A wide variety of animals have tusks, from elephants and walruses to five-pound, guinea pig-looking critters called hyraxes. But one thing tusked animals have in common is that they're all mammals—there are no known fish, ...
Evolution
Oct 26, 2021
1
450
In Star Trek, characters carry a little handheld device called a tricorder that they can point at objects to analyze and identify them. When the show's writers cooked up the idea in the 1960s, it was purely science fiction, ...
Plants & Animals
Oct 19, 2021
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190
In 1973, a scientist stumbled upon a strange tree in the Amazon rainforest, unlike anything he'd ever seen. It was about 20 feet tall, with tiny orange fruits shaped like paper lanterns. He collected samples of the plant's ...
Plants & Animals
Oct 6, 2021
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567
The trillions of bacteria living in our guts play a crucial role in our ability to digest food and fight off disease. All other animals also have communities of bacteria living inside them, that scientists call microbiomes, ...
Ecology
Sep 28, 2021
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46
If you had to describe a male peacock's tail feathers, you might pick words like "dazzling" or "beautiful." You probably wouldn't go with "stealthy," "aerodynamic," or "subtle." Peacock tails are just one example of how evolution ...
Plants & Animals
Sep 16, 2021
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126
Picture a skunk. You're probably thinking of a stocky animal, around the size of a housecat, black with white stripes, like Pepé Le Pew. That describes North America's most common skunk, the striped skunk, but they also ...
Plants & Animals
Sep 1, 2021
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465
We humans aren't the only animals that have to worry about bug bites. There are thousands of insect species that have evolved to specialize in feeding on different mammals and birds, but scientists are still learning how ...
Plants & Animals
Jul 30, 2021
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225
The Xerces blue butterfly was last seen flapping its iridescent periwinkle wings in San Francisco in the early 1940s. It's generally accepted to be extinct, the first American insect species destroyed by urban development, ...
Plants & Animals
Jul 20, 2021
4
1102
We sometimes think of the Amazon rainforest as unaltered by humans, a peek into the planet's past. In recent years, scientists have learned that many parts of the Amazon aren't untouched at all—they've been cultivated by ...
Earth Sciences
Jun 7, 2021
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37
Every night during the spring and fall migration seasons, thousands of birds are killed when they crash into illuminated windows, disoriented by the light. But a new study in PNAS shows that darkening just half of a building's ...
Plants & Animals
Jun 7, 2021
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418
