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
0
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
0
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
1
418
It's a tough time to be a shark. Pollution, industrialized fishing, and climate change threaten marine life, and the populations of many top ocean predators have declined in recent years. In addition to studying sharks in ...
Plants & Animals
May 13, 2021
0
39
Forget diamonds—plastic is forever. It takes decades, or even centuries, for plastic to break down, and nearly every piece of plastic ever made still exists in some form today. We've known for a while that big pieces of ...
Ecology
Apr 29, 2021
0
231
Rats, by and large, aren't terribly popular animals. But while you don't want an infestation of common black rats living in your house, their distant cousins in the Philippines are downright cuddly. These "giant cloud rats" ...
Paleontology & Fossils
Apr 23, 2021
1
152
Our planet's worst mass extinction event happened 252 million years ago when massive volcanic eruptions caused catastrophic climate change. The vast majority of animal species went extinct, and when the dust settled, the ...
Earth Sciences
Apr 19, 2021
1
552
The Amazon rainforest is teeming with creatures unknown to science—and that's just in broad daylight. After dark, the forest is a whole new place, alive with nocturnal animals that have remained even more elusive to scientists ...
Plants & Animals
Mar 25, 2021
0
54
Every society has some degree of wealth inequality—over history, across continents, there always seem to be some people who have more than others. But the amount of inequality differs—in some civilizations, a few powerful ...
Archaeology
Mar 24, 2021
4
1169
