Life
We summarize the week's scientific breakthroughs every Thursday.
- Animals
Ballistic defecation: Hiding, not hygiene
Evading predators may be the big factor driving certain caterpillars to shoot their waste pellets great distances.
- Plants
Any Hope for Old Chestnuts?
Next year will mark the 100th anniversary of the discovery of chestnut blight in the United States, but enthusiasts still haven't given up hope of restoring American chestnut forests.
- Paleontology
Ancestors Go South
A group of new and previously excavated fossils in South Africa represents 4-million-year-old members of the human evolutionary family, according to an analysis of the sediment that covered the finds.
- Animals
Chicks open wide, ultraviolet mouths
The first analysis of what the mouths of begging birds look like in the ultraviolet spectrum reveals a dramatic display that birds can see but people can't.
- Animals
Fishy Paternity Defense: Bluegill dads: Not mine? Why bother?
Bluegill sunfish have provided an unusually tidy test of the much-discussed prediction that animal dads' diligence in child care depends on how certain they are that the offspring really are their own.
- Paleontology
Fertile Ground: Snippets of DNA persist in soil for millennia
Minuscule samples of sediment from New Zealand and Siberia have yielded bits of DNA from dozens of animals and plants, including the oldest DNA sequences yet found that can be traced to a specific organism.
- Ecosystems
At a Snail’s Place: Rock climbing cuts mollusk diversity
As rock climbing soars in popularity, some cliff-side snail populations may be crashing.
- Animals
Costly Sexiness: All that flash puts birds at extra risk
Distinctive his-and-her plumages increase the chance that a bird species will go extinct locally, according to an unusually far-ranging study.
- Ecosystems
Cultivating Weeds
Some formerly mild-mannered plants turn into horticultural bullies when planted far outside their native range.
- Animals
Careful Coots: Do birds count their eggs before they hatch?
A coot may tally the eggs in her nest, a rare example of an animal counting in the wild, suggests a new study.
- Paleontology
Family Meal: Cannibal dinosaur known by its bones
Analyses of the gnaw marks on bones of Majungatholus atopus, a carnivorous dinosaur from Madagascar, indicate that the creatures routinely fed on members of their own species.
- Paleontology
Fossils of early salamanders found
A recent discovery of fossilized salamanders pushes back a milestone in amphibian evolution by more than 100 million years.
