Biology

Watch a group of apes just before the food arrives, and you can feel the room tighten. Bananas or sugarcane are about to land in the middle of a hierarchy, and everyone knows it. In those loaded…

In the Brazilian savanna a capuchin monkey climbs onto a flat block of stone with a palm nut in one hand. It sets the nut down, picks up a second stone, raises it above its head with both arms, and…

Consider the problem an infant immune system has to solve. Almost everything it meets in its first months is harmless and much of it is edible, so a system tuned to attack novelty would attack…

Pick any two eukaryotes far enough apart and the differences are almost comic. A human being and Acanthamoeba castellanii, a soil amoeba that spends its life eating bacteria in damp earth, last…

Orcas in the Gulf of California have been filmed using a hunting tactic scientists had never formally recorded: one whale grips a sharptail sunfish by the tail while a second accelerates in and rams…

The lesions were the easy part. For more than a decade, biologists had watched brown bullhead catfish in Lake Memphremagog turn up with patches of blackened, malignant skin; by 2014, nearly one in…

For years, the people trying to grow milk proteins inside plants have run into the same wall. A cow makes casein by the bucket because its mammary cells are built to package the stuff. A plant cell…

An elephant standing still, its ears spread, sometimes seems to be listening to nothing at all. It isn't. It is listening to the ground. Elephants communicate across distances that would defeat…