A Whale Call Just Knocked on Einstein's Door
Whale calls near the ocean's surface look supersonic. Not because physics broke, but because of something far stranger.
Nature
Ricefield Eels Start Female. The Thermostat Decides What Comes Next.
They start female. Somewhere along the way, their surroundings can begin pushing their ovaries toward testes. Researchers think they've found the molecular switch.
A Living Circuit Board Just Ran Calculations Inside a Petri Dish
Five bacterial strains. Two transistor types. One living circuit board doing arithmetic in a petri dish. What gets built when biology becomes the hardware?
Rock-Eating Organisms Thrive Beneath the Great Lakes
689 fungal species have been quietly eating rock 1,000 feet underground for 11,000 years. What else is down there that we haven't thought to look for?
This Microbe Grows Its Young Inside Itself. Then It Explodes.
A newly discovered microbe doesn't split in two like ordinary cells. It grows its young inside itself, then bursts open to release them, and what's happening inside before that happens is stranger than it sounds.
A 245-Million-Year-Old Reptile Went Into the Rock and Kept Its Lunch
A quarter-billion-year-old fossil still had a liver, and it was still red. What else survived besides the bones?
A Seal's Ears Fill With Blood When It Dives
Scientists just found the missing piece of an underwater hearing system hidden in plain sight for decades. The engineering behind it looks more like hydraulics than anatomy.
A 40-Foot Sea Monster, a 23-Foot Predator and a Flying Reptile Walk Into the Eromanga Sea
A 100-million-year-old specimen from Australia contains proof of two separate encounters, both violent. How the second one played out is still being pieced together.
Pilot Whales Have the Ocean's Top Predator Running Scared
They're the largest dolphins in the sea and they've never made a kill. So why does one sound send killer whales running?
Every Living Thing May Trace Back to Something That Wasn't Quite Alive
The ancestor shared by every organism may have had genes and metabolism but still needed metal-rich rocks to finish the job chemically.
The La Brea Tar Pits Have Been Hiding a Toad Since the 1950s
Only two Ice Age amphibians have ever been found in North America. One is a tree frog from Florida. The other turned up in a drawer in Los Angeles.
Octopuses Changed One of Life's Oldest Machines
Evolution labeled part of the ribosome DO NOT MODIFY. Shallow-water octopuses ignored the rules. Then protein synthesis worked better.
An Octopus Totes a Coconut Fortress for Trouble It Hasn't Met
A cephalopod hauls a portable panic room across the seafloor in two pieces, fully exposed. The shells are completely useless the entire time it's moving. So why bother?
Flying Apparently Makes Birds Happy
For centuries, we assumed the creatures overhead were reveling in the act of soaring. A new study says our instinct was right.
The Gene That Made Wolves Trust Us
A rare human condition defined by extreme, boundless friendliness shares its DNA fingerprint with your dog.
A Single-Celled Organism Ran a Cable to Its Neighbors
One-celled life isn't supposed to share resources with anything outside itself. So what is this species doing building physical tunnels to pass cargo to the cell next door, and why does it build more of them under stress?
Humpback Whale Songs Are a Dive Chart
A 40-ton animal has spent 16 hours performing the same routine, and it lines up with his body's position in the water almost to the second. What does it mean when the music and the movement turn out to be the same thing?
The Amber That Remembered a World Before Trees Knew What Insects Were
The fragment is smaller than a sesame seed. It predates the first dinosaurs by more than 100 million years. Nobody's sure yet what the plant was trying to protect itself from.