Life
We summarize the week's scientific breakthroughs every Thursday.
- Paleontology
Fossil gets a leg up on snake family tree
A 95-million-year-old fossil snake with legs may be an advanced big-mouthed snake, not a primitive ancestor.
- Paleontology
Dinosaurs, party of six, meat eating
The bones of six carnivorous dinosaurs discovered in a fossil bed in Patagonia may indicate that big, meat-eating dinosaurs were social creatures.
- Animals
Pregnant—and Still Macho
Some of the basic theories of sexual behavior and sexual selection are getting attention thanks to a burst of new studies in the topsy-turvy social world of the seahorse, where the males get pregnant.
- Animals
Hormone still rules no-tadpole frogs
Coqui frogs may skip the tadpole stage, but within the egg, they undergo a metamorphosis ruled by thyroid hormone.
- Animals
New frog-killing disease may not be so new
The skin disease that savaged amphibians in remote wildernesses in the 1990s has been linked to outbreaks in the 1970s.
- Animals
Flight puts the fight back into crickets
Researchers are just discovering what gamblers in China have known for centuries—flying can make a losing cricket fight again.
- Animals
When Ants Squeak
In the past 20 years, researchers studying sound communication in ants have discovered a sort of ant-ernet, zinging with messages about lost relatives, great food, free rides for hitchhikers, caterpillars in search of ant partners, and impending doom.
- Animals
Bees log flight distances, train with maps
After decades of work, scientists crack two problems of how bees navigate: reading bee odometers and mapping training flights.
- Plants
Why tulips can’t dance
An elliptical stem gives daffodils an unusual liveliness in the wind compared with tulips.
- Ecosystems
Males live longer with all-year mating
Male butterflies live longer in Madeira, where females are available year-round, than in Sweden, where females mature in one burst.
- Animals
Why don’t racing horses fry their brains?
Lumpy sacs bulging out of a horse's auditory tubes may solve the mystery of how such an athletic animal keeps its brain from overheating during exercise.
- Animals
Redder is healthier in squawking birds
When barn swallow nestlings open wide for food, their parents may be looking for the healthiest throats.
