All Stories
- Humans
Middle schoolers earn top prizes in science competition
Five winners awarded top prizes in the Society for Science & the Public’s national science competition for middle school students.
- Animals
Spider males good for mating, food
Expectant mothers, including spiders, need to eat well. For Mediterranean tarantulas, a male suitor tastes just fine.
- Life
Heat sensors guide insects to a hot meal
Bugs home in on seeds by detecting infrared radiation.
- Life
Avian airlines: Alaska to New Zealand nonstop
Tracked bar-tailed godwits break previous nonstop flight record for birds.
- Humans
Midlife suicides are on the rise
Data gleaned from death certificates indicate that, from 1999 to 2005, middle-aged whites accounted for much of the overall increase in the U.S. suicide rate.
- Physics
Clean coal for cars has a dirty side
Getting liquid fuels from coal would likely increase carbon emissions, and certainly not reduce them.
- Humans
Elephants’ struggle with poaching lingers on
Even as African elephants struggle to recover from decades-old poaching, the animals face new and renewed threats today.
- Life
A more fearsome saber-toothed cat
Analyses of fossils reveal that a third, newly recognized type of saber-toothed cat — one that killed by biting large chunks of flesh from its victim instead of biting its neck and slashing the major blood vessels there —roamed the Americas about a million years ago.
- Tech
Coal Country’s New Foresters
New techniques may be shaving a century or two off the recovery of mined mountain tops.
- Paleontology
How pterosaurs took flight
Extinct flying reptiles known as pterosaurs may have taken to the air with a technique akin to leapfrogging, new research suggests.
- Tech
Trading Forests for Coal
Forested mountain peaks have been giving way to grassy planes in Appalachian coal country.
- Archaeology
Really Cool History
Tales of the black band: Clues to a 4,200-year-old mystery lie frozen in icy records stored atop Mt. Kilimanjaro.
