Outdoor recreation is booming across the US, but research shows that the presence of humans – or the trails they hike and ski on – can have harmful effects on wildlife at less-than-close range.
A behavior from kittenhood persists in many adult cats.
Byron Chin/flickr
By measuring how and when elephant seals sleep, researchers were able to figure out how elephant seals change their risk-taking behavior as they gain weight.
A trace fossil of an iguana burrow was discovered on San Salvador Island in the Bahamas. Estimated to be 115,000 years old, it is the first known fossil of its kind.
Caribbean spiny lobsters normally live in groups, but healthy lobsters avoid members of their own species if they are infected with a deadly virus.
Humberto Ramirez/Getty Images
Faced with uncertain and anxious times, brains send out instructions to start stockpiling supplies – whether you’re a person facing a pandemic, or a rodent prepping for a long winter.
Kea were able to correctly guess the most probable scenarios, by evaluating various physical and social cues. Previously, only great apes and humans were known to be able to understand probability.
Individuals working together as one.
Orit Peleg and Jacob Peters
A swarm of honeybees can provide valuable lessons about how a group of many individuals can work together to accomplish a task, even with no one in charge. Roboticists are taking notes.
Imitation is the sincerest form of being human?
Rawpixel.com/Shutterstock.com
A quirk of psychology that affects the way people learn from others may have helped unlock the complicated technologies and rituals that human culture hinges on.
A capuchin monkey in Brazil hoists a stone tool to crack open nuts.
Luca Antonio Marino
Capuchin monkeys in Brazil use big stones to crush the shells of nuts they want to eat. An experiment in the field investigated how these monkeys prepare to use new, unfamiliar tools.
Therizinosaurs and their fossilised eggs.
Mark Witton/Kohei Tanaka
Have a cat who just loves to scratch? Declawing is a major surgery that comes with serious long-term side effects – and it might not solve the problem anyway.
A male guppy looks good when he looks different.
Mitchel Daniel
After Google suggested PigeonRank was at the root of its search function, a group of researchers put a small flock of the birds to a different classification test in real life.
Tim Caro, University of California, Davis e Martin How, University of Bristol
How the zebra got its stripes is not only a just-so story, but an object of scientific inquiry. New research suggests that stripes help zebras evade biting flies and the deadly diseases they carry.
Professor in the Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology and the Institute of the Environment and Sustainability, University of California, Los Angeles