How to teach a honeybee to do math
Despite their “miniature brains,” honeybees can harness both long-term rules and short-term memory in order to solve math problems.
300 million years ago, our ancestors walked tall. This robot shows you how
The fictional Sherlock Holmes could read footprints — in soil, snow, carpet, dust and even blood. Researchers today are similarly using tracks caught in stone — plus a robot — to recreate a creature that lived 300 million years ago.
Cities could be teeming with more rats, thanks to the shutdown’s festering trash
Rats could get access to an all-you-can-eat buffet of garbage during the government shutdown as uncollected trash piles up.
As polar bear attacks increase in warming Arctic, Inuits and scientists search for solutions
With sea ice reduced, polar bear attacks are rising. Concerned Inuit communities want to increase hunting quotas, but researchers are testing new technologies they hope will reduce these often deadly confrontations.
Every year, hundreds of thousands of kittens end up in animal shelters, in need of permanent homes. So researchers and shelters are trying to figure out ways to make it easier.
The average adult yawns 20 times per day. And when you feel a yawn coming on, it can be nearly impossible to suppress. But why does being around other yawners make you yawn?…
Spiders don’t have wings, but they can fly across entire oceans on long strands of silk. For more than a century, scientists thought it was the wind that carried them, but a new study shows the Earth’s electric field can…
When humans have conflicts with wildlife, the first reaction is often to cull them. But there's little evidence that it works.
Are cats smarter? Or are dogs? When scientists counted the brain cells in these animals, there was a clear winner. But the latest research on animal intelligence challenges all of the old-school notions of what it means to be smart.
