Life
We summarize the week's scientific breakthroughs every Thursday.
- Animals
Walking on Water: Tree frog’s foot uses dual method to stick
The tree frog can cling to both wet and dry terrains, despite its permanently lubricated foot.
- Animals
Lobster Hygiene: Healthy animals quick to spot another’s ills
Caribbean spiny lobsters will avoid sharing a den with another lobster that's coming down with a viral disease.
- Ecosystems
Top-Down Lowdown: Predators shape coastal ecosystem
The health of southern California kelp forests may depend more on the ecosystem's predator population than the forest's access to nutrients.
- Animals
True-pal lizards may show odd gene
Colorful lizards in California may offer an example of a long-sought evolutionary factor called greenbeard genes, a possible explanation for altruism.
- Animals
Jay Watch: Birds get sneakier when spies lurk
A scrub jay storing food takes note of any other jay that watches it and later defends the hoard accordingly.
- Paleontology
Remains may be an evolutionary relic
Fossils recently found in southwestern China may be of a lineage that originated long before the Cambrian explosion of biodiversity, when most major groups of animals first appeared in the fossil record.
- Animals
Monkey Business: Specimen of new species shakes up family tree
The new monkey species found in Tanzania last year may be unusual enough to need a new genus, the first one created for monkeys in nearly 80 years.
- Plants
Nectar: The First Soft Drink
Plants have long competed with one another to lure animals in for a sip of their sweet formulations.
- Animals
No Early Birds: Migrators can’t catch advancing caterpillars
Pied flycatcher numbers are dwindling in places where climate change has knocked the birds' migration out of sync with the food-supply peak on their breeding grounds.
- Animals
Just turn your back, Mom
A female in a species of legless amphibians called caecilians nourishes her youngsters by letting them eat the skin off her back.
- Animals
Bird hormone cuts noise distractions
A jolt of springtime hormones makes a female sparrow's brain more responsive to song.
- Animals
Grammar’s for the Birds: Human-only language rule? Tell starlings
A grammatical pattern called recursion, once proposed as unique to human language, turns out to fall within the learning abilities of starlings.
