Video
We summarize the week's scientific breakthroughs every Thursday.
- Health & Medicine
How flossing a mouse’s teeth could lead to a new kind of vaccine
Flu viruses often enter the body through mucous tissue in the nose. Researchers are developing new ways to protect such areas.
- Plants
These plants build ant condos that keep warring species apart
The unique architecture of some ball-like plants high in trees in Fiji lets violent ants live peacefully and feed the plant with valuable droppings.
- Animals
Some killer whales hunt in pairs to maximize their bounty
Drone footage from Norway shows killer whales using a highly coordinated and cooperative hunting technique to catch herring.
- Animals
A dog’s taste for TV may depend on its temperament
Anxious dogs might react nervously to some television sounds, a survey of dog owners reports, while hyper ones might try to play chase.
- Paleontology
How fast did dinosaurs really go? Birds walking in mud provide new clues
Tracks of dinosaur footprints can hint at how fast the extinct animals moved. Here’s how guinea fowl can help fact-check those assumptions.
- Animals
Killer whales may use kelp brushes to slough off rough skin
The whales use quick body movements to tear pieces of bull kelp for use as tools, perhaps the first known toolmaking by a marine mammal.
- Animals
U.S. seal populations have rebounded — and so have their conflicts with humans
Alix Morris’s new book, A Year with the Seals, explores humans’ complicated relationship with these controversial marine mammals.
- Space
Here’s how a collision of star remnants launches a gleaming jet
A computer simulation shows how two neutron stars of unequal mass merge, form a black hole and spit out a jet of high energy matter.
- Physics
Rainbows of sound are a reality thanks to a new device
A plastic structure separates white noise into pitches, like a rainbow splits light into colors, offering a novel way to manipulate sound.
- Animals
Flamingos create precise water vortices in a shrimp-hunting frenzy
Nashville Zoo flamingos reveal the oddball birds generate many types of vortices to eat. The swirls could be an inspiration to human engineers.
- Animals
This tool-wielding assassin turns its prey’s defenses into a trap
This assassin bug's ability to use a tool — bees’ resin — could shed light on how the ability evolved in other animals.
- Astronomy
A gas cloud 5,500 times as massive as the sun lurks nearby
At 300 light-years away, the interstellar cloud is the closest of its kind ever found to Earth and the largest apparent single structure in the sky.
