How Plant Acoustic Signals Influence Moths’ Choice of Egg‑Laying Sites

When the lowlands fill with farms, roads, mines and towns, the expectation is that wild animals go uphill. Mountains are steep, cold and awkward to build on, and that awkwardness has worked like a…

Textbooks introduce Uranus and Neptune as a matched pair: nearly the same size, nearly the same mass, the same blue-green face, both parked in the cold outer solar system. The tidy assumption behind…

Every setting that makes a spin qubit faster is the same setting that makes it jumpier. To steer a single electron's spin with a voltage instead of a magnetic field, physicists let the electron slosh…

The light-catching tip of a cone cell, its outer segment, is a dense stack of membrane, and it wears out from the far end. New material goes in at the base, the oldest material ends up at the top,…

For billions of years, the natural world has acted as a silent engineer. It methodically discarded ineffective solutions and refined the good ones. As a result, these mechanisms became so effective…

Each of the four panels shows twenty points, with lines connecting some pairs. Even a diagram like this allows us to ask rigorous questions about a network. In graph theory, the points are called…

A radio burst from a distant galaxy can help us understand the structure of the Universe. How? On its way to Earth, the signal passes through diffuse gas that is difficult to detect through its own…

El Niño, the periodic warming of the tropical Pacific that reshapes weather around the world, may be about to reach a strength never recorded. Only months ago the ocean was in the opposite state: in…