More than a half-century ago, researchers at the Beltsville Agricultural Research Center outside Washington, D.C., engaged in some creative barnyard breeding. Their goal was the development of fatherless turkeys — virgin hens that would reproduce via parthenogenesis. Along the way, and ostensibly quite by accident, an interim stage of this work resulted in a rooster-fathered hybrid that the scientists termed a churk.

Researchers reported new data today confirming that with enough coddling, many heavily infected bats can recover. The rub: These scientists also pointed out that there really aren’t sufficient resources to save more than a handful this way.

The day starts with chatting about the Black Death over bagels, then detours to garbage piles and ends with a goofy interview moment —one of the best days I’ve spent in a long time. Some of what happened during this visit with crow researchers in Ithaca, N.Y., went into the story “When birds go to town.” Just a single sentence, though, deals with one of the most entertaining aspects of a day with Team Crow. The three researchers I meet — Anne Clark and Jenn Campbell-Smith, both of Binghamton University and Kevin McGowan of the Cornell Lab of Ornithology — not only know crows, but...

Look to Texas to see evolution’s true colors. There, speckling the state’s green fields, you’ll find the annual phlox, a flower also known as “Texas pride.” Its petals, a light purple elsewhere, are bright scarlet in the southeast near Austin. This color change isn’t a whim: It’s the annual phlox’s response to the presence of a close cousin, the pointed phlox. Native to East Texas, the pointed phlox also has purplish flowers. Just two genes orchestrate the annual phlox’s shift from purple to red flowers in the fields where it meets its cousin.  But this color change has... (p. 18)

Eurasian diving bell spiders, the only truly aquatic arachnids, survive underwater with the help of “physical gills,” scientists say. (p. 14)

Early animals survived poor marine conditions by inhaling oxygen from bacterial "mines" at the bottom of the ocean. (p. 9)