Science

Professor Douglas Causey logs information as he tags and takes basic measurements of the birds he harvested in the Aleutian Islands on June 4. He is looking at the birds' blood and their diet, hoping to find out the ways the ocean is changing as it warms.

In The Stomach Of A Seabird, A Glimpse Of An Ocean Heating Up

1:43pm August 30, 2015

by Lauren Rosenthal

As the Pacific Ocean warms, the diet of Alaska's seabirds has been changing along with it. Now, on the eve of President Obama's visit to the state, researchers aren't the only ones paying attention.

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Science

NASA Scientists Simulate A Year On Mars — On Hawaii

11:38am August 30, 2015

NPR's Rachel Martin reports on a year-long NASA mission to Hawaii.

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An illustration of Pappochelys, based on its 240-million-year-old fossilized remains. This ancestor to today's turtle was about 8 inches long.

How The Turtle Got Its Shell

3:12pm August 28, 2015

by Nell Greenfieldboyce

The ribs of a 240 million-year-old fossil hold clues to how the first turtle shell evolved. And its skull shape seems closer to that of lizards and snakes than to an ancestor of dinosaurs and birds.

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Ah, sugar — we love the sweetness, but not the calories. For more than a century, food technologists have been on a quest for the perfect, guilt-free substitute. The latest candidate, allulose, is not available to consumers in a crystal form: It is a sy

In The Search For The Perfect Sugar Substitute, Another Candidate Emerges

6:51pm August 27, 2015

by Dan Charles

There's a new contender in the century-old quest for perfect, guiltless sweetness: allulose. It's sugar — but in a form that our bodies don't convert into calories. Perfect? Not quite.

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Froggy Went A-Courtin', But Lady Frogs Chose Second-Best Guy Instead

6:23pm August 27, 2015

by Nell Greenfieldboyce

Given two choices of attractive mates, female frogs pick the top vocalist. But add a third, inferior male to the mix, and females go for No. 2. The "decoy effect" shapes some human choices, too.

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Science

A Message In A Bottle Makes Its Way Home — More Than A Century Later

6:12pm August 27, 2015

Guy Baker of England's Marine Biological Association tells the story of a postcard his group recently received. It was addressed to George Parker Bidder — the MBA's esteemed former president, dead for more than 60 years — and had been found in a bottle dropped in the North Sea more than a century earlier.

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Male treehoppers make their abdomens thrum like tuning forks to transmit very particular vibrating signals that travel down their legs and along leaf stems to other bugs — male and female.

Good Vibrations Key To Insect Communication

3:52pm August 27, 2015

by Christopher Joyce

For some insects, sound waves or vibrations are the real social media — high-speed rumbles sent through the air and along leaf stems to help the bugs claim territory, send warnings and find mates.

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Heroin sold in the U.S., like this dose confiscated in Alabama last fall, is often cut with other drugs.

Illicit Version Of Painkiller Fentanyl Makes Heroin Deadlier

3:28pm August 27, 2015

by Fred Bever

U.S. drug officials have traced a sharp spike in the already climbing death toll from heroin overdoses to an additive — acetyl fentanyl. The fentanyl is being cooked up in clandestine labs in Mexico.

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An aerial view of Tokyo Electric Power Co.'s tsunami-crippled Fukushima Dai-ichi nuclear power plant, on March 11.

Particles From The Edge Of Space Shine A Light On Fukushima

1:59pm August 27, 2015

by Geoff Brumfiel

Researchers have been using muons to take a peek inside the nuclear reactors in Japan that melted down in 2011. The results could aid the continuing cleanup operations.

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Scientists who eat the plants and animals they study are following in the tradition of Charles Darwin. During the voyage of The Beagle, he ate puma ("remarkably like veal in taste"), iguanas, giant tortoises, armadillos. He even accidentally ate part of a

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Arts

Dining Like Darwin: When Scientists Swallow Their Subjects

10:55am August 27, 2015

by Jessie Rack

Some scientists carry on the tradition of eating the animals or plants they study: leeches, tadpoles, 30,000-year-old bison. Darwin did it first, but why do it at all? Call it all-consuming curiosity.