Biology

There's an old saying that everything in Australia wants to eat you – and this apparently includes plants. Now scientists have made a special find, stumbling across a massive community of a rare meat-eaters living closer to humans than ever before.

In a wide range of social species, when an animal is sick, it takes itself away from its group. Ant pupae are unable to move, however, so they've developed a unique mechanism that leads them to sacrifice their own life for the betterment of the nest.

In the world of flying, stinging insects, Asian giant hornets reign supreme, reaching impressive sizes and wielding mighty venom-filled lances. Now, researchers have found an unlikely hero that can vanquish these buzzing badasses: the humble frog.

New evidence shows that Neanderthals, early Homo sapiens and even earlier hominins were using, processing and eating starches, grass seeds, nuts, fruits, sedges and tubers long before the supposed "Broad Spectrum Revolution" diet shift took place.

Scientists have sequenced RNA from a nearly 40,000-year-old woolly mammoth leg, the oldest ancient RNA ever recovered. These fragile molecules could reveal which genes were active in the animal’s final hours.

The extent of an incredible dinosaur highway has been revealed in Bolivia. More than 16,000 footprints, along with tail impressions, have been fully documented – and the scale of theropod activity alone is unlike anything that's been seen before.

Bears look like textbook mammals, but hidden in their evolutionary history are two dramatic departures from the rules of growth and adaptation. Scientists have now unlocked when, and how, ancient bears broke the rules and hacked nature out of need.

On a remote reef, endless streams of bubbles rise from cracks in the seabed into the shallow water, fed by an underground volcanic system. For scientists, this phenomenon has become a kind of crystal ball, revealing the changes that await marine life.

We'd like to welcome this curious armless burrowing lizard into the New Species Hall of Fame. Despite being built for life underground, in the end this slider skink was no match for scientists who had searched for a decade to confirm its existence.

You may be sitting on – so to speak – a very valuable asset that scientists would love to get their hands on: your poop. As well as blood, plasma and organs, you can now donate fecal samples to stool banks for research and use in transplants.

Inside the Exclusion Zone surrounding the Chornobyl nuclear plant, thousands of animals now roam freely. Among them are the stray dogs – around 900 descendants of the pets left behind, living in the shadow of the world’s worst nuclear disaster.

Using advanced chemistry and AI, a team of Carnegie researchers uncovered new chemical traces of Earth's earliest life in 3.3‑billion‑year‑old rocks, and evidence that oxygen‑producing photosynthesis began over 800 million years earlier than thought.

As our evolution slows and industrialization and technology accelerates, research suggests that human biology is struggling to keep pace. A new study investigated whether rapid and extensive environmental shifts have compromised the fitness of Homo sapiens.

A stealthy parasite queen can turn an ant colony against itself. The invading queen has been found to sneak into an ant colony, creep towards the resident ant queen, and spray a chemical that tricks ants into slaughtering their own mother.

In a first, scientists believe they have confirmed we have another sense – a “remote touch” that we share with others in the animal kingdom, like some shorebird species that can sense prey beneath sand without seeing or touching it first.