This Bird's Sexy Dance Began as a Fruit Craving
The most dazzling courtship displays in the bird world may trace back not to sexual pressure, but to a gut enzyme these birds quietly stopped using. What came first changed everything.
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2.64 Billion Years in the Dark, and It Tastes Like Regret
Sealed in rock since before animals existed, it might still have something living inside it. Someone got close enough to get splashed, which is how we know it's unpleasant to the tongue.
The Same Molecule in Your Raspberry Jam Turned Up Near the Center of the Galaxy
The same sugar molecule in raspberries just turned up near the galactic center, in quantities nobody expected. What that means for life on Earth is still wide open.
Your Skin Cells Fire Electrical Spikes When You're Injured. They Work Nothing Like a Nerve.
A wound sets off a wave of activity that races across nearby tissue for over an hour, using signaling biology assumed reserved for neurons. What it's actually communicating is still unclear.
The First Look Inside a Whale Never Seen Alive
A routine beach call in New Zealand turned into the first real look inside one of the ocean's most elusive animals, and the anatomy inside was stranger than anyone expected.
The North Sea Crater That Lost the Vote
The proof sat in a cardboard box of oil-well cuttings for decades. Two grains of shocked crystal. The asteroid had always been winning the argument.
A Man Died in His Bed in Herculaneum. His Brain Turned to Glass.
Only one human being has ever been found this way. Scientists still aren't sure why him, or how it happened at all.
A Bat Sat on a Sleeping Boy's Face. He Had No Bite Marks. He Died of Rabies.
A bat lands on a sleeping kid's face. No bite. No scratch. No reason to worry. The family was wrong, and the reason why is something most people still don't know.
450 Million Years Ago, Your Brain Already Had a Blueprint
A jawless fish unchanged for 360 million years just handed researchers a working map of the very first vertebrate brain, older and stranger than expected.
Results: Best Hot Take from YGBFKM
Ten hot takes. One vote. Science journalism has never been more democratically absurd.
Two Planets We've Been Calling Ice Giants May Be Full of Magma
The two planets have been called ice giants for decades. Modeling suggests their interiors may be roiling oceans of magma instead.
The Words Jefferson Borrowed From the Vikings
A Viking word for "luck" sits at the center of American democracy. Jefferson didn't know. The language kept that secret for a thousand years.
The Twelfth Key to Our Last-Resort Antibiotic Turned Up in Freshwater Mud
A resistance gene capable of defeating one of medicine's final options just surfaced in ordinary river-bottom muck, not a hospital, not a farm. What kept it there might be the more unsettling part.
The Squirrel Monkey Has Entered the Chat on Human Childbirth
The obstetrical dilemma assumed our species faced the tightest squeeze in the primate order. Then researchers re-measured a much smaller mammal correctly, and the ranking changed.
A Sea Worm Built Metal Jaws Without Any Metal
Half a billion years before we figured out smelting, a marine worm was already building metal-grade jaws from protein. What else has nature quietly engineered that we haven't noticed yet?
The Great White Has a Thermostat Problem
Great white sharks run hot by design. Now that the ocean is heating up, their greatest physiological advantage may be turning against them.
Egyptians Buried Their Dead With Gold Tongues as Legal Briefs for the Afterlife
They buried the dead with gold tongues to plead their case before Osiris. Two thousand years later, archaeologists just found 24 of them near Egypt's Mediterranean coast.
Black Holes Are Messy Eaters. Now We Have the Radio Receipts.
Scientists assumed black holes went silent after swallowing a star. Turns out they were just warming up.