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When Julia Lohmann set out to create an artwork for the street-level windows of the London headquarters of the Wellcome Trust, the health research foundation, she chose a classic subject: [...]

J. HENRY FAIR WAS stumped. He couldn't figure out how to photograph whatever might be hiding behind the walls and fences of industrial plants. Then, on a cross-country flight about [...]

DAVID MAISEL DOESN'T CONSIDER HIMSELF AN ENVIRONMENTAL ACTIVIST. Yet his large-scale aerial photographs of strip mines, a bone-dry lake bed and manmade evaporation ponds can be viewed as indictments of [...]

'You see how his nose is up in the air and he is walking a little more stiff-legged,' Megan Brown is saying while watching a video on her laptop. 'That's [...]

HEEDS: The whoops of intruding hyenas when they are played through loudspeakers in the wild, at least in a study by Michigan State University researchers. COUNTS: The number of hyenas [...]

When Central America rose from the ocean three million years ago, horn snails divided into two species, one in the Pacific and one in the Atlantic. Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute [...]

King crabs have come to the Antarctic shelf. Frigid water kept them away for millions of years, but now the region is warming up, says Craig Smith of the University [...]

To reproduce, the parasite Toxoplasma gondii needs to get from a rat into a cat. It's known that infected rats don't fear the scent of cat urine. New research led [...]

Most of what we know about dinosaurs comes from their fossils. But a University of Alberta research team recently found a different kind of evidence: 11 feathers preserved in amber. [...]

ON A may morning in the National Arboretum in Washington, D.C.Jorge Santiago-Blay ducks under the branches of a Norway spruce to admire a thick white scab of resin that has [...]

Mother bears have a fierce reputation, but they're not the ones to worry about. Researchers led by the University of Calgary analyzed 59 fatal black bear attacks in the United [...]

Researchers studying the box jellyfish Tripedalia cystophora in Puerto Rico observed that four of the species' 24 eyes always point up.The translucent eyes, inside the jellyfish'sbody, seem specialized for peering [...]

NAME: Paranthropus boisei, a human relative that lived in East Africa from about 2.3 million to 1.2 million years ago. DENTITION: Its massive jaw and flat molars gave rise to [...]

Hummingbirds captured on high-speed video surprised University of Connecticut scientists with the way they drink: a bird dips its tongue in nectar, widens the forked tip and unfurls a fringe [...]

All spiders secrete silk from their abdomens, but it now appears that tarantulas can also shoot silk from their feet. Researchers in Britain turned tarantula glass tanks sideways, shook them [...]

SOME SAY THAT competition between spouses is like dragging a fork across a balloon. Before long, the whole thing explodes. But for me, gaining a lifelong, live-in opponent was the [...]

NAME: Pacific salmon (Oncorhynchus). LIFE: Is born in a stream or lake, then swims to and roams the ocean. DEATH: Returns to fresh water to spawn and die. AFTER LIFE: [...]

Paleontologists in Brazil have found the 260-million-year-old skull of a sheep-size therapsid, a distant relative of mammals. They named it Tiarajudens eccentricus. What made it 'eccentric' was it had a [...]

Larvae of the Southeastern beach tiger beetle have an odd way of getting around. Scientists working in Georgia found that, especially on windy days, the larvae hurl themselves into the [...]

Male humpback whales in the South Pacific all sing the same song--until another one catches on and they start singing a new tune. An 11-year study showed that songs usually [...]

Human beings aren't the only animals to yawn when they see another of their kind doing the same. So do dogs and some primates, including chimpanzees. But in a new [...]

In 2002, ALAIN TOUWAIDE came across an article about the discovery, some years before, of a medical kit salvaged from a 2,000-year-old shipwreck off the coast of Tuscany Divers had [...]

A songbird can fly about three times as fast as the silver Y moth (right) over short distances. But during long-distance seasonal migrations, moths travel just as fast as birds, [...]

Fire ants traveled on ships from their native South America to Mobile, Alabama, in the 1930s and spread through the Southeast. Solenopsis invicta has since sprung up in California, the [...]

Spider monkeys have complex behaviors that vary from group to group, according to a comparison of five isolated populations in Central America. In some groups monkeys kiss, in others they [...]

A newly described dinosaur from Utah had a huge hipbone that must have supported massive muscles. Why did Brontomerus ('Thunder Thighs') have such beefy limbs? One possibility, suggested by paleontologists [...]

Male splendid fairy-wrens sing a special song when they hear the call of a butcherbird, their predator. The behavior would seem to paint a target on the fairy-wren. But University [...]

Two castes of paper wasps are genetically identical. Larvae turn into either workers or potential queens, depending on the behavior of adults, say University of Wisconsin scientists. If adults drum [...]

Tiny aquatic bladderworts are the world's fastest carnivorous plants, say researchers from the University of Grenoble and elsewhere. The plant takes its time getting ready to eat: it pumps water [...]

Banded mongooses, small striped carnivores from sub-Saharan Africa, have unusually high 'breeding synchrony'--64 percent of females give birth on the very same night. A 12-year study in Uganda reveals the [...]

SURE, SOCRATES WAS ONE OF THE FOUNDERS of Western philosophy, but what was he really like? The 42-year-old British historian Bettany Hughes, whose previous biography dealt with Helen of Troy, [...]

What do pandas want? Bamboo, first of all; that's almost all they eat. But they also need old trees. A Chinese Academy of Science-led study of four years of observations' [...]

Scientists have discovered that every peat moss plant in a 2,500-mile stretch from Oregon to the Aleutians is genetically identical. The functional clones apparently originated with a single plant, possibly [...]

San Joaquin kit foxes living in urban areas are taking on a distinctly human diet, according to a new study. Scientists working in Bakersfield, California, chemically analyzed fox fur and [...]

A new analysis of tree rings from more than 9,000 European pines, larches and oaks provides a climate record going back 2,500 years. Scientists in Switzerland and elsewhere linked the [...]

Fork-tailed drongos in the Kalahari Desert act as sentinels, scanning for predators and producing regular 'all clear' calls so other birds can spend more time looking for food. It's cooperative [...]

Great white sharks have the strongest known bite of any living animal. But until they grow to about ten feet in length, says study leader Toni Ferrara of the University [...]

North America's walnut sphinx caterpillar employs a newly discovered defense when under attack: it whistles. Researchers from Canada's Carleton University and elsewhere found that it forces air through tiny abdominal [...]

SOPHOCLES HADJISAVVAS CIRCLES a display case containing a 4,000-year-old ceramic jug. Hand-pinched clay figures sprout from its top: a man stomping on a tub of grapes as another collects the [...]

Wildlife biologists conducting a census in remote mountains of Myanmar have documented the existence of a primate previously unknown to science. They learned of the Burmese snub-nosed monkey (right: an [...]

Researchers underestimate Tyrannosaurus rex tail muscle mass by as much as 45 percent (right: an updated illustration), say University of Alberta scientists who compared its tail vertebrae with those of [...]

NAME: Atlantic molly (Poecilia mexicana), a freshwater fish in caves in southern Mexico. PARTY: For a religious feast, the Zoque people added poisonous barbasco plant roots to the water and [...]

Plants that greened the earth 400 million years ago probably needed help. In experiments with liverworts right), the most ancient plant group, scientists in Britain and Australia found that fungi [...]

A flamingo's pink color comes from pigments concentrated in the brine shrimp and other foods it eats. How does a flamingo attract a mate after its feathers fade? Cosmetics, according [...]

Large parts of the world seem to be getting drier, according to a study led by Germany's Max Planck Institute for Biogeochemistry. Researchers analyzed 27 years of data from remote [...]

A female humpback whale first spotted in 1999 off Brazil appeared near Madagascar two years later, according to an analysis of tourist snapshots. That means the whale traveled at least [...]

A mongoose-like creature in Madagascar is the first new member of the carnivore order to be discovered in 24 years. Durrell's vontsira (Salanoia durrelli) is a marsh dweller, with large [...]

NAME: The mantis shrimp (Neogonodactylus wennerae), a coastal crustacean. EATS: Snails, blasting open their shells with a 'raptorial appendage,' a spring-loaded hammer-arm that slices through seawater at up to 50 [...]

Wildlife experts who moved eight female panthers from Texas to Florida in 1995 to bolster the dwindling population's genetic diversity now say the experiment has worked. Just a few dozen [...]

Male bonobos accompanied by their mothers have greater success mating with fertile females than unchaperoned males, say researchers from the Max Planck Institute in Germany. Mother bonobos can assist low- [...]