The Naked Mole-Rat Queen Doesn't Rule With an Iron Fist. She Rules With a Smell.
One airborne compound keeps every other female in a colony infertile, and it doesn't require anyone to be in the room to work. What else are we missing?
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Latest Stories
The Galaxy You Are Standing In Was Upside Down 10 Billion Years Ago
Something hit the Milky Way so hard it flipped. What that means for every star in it, including ours, is still being worked out.
Joy to the World, Then the ER: The Rare Syndrome Where Happiness Breaks Your Heart
Devastating news and the best day of your life can trigger the exact same cardiac emergency. Here's the biology behind celebrations that land people in the ICU.
Assyria Erased Three Kings From History, Almost
The record of who sat on Assyria's throne stood unquestioned for a century of scholarship. Then two historians found what the empire tried to scrub out.
The Asteroid That Vanished From Radar Came Back a Comet
For almost three decades, astronomers tracked what looked like an ordinary rock with total confidence. Then a routine observation came up empty, and what reappeared in its place wasn't ordinary at all.
The Insect That Rebuilt Its Lungs Into a Submarine
The rule was simple: deep water pressure destroys anything that breathes air. One larva in an African lake never got the memo, and what it grew instead has researchers rethinking the ocean's biggest mystery.
Two Strangers Are Living in Your DNA
The part of your genome scientists called uniquely human just turned out to harbor someone else. Two unknown ancestors. No fossils. No names. Still in you.
Shocking Way to Make Adult Brain Cells Act Young
Adult brain cells aren't supposed to change anymore. Shock therapy may be quietly overriding that rule, and the mechanism breaks something neuroscientists thought was locked shut.
Titan and Pluto Found the Same Recipe Using Mystery Ingredients
Two utterly different worlds are absorbing light at the exact same wavelength. The molecule responsible doesn't match anything ever catalogued.
Clams Are Pretty Good Parents
A baby shellfish's first move after birth is riding a fish like a school bus. This has been the care plan for 125 million years.
The Laugh You Just Had Is 15 Million Years Old
Every living great ape cracks up on the exact same rhythm: chimp, gorilla, orangutan, human, no exceptions. That's not a coincidence.
Colchester Has the Oldest Fossil Collection on Earth. It's One Bone.
A Roman found a 100 million year old bone, buried it next to a spoon and nobody has explained the spoon since.
Every Egg You'll Ever Have. Except Maybe That's Wrong.
The biology fact you never questioned, that women are born with all the eggs they'll ever have, may be resting on a 70-year-old assumption that's starting to crack.
A Pterosaur Died 113 Million Years Ago. Its Last Meal Survived.
Bacteria moved in on this fossil immediately, the way bacteria do. Instead of destroying the evidence, they sealed it in.
A Frozen Rat's Chromosome Woke Up Inside a Mouse. It Glowed.
The chromosome came from a rat frozen for over a year. The mouse it woke up inside never noticed the difference.
The Big Bang Wrote the Rules. The Big Ring Ignored Them.
A structure larger than physics allows sits 9.2 billion light-years away, and researchers used the light of ancient quasars to find it hiding in plain sight.
The Luddites Weren't Anti-Technology. They Were Anti-Getting-Fleeced.
They smashed the machines, but the machines weren't really the point. What the Luddites actually wanted has been misread for 200 years, and the misreading wasn't an accident.
A CRISPR Enzyme That Recognizes Cancer and Shreds It From the Inside
Cancer cells give off a molecular signature no drug has ever been able to touch. This one doesn't bother being gentle with it.