Life

  1. Ecosystems

    BOOK LIST | Trees, Truffles, and Beasts: How Forests Function

    An argument that simple policies will not save complex forests.Rutgers Univ. Press, 2008, 280 p., $26.95 (paperback). TREES, TRUFFLES, AND BEASTS: HOW FORESTS FUNCTION

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  2. Math

    Detangling DNA

    DNA can form some very nasty knots — but not just any knots.

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  3. Animals

    How they shine

    Iridescence could be pretty meaningful—or maybe just pretty.

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  4. Earth

    Audubon’s insect cafeteria

    Sidebar: Insects.

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  5. Health & Medicine

    Insects (the original white meat)

    Dining on insects, usually more by choice than necessity, occurs in at least 100 countries — and may be better than chicken for both people and the environment.

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  6. Animals

    Pandamonium over a Tiny Pest

    A parasite threatens efforts to protect China's endangered icon.

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  7. Life

    Rock-hard evidence

    Newly discovered dinosaur tracks, the first ever reported from the Arabia Peninsula, indicate that a part of the now-arid region was teeming with dinosaurs about 150 million years ago.

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  8. Health & Medicine

    Vacillating stem cells

    Unsuspected, ever-changing variation among stem cells in bone marrow helps determine the development path the cells will follow during differentiation.

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  9. Animals

    Courting both ways

    Some extra dopamine, and male fruit flies like boys too.

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  10. Life

    These colors don’t run

    A chameleon employs different color-changing defenses depending on its predator.

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  11. Life

    Reviving extinct DNA

    For the first time, scientists have resurrected a piece of DNA from an extinct animal — the Tasmanian tiger. The researchers engineered mice with a piece of the long-gone marsupial's DNA that turns on a collagen gene in cartilage-producing cells.

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  12. Life

    For bacteria, it’s a hard-knock life

    Bacteria stick better to rigid surfaces.

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