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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
More than 70 percent of New Orleans residents say some progress has been made in the availability of medical services since the storm. Still, most say care for the poor continues to lag.