evolve a powerful hallucinogen to stop insects from getting the munchies?
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Christophe Simon / Getty The Case for Sharing All of America's Data on Mosquitoes
The U.S. is sitting on one of the largest data sets on any animal group, but most of it is inaccessible and restricted to local agencies.
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Jonathan Armstrong / Oregon State University How Climate Change Canceled the Grizzly Salmon Run
On an Alaskan island, one of nature’s greatest spectacles is shutting down, as brown bears abandon fish in favor of a surprising alternative.
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Marc Piscotty / Reuters Can Dogs Smell Their ‘Reflections’?
For decades, scientists have tested animal intelligence by seeing if they can recognize themselves in mirrors. But how do you revamp that test for a species that relies more on smell than sight?
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NASA The Origin Story of Animals Is a Song of Ice and Fire
It begins with the melting of a snowball earth, and the rise of algae.
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Danish Siddiqui / Reuters At Last, a Big, Successful Trial of Probiotics
A large Indian study of 4,500 newborn babies found that the right microbes can prevent a life-threatening condition called sepsis.
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Colin Braley / Reuters Can Humans Understand Chimps?
Scientists have found a way to measure if people intuitively know what ape gestures mean.
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Michaela Rehle / Reuters The Next Chapter in a Viral Arms Race
A highly lethal disease that controlled Australia’s rabbit problem initially evolved to be milder—but has since rebounded into a newly nasty form.
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Claire Goiran / Current Biology How Humans Turned a Sea Snake to the Dark Side
An Australian snake may have evolved all-black scales to cope with pollution.
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University of Washington These Scientists Took Over a Computer by Encoding Malware in DNA
There’s no immediate threat, but as sequencing becomes more commonplace, researchers face security risks.
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Shannon Stapleton / Reuters Meet Patagotitan, the Biggest Dinosaur Ever Found
It weighed 69 tons.
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NASA / Reuters Confirmed: Night Lights Drive Pollinators Away From Plants
A first-of-its-kind study shows that artificial lights deter nocturnal insects that flowers rely on.
