Biology

Cortisol is present in the blood of North Pacific spiny dogfish, a team at the University of Manitoba and the Bamfield Marine Sciences Centre reported Oct. 14, 2026, in Proceedings of the Royal…

An Andean condor and a trumpeter swan are about as heavy as flying animals get, and they are almost exactly as heavy as each other: roughly 11 kilograms apiece. By the rules printed in textbooks,…

There are two ways for a fish to end up among the smallest vertebrates on Earth. One is to shrink in proportion. The result is a tiny animal otherwise built like its larger relatives, with everything…

Researchers in China have described a Late Jurassic fossil that sits near the base of the bird family tree and, they report, could not fly. The animal, named Yuezhuornis yangyuanensis, comes from the…

Polar bears in East Greenland carry antibodies to the highly pathogenic H5 bird flu now spreading through wild birds worldwide, and no sample taken before 2024 carried antibodies to any influenza A…

A honey bee stinger that has torn free from the bee works as a pump with two sliding pistons, and it keeps pushing venom into the skin after the bee itself has gone. Fiorella Ramirez-Esquivel and…

Researchers at Columbia University and the University of Copenhagen have found a bacterial immune system that fights off viruses by building long stretches of repeated DNA, the same job telomerase…

The pistol shrimp is one of the most extreme creatures on the planet. Despite its modest size of 3 to 5 centimeters, it shoots jets of water, creates blinding flashes of light, jams military sonar,…

Iron-starved Arabidopsis plants change which chemicals they release into the soil according to how acidic their surroundings are, and the bacteria living on their roots then use those chemicals to…

Larger dogs and male dogs, both of them shorter-lived, also age faster by a chemical measure read off their DNA. Researchers at Arizona State University, working with the Dog Aging Project, report…

For decades, the story of how a cattle pregnancy survives its first three weeks has had one hero. The embryo, by then a flat sheet of cells stretching itself along the inside of the uterus, pours out…

Researchers at the University of Washington have reconstructed the family tree of 1.28 million cells from a single mouse embryo, tracing each of them back to the fertilized egg the animal started as.…