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It's Not Too Late to Save the Polar Bear
In 2007, scientists from the U.S. Geological Survey said that if humans didn't do anything to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, two-thirds of the world's polar bears could be gone by the middle of this century. Now a new study has addressed the next question: Is there still time to help the bears? T...
December 17, 2010 |
By Sarah Zielinski
Bird Sets Up Protection Racket to Ensure Meals
Announcing your presence would seem to be a bad strategy for a bird that survives through kleptoparasitism—stealing food from others. But that's just what the fork-tailed drongo (Dicrurus adsimilis) of the Kalahari Desert does. And the drongos seem to have taken some lessons from the Italian mafia,...
December 15, 2010 |
By Sarah Zielinski
Honey Badgers Are Real
I was watching the Botswana special episode of the British television show Top Gear earlier this week, the one in which the three hosts use sub-standard cars to make their way from the Zimbabwean border to the Namibian one, and a certain scene got me thinking. In it, the hosts, Jeremy Clarkson, Ric...
December 09, 2010 |
By Sarah Zielinski
Thomas Henry Huxley and the Dinobirds
Evolution never got much time in my elementary school science classes. When the topic came up, inevitably near the end of the term, the standard, pre-packaged historical overview came along with it. Charles Darwin was the first person to come up with the idea of evolution, and, despite the ravings ...
December 07, 2010 |
By Brian Switek
Fate of the Cave Bear
The lumbering beasts coexisted with the first humans for tens of thousands of years and then died off. Why?
December 2010 |
By Andrew Curry
Dinosaurs' Living Descendants
China's spectacular feathered fossils have finally answered the century-old question about the ancestors of today's birds
December 2010 |
By Richard Stone
A Quest to Save the Orangutan
Birute Mary Galdikas has devoted her life to saving the great ape. But the orangutan faces its greatest threat yet
December 2010 |
By Bill Brubaker
How Did Whales Evolve?
Originally mistaken for dinosaur fossils, whale bones uncovered in recent years have told us much about the behemoth sea creatures
December 01, 2010 |
By Brian Switek
A "Perverted" View of Bird Evolution
Among the many recurring themes on this blog, the evolution of birds from feathered maniraptoran dinosaurs is probably the most prevalent. Hardly a month goes by without a new study relevant to this major evolutionary transition, and as paleontologists discover more they continue to find that many ...
November 30, 2010 |
By Brian Switek
This Thanksgiving, Make a Wish on a Dinosaur
Tomorrow families all over the United States will be taking part in the ritualized, yearly tradition of dinosaur dissection. Granted, "Thanksgiving" is a much better name than "Annual Dinosaur Dissection Day", but the fact of the matter is that the turkey on the table has a lot in common with its ...
November 24, 2010 |
By Brian Switek
Zoom in on a Daddy Longlegs
This psychedelic photo is a depth color-coded projection of a confocal microscope image of the eyes of a daddy longlegs (Phalangium opilio). The image, by Igor Siwanowicz of the Max Planck Institute for Neurobiology in Munich, Germany, was awarded first place in the Olympus BioScapes International ...
November 19, 2010 |
By Sarah Zielinski
Cats Defy Gravity to Take a Sip
The 1940 documentary short "Quicker'n a Wink" fascinated people with its slow-motion imagery of things like the beating of a hummingbird's wings; it won a 1941 Academy Award. One of the revelations from the movie was that a cat curls its tongue backwards into a "J" when it goes to take a drink of l...
November 12, 2010 |
By Sarah Zielinski
Pink Flamingoes Attract Mates With Make-Up
The flamingo's bright pink coloration comes from its diet—animals can't synthesize the carotenoids that color these feathers. The more carotenoid-containing food a flamingo eats before molting and growing new feathers, the brighter those feathers will be. Over time, though, the color fades. So how ...
November 01, 2010 |
By Sarah Zielinski
How Male Elephants Bond
Bull elephants have a reputation as loners. But research shows that males are surprisingly sociable—until it's time to fight
November 2010 |
By Caitlin O'Connell-Rodwell
Tracking the Emergence of Birds
Since the description of the fuzzy-feathered dinosaur Sinosauropteryx in 1996, paleontologists have been inundated with a still-flowing flood of fossil evidence confirming that birds are living dinosaurs. More than that, many of the characteristics we once thought were unique to birds—from air-sacs...
October 27, 2010 |
By Brian Switek
Inside a Mosquito's Heart
What does a mosquito's heart look like? I would never have expected that it would look like this, a fluorescent image taken by Jonas King, a student at Vanderbilt University, which won first place in the Nikon Small World photography competition.King, working in the lab of biologist Julián Hillyer,...
October 22, 2010 |
By Sarah Zielinski
The Scariest Zombies in Nature
Parasites found in ant bodies tell us that Hollywood’s stories of the undead may be closer to truth than fiction
October 18, 2010 |
By Brian Switek
Photo Contest Finalist: Chinstrap Penguins Climbing an Iceberg
Most everyone here in D.C. would prefer to forget the Snowpocalypse of 2010, but with autumn upon us, winter—and the weather that comes with it—is just around the corner. Don’t get me wrong: snow is quite pretty when it’s freshly fallen. But at this point I’d just as soon admire the stuff from afar...
October 15, 2010 |
By Jesse Rhodes
It's Hawk Watch Season
It's the most wonderful time of the year—fall bird migration.Spring migration is nice, too, when birds are in their brightest breeding plumage (see the difference between spring and fall colors in a chestnut-sided warbler). But birds flying from their wintering grounds to their breeding grounds are...
October 13, 2010 |
By Laura Helmuth
Gargantuan Spider Webs Bridge Waters of Madagascar
As a young girl, I used to wake up in the middle of the night, frightened by a spider I knew had to be lurking in some dark corner of my room. For arachnophobes such as myself, nothing could be more unsavory than a big spider that blends seamlessly into tree bark. Unless that same spider also spins...
October 04, 2010 |
By Jess Righthand
