News

Plants

Why tulips can’t dance

An elliptical stem gives daffodils an unusual liveliness in the wind compared with tulips.

Astronomy

Milky Way gets a new layer

Astronomers propose that 150 billion corpses of sunlike stars may blanket the visible disk of the galaxy.

Animals

Bees log flight distances, train with maps

After decades of work, scientists crack two problems of how bees navigate: reading bee odometers and mapping training flights.

Earth

DDT treatment turns male fish into mothers

Injecting into fish eggs an estrogen-mimicking form of the pesticide DDT transforms genetically male medaka fish into apparent females able to lay eggs that produce young.

Health & Medicine

Novel diabetes strain has rapid onset

Japanese researchers have confirmed that some patients with type 1 diabetes have a novel form of the disease that's not caused by immune cells attacking the pancreas.

Physics

Black hole recipe: Slow light, swirl atoms

Whirling clouds of atoms may swallow light the way black holes do, possibly giving scientists a way to test the general theory of relativity in the lab, not just in outer space.

Anthropology

Ancient populations were game for growth

Archaeological evidence of a Stone Age shift in dietary preferences, from slow to swift small game, suggests that the human population rose sharply sometime between 100,000 and 50,000 years ago.

Anthropology

Drowned land holds clue to first Americans

A map of a now-flooded region charts the path that Asians may have taken to first reach the Americas.

Humans

Treaty Nears on Gene-Altered Exports

In an effort to help preserve biodiversity, negotiators from 130 nations crafted rules of conduct for international trade in living, genetically engineered organisms.

Animals

Slithering on Air: Flying snakes glide through the treetops

The paradise tree snake flies by flattening its body and slithering through the air.