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Green tree ants are not the kind of prey most spiders go looking for. They swarm, they bite, they spray formic acid, and they coordinate. A spider that tried to wrestle one into a web would, more…
Watch a fruit fly hover over a bowl of ripe peaches, then a crane fly stumble across a windowpane, then a midge hang in a cloud at dusk. They look like utterly different aviators: different sizes,…
The first clue was almost nothing. In 2008, a photograph taken on the east bank of the Lomami River in the Democratic Republic of Congo showed a black monkey with a strange, bright detail: orange…
Grasses carry two separate chemical routes for making starch, and their closest non-grass relatives carry only one, according to a University of Wisconsin–Madison release describing a paper published…
A virus that preys on bacteria shuts down its host's immune defenses by attaching phosphate groups to almost every protein in the cell, a group at EMBL Heidelberg reports in Nature on Aug. 19. The…
The soil bacterium Bacillus subtilis assembles tubes of protein that carry the fat-soluble molecules of respiration away from its cell membrane, a research team reports in a paper published Aug. 17…
A peptide encoded in human mitochondrial DNA kills bacteria directly and changes how immune cells mature, a University of Southern California team reports in a paper whose peer-reviewed Version of…
The narwhal's corkscrew tusk is built from mineral-hardened collagen wound into two helices that turn in opposite directions, a team led from Aarhus University in Denmark reports in a paper published…
In the airless mud of a river near Libreville, in Gabon, a single cell keeps finding its way down. It is a ciliate: a fringe of beating hairs, a nucleus, the sort of organism a high-school microscope…
Open almost any biology textbook to the chapter on photosynthesis and you will meet the same diagram. Light hits a green cell and its energy runs down a chain built from two linked machines,…
Step into a rainforest and the soundscape can feel infinite, thousands of species layering whistles, buzzes, and rippling phrases into a wall of noise. That impression of endless variety is, in a…
Deep in a maze of tunnels, a single female runs the whole operation. She is the only naked mole-rat in her colony who breeds. The dozens of other females around her, her daughters and sisters, live…