Life
We summarize the week's scientific breakthroughs every Thursday.
- Animals
Flea treatment shows downside of social life
The flealike parasites that build up in a shared burrow take an unexpectedly large toll on the ground squirrel's reproductive success.
- Animals
How do female lemurs get so tough?
Female ring-tailed lemurs may get masculinized by well-timed little rises of prenatal hormones.
- Animals
Female moths join pheromone choruses
Female rattlebox moths can detect each other's male-luring pheromones and tend to gather in what may be a scent version of male frogs' chorusing around the pond.
- Animals
Underage Spiders: Males show unexpected interest in young mates
Male Australian redback spiders mate readily with females too young to have external openings to their reproductive tracts, a tactic that reduces the male's risk of getting cannibalized.
- Paleontology
Bone Hunt
Science News reporter Sid Perkins recounts the trials and tribulations of digging for dinosaurs in central Montana.
- Animals
Seabirds take record summer vacations
Sooty shearwaters that breed in New Zealand have set a new record for off-season travel, covering 64,000 kilometers between visits to their mating ground.
- Ecosystems
Fish as Farmers: Reef residents tend an algal crop
A damselfish cultivates underwater gardens of an algal species that researchers haven't found growing on its own.
- Paleontology
New View: Method looks inside embryo fossils
Using an X-ray–scanning technique, scientists have taken a high-resolution peek inside fossilized embryos of some early multicellular organisms.
- Animals
Crouching Scientist, Hidden Dragonfly
Although dragonflies are among the most familiar of insects, science is just beginning to unravel their complex life stories.
- Animals
Hot and hungry bees hit hot spots
New lab experiments suggest that bumblebees like warm flowers and can learn color cues to pick them out.
- Animals
Babbling Bats: Do pups talk baby talk as human infants do?
Young sac-winged bats make long strings of adultlike noises and could be the first animals besides some primates and birds that babble when they're babies.
- Paleontology
Rarity of fossils of young tyrannosaurs explained
Paleontologists have unearthed only a few juvenile tyrannosaurs, and a new study suggests why: A large percentage of these meat-eating dinosaurs, unlike many other creatures, survived into adulthood.
