Animals

The bird picks up the ball, the way it has been taught to, and turns to hand it over to the person at the edge of the table. The cord pulls tight. The ball does not move, because the far end of the…

A bumblebee working a city park on a hot afternoon is not dealing with one problem at a time. The air can carry ozone, a gas that forms when sunlight works on traffic exhaust. The flowers, the water…

Sable shearwaters in Australia are swallowing far more plastic than they were before 2022, while the overall share of birds carrying any plastic at all has remained steady for 16 years. That is the…

The World Health Organization has validated Chile as having eliminated dog-transmitted rabies as a public health problem, the first country in South America to receive it. The Pan American Health…

Researchers have described a new species of bubblegum coral from the Nazca Ridge in the southeastern Pacific and found chitin, the tough material of insect shells and fungal cell walls, in its…

Earthworms fed polystyrene microplastic for six days ended up with fewer living immune cells, and fewer still when the plastic carried an antioxidant additive, a team at the University of Bayreuth…

A lump of fossilized dinosaur dung collected in eastern Montana in 2016 has turned out to be packed with feathers, and a University of Washington-led team reports that two of them have features…

Researchers at Boston University and Harvard Medical School have mapped the mosquito brain circuit that responds to carbon dioxide and found the neurons detecting the gas connect mostly back to one…

Researchers at the Howard Hughes Medical Institute's Janelia Research Campus have recorded the activity of nearly every cell in a week-old zebrafish larva at once, on a timescale of seconds. The work…

Switching on a rare type of nerve cell in the outer layer of the mouse brain was enough to put the animals to sleep, a research team reports in Nature. Sleep is usually traced to structures below the…

You took a few thousand steps today, and almost every one of them started the same way. The back of the heel touched down first, slightly ahead of the rest of the foot, and the load rolled forward…

A fossil of Charnia, a frond-like organism that lived about 560 million years ago, has been found preserved in three dimensions in a sheep field in Finnmark, Arctic Norway. A team led by the…