biology

Despite concerns raised by Weaver and others in the field, fire suppression became a cornerstone of forest management. And at first, coinciding with a relatively cool, wet period, it seemed to work. Fires across the American West were…

Stewart says public interest in spiders and scorpions has exploded as people realize they are actually low-maintenance pets that don't need walking three times a day and can be kept in apartments or small homes without a backyard.…

By washing through the brain, neuromodulators “allow you to govern the excitability of a large region of the brain more or less in the same way or at the same time,” said Eve Marder, a neuroscientist at Brandeis University widely…

A mosquito watches you through a lattice of microscopic lenses. You stare back, fly swatter in hand, closely tracking the bloodsucker with your humble single-lens eyes. But it turns out that the way you see each other—and the world—may…

The team’s test plots also host some of Jordan’s rarest flora. In Marka, that includes saplings of Pistacia lentiscus, the wild pistachio tree—there are only about 50 left in the wild in Jordan—and Celtis australis, sometimes called a…

Billions of years ago, some unknown location on the sterile, primordial Earth became a cauldron of complex organic molecules from which the first cells emerged. Origin-of-life researchers have proposed countless imaginative ideas about…

Watching a boa constrictor capture and consume its prey is quite something. First, the snake strikes and latches onto the prey with its teeth, then it coils its body tightly around the poor creature and slowly squeezes the life from it.…