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.
Nature
Bent Trees With No Sense of Up Straightened Themselves
Take away gravity and the direction of light, and a bent tree still has one sense left. For weeks, that was all these trees had to go on.
Beak Length Changed Faster Than Natural Selection Allows
Beaks on one campus swung up and back at a pace near the top of 2,400 documented cases, yet no population crash was reported. What moved them?
This Moth Can Smell With Its Wings
Cut-off wings, a pair of electrodes and two stinky chemicals. The wings responded. What the moth does with that sense is the part nobody has answered.
Mount Elgon Elephants Seek the Same Medicinal Plants as Human Neighbors
Elephant mothers on a Kenyan mountain reportedly give certain plants to their calves. Whether it works as medicine, and who taught whom, is still unsettled.
Dolphins Are Catching Fish With Seashells, and the Kids Are Watching
Two dolphin populations on opposite sides of Australia solved the same puzzle with the same tool. What are the odds they both figured out the shell thing on their own?
This Cicada's Love Song Sounds Like a Jet at Takeoff
Get close and this insect is one of the loudest land invertebrates. Get too close and something else happens.
One Gentoo Penguin Walked Into a Genome Sequencer. Four Came Out.
No new penguin species had been named in more than 100 years. Then biologists read the DNA of a bird everyone thought they already knew.
These Seabirds Chase Hurricanes
When researchers laid the birds' GPS tracks over hurricane maps, they checked the data three times. The tracks were right.
A Parasitic Plant That Looks Like a Mushroom Has Been Sending Hermit Crabs to Do Its Dirty Work
It can't make its own food, yet it turns out up to 1 million seeds. Nobody could say how they left the forest floor until a camera caught what shows up after dark.
The Bullfrog Brain Doesn't Wait for a Rescue. It Builds One.
Most brains wait for the liver to send emergency fuel. After a winter underwater, the bullfrog's brain stops waiting.
Cannibal Chicks: The Hoopoe Hatches a Spare
Researchers slipped one extra late-hatching egg into hoopoe nests. That chick never fledged, and the nest raised nearly two more birds anyway.
Your Dog Is Parsing Your Words
Even dogs that spent puppyhood on the street or in a shelter do it. How much talking does it take to rewire a dog's brain?
An Octopus Used a Mirror to Hunt
Before it could use the mirror, it had to stop seeing a rival in it. What an octopus understands about reflections is still an open question.
This Frog Outsourced Its Defense Against a Species-Killing Fungus
One frog survives a fungus that has wiped out whole species. Another, tested the same way, doesn't. The difference is living on their skin.
Bubbles the Dolphin Makes Fish Vomit. Then He Eats It.
Researchers watched one dolphin pull this off 11 times. Nobody knows where he learned it, or whether other dolphins are doing the same.
Complex Life Had a Heat Limit. The Fire Amoeba Crawled Past It.
Complex cells were supposed to fall apart at this temperature. One tiny blob in a California hot spring keeps eating, moving and multiplying anyway.
A Labrador-Sized Scorpion Once Roamed Britain
The fossils sat in London for 155 years, classified as the wrong animal entirely. What they actually were is considerably more alarming.