Comics

Photograph of a group of vervet monkeys. They are clustered around and feeding from a box of pink-colored corn kernels. They are ignoring an equally full box of blue-colored kernels.

Cultural transmission makes animals flexible, but vulnerable

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.

Living World

The monarch’s stupendous migration, dissected

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.

Photograph of the deck of a large commercial fishing vessel. Fish are falling from a massive net and piling on the deck floor, as fishermen look on.

Food & Environment

The human hand in fish evolution

Fishery practices that go for the big ones may be counterproductive when mostly the small survive

A neanderthal tooth and replica of a crown.

Living World

The truth in baby teeth

Fossilized remains of children have a lot to tell us about their short lives

Photograph of a large brown ant with fierce-looking mouthparts — the queen. It is surrounded by much smaller worker ants.

Living World

How can ant and termite queens live so long?

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.

Close-up photograph of a monarch caterpillar holding onto the stem of a milkweed plant and biting into one of its leaves.

Living World

How a poisonous plant became breakfast, lunch and dinner for monarchs

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

Colorized scanning electron microscopy image shows round orange blobs (T cells) on top of an irregularly shaped cell with lots of hairy projections (a tumor cell).

Technology

After Covid-19, can mRNA vaccines help with cancer as well?

The pandemic put the technology, long in development, to the test. Here’s a look at the status of its application to cancer and when it might reach patients.

Close-up photograph of a pure California tiger salamander (right) and a hybrid between the California species and the non-native barred tiger salamander (left). Though the two are clearly different in this photograph, they are not always as easy to tell apart.

Living World

A salamander’s dangerous liaisons

The giant genomes of these struggling amphibians tell a story of outsider invasions, assault by disease and cross-species sex. A geneticist explains.

Artwork showing neurons along with the tangles of tau protein and clumps of amyloid-beta plaques that are typically found in the brains of patients with Alzheimer’s disease. Investigating when and how these proteins form might lead to new therapies.

Health & Disease

Watching Alzheimer’s in action

A look inside the brains of engineered mice suggests therapies might need to target two key proteins — tau and amyloid-beta — at the same time

Photograph of a row of skeletons in a trench.

Health & Disease

Profiling the perpetrators of past plagues

The ancient pathogens in old graves are as dead as the people they once infected. Still, they tell a vivid tale.

Living World

Life’s a blur — but we don’t see it that way

Our brains manage to construct stable images even as our eyes keep darting around. Here’s what we know about how that happens.

Still photograph from the 2015 movie The Revenant. Frontiersman Hugh Glass (Leonardo DiCaprio) is brandishing a rifle and shouting in fury, beneath trees.

The Mind

Revenge is bittersweet at best

Research is starting to reveal how the urge for vengeance may have evolved, when it can be useful and what could prevent the violence it can provoke

A satellite image shows how a decades-old fence erected between Finland and Norway affected Arctic vegetation by altering the movement of reindeer herds.

Food & Environment

Effects of a fence

A satellite image reveals how humans and their herds are changing the Arctic from the ground up

Photograph of a butterfly perched on a plant. Its wings are spread wide, showing off a checkered pattern in white, black and orange.

Living World

Edith’s checkerspot butterfly: Checkered past, uncertain future

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.

A tan-colored male fly is positioned over a female fly. They are standing on a dark, mountainous terrain of dung.

Living World

A seminal semicentennial

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.