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New research suggests that to maintain a healthy brain, we should tend our gut microbiome. The best way to do that right now is not through pills and supplements, but better food.
They have held our fascination ever since we first identified their remains. Today, thanks to new artifacts and technologies, findings about our closest relatives are coming thick and fast.
Social insects and humans share the trait of divvying up tasks, as do some fish. Researchers find that it emerges naturally, and it often doesn’t take a boss to keep things in order.
These stealthy survival tactics could teach us how to curb the widespread use of chemical pesticides in agriculture. But first, researchers must learn how seemingly helpless flora deploy this masterful strategy.
How do animal populations respond to climate change? After studying the same butterfly and its habitats for decades, two biologists explain that it’s complicated — but endlessly intriguing.
From monkeys washing potatoes to cockatoos raiding trash cans, socially spread behaviors allow creatures to adapt more rapidly to changing environments than conventional evolution would allow. But the traits are also more easily lost.
Social insects disobey evolutionary principles that say creatures invest in body maintenance or reproduction — not both. Scientists want to know how the creatures do it.
Fifty years ago, Geoff Parker’s pioneering scholarship on “sperm competition” in insects was broadly overlooked. Since those days, hundreds of studies in many animals have confirmed the importance of what he discovered while watching flies mate around cow pats.
We know pathogens from other species can endanger us. Scientists are better equipped than ever to do something about it, but political buy-in is crucial.
By engineering mutations into fruit flies, scientists reconstructed how the butterflies may have evolved resistance to the toxins found in milkweed, allowing their caterpillars to feast on the plant
COMIC: The feisty orange-black butterfly uses a toolbox of biological tricks to find its way down to Mexico for winter and flap north again in spring. Here’s how scientists figured out those tricks — and what they don’t yet understand.
Cells build an elegant, symmetrical structure. How they do it is intriguing on its own, but recent insights could also help explain some developmental disorders.
Fossilized remains of children have a lot to tell us about their short lives
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