This Microbe Ditched So Many Genes It Can't Feed Itself
It cannot feed itself, yet it may still count as a cell of its own. One-fourth of its DNA does a job nobody has figured out.
Nature
The Dinosaurs Moved Out. A Fungus Named Rex Moved In.
Why would a fungus grow this big? One untested idea involves a long stay inside a living tree and a change of diet after it dies.
An Amphibian’s Poison Glows Blue-Green
A blacklight on a rainy road in Spain gave it away. The same compound runs through the animal's blood, and nobody could identify it.
Extinction's Most Famous Bird Has an Understudy. It Can Fly.
The dodo left one complete genome and a famous face. Somewhere among roughly 2,300 candidates may be the recipe for that beak.
The Bat That Hunts Birds on the Wing
A bat that normally eats insects went after birds bigger than itself. What it did with the ones it caught, the footage never showed.
Some Sperm Don't Race. They Row as a Crew.
One farm pest seals every sperm cell inside its own thick casing. The researchers could not say how those cells move at all.
Rainforest Recluses Plan Baby Playdates Days Ahead
The loneliest great ape has little use for the neighbors. So why do some mothers keep steering their babies straight to them, on empty stomachs?
A Healing Touch Revives Coral
The same rescue that saves one bleached coral turns hostile the moment the donor is a genetic stranger. And the fastest part of the recovery went unexplained.
Snakes Have Packed Their Own Antivenom for 50 Million Years
Snakes carry a built-in defense against their own bite. How they end up poisoning themselves in the first place is still anyone's guess.
Bats Likely Took Their First Flight in Europe
Three continents had a claim on the first bat. A mountain of genomes and fossils points somewhere else, and roughly half of every bat family's past is still missing.
Zombies of the Sea: This Creature's Severed Body Parts Live On
Severed. Alone. Still running an immune system three years later. Still very much alive.
A Jurassic Otter Wasn't Quite a Mammal. Its Throat Didn't Get the Memo.
The neck bones that let babies nurse turned up early, in a hunter that swam among dinosaurs. What was a not-quite-mammal doing with them?
Jonathan Is 194. His Cellular Power Switches Look Barely Used.
Age scrambles the controls that keep cells powered. In one very old reptile, they stayed neat, and nobody can say how he managed it.
Golden Trees Grow From a Carpet of Living Stars
The coral's own DNA could not agree on who its relatives are. The answer that finally won points to a family it barely resembles.
A Butterfly Flew Up. Its Wings Said Down.
What if the stripes on a butterfly were never meant to hide it? Something in the pattern only switches on once the wings start moving.
The Mantis Grip Evolved at Least Seven Times. It Kept Coming Out Different.
Same job, same hinge, same snap. So why did six insect lineages that invented this hunting trick each build it to their own measurements?
A Four-Winged Dinosaur May Hold a Rival Patent on Flight
Two feathered lineages ended up with many of the same flight parts. So why do their assembly timelines look like they were drafted by strangers?
Bacteria Read Eight DNA Letters. Life Runs on Only Four.
Four letters that exist nowhere in nature were handed to a bacterial enzyme. Cryo-electron images caught what it did next.