Imagine discovering that bats and birds both evolved wings independently, or that sharks and dolphins developed nearly identical body shapes despite being separated by hundreds of millions of years of evolution. This phenomenon, called convergent evolution, reveals a stunning truth: nature often solves the same problems in the same ways. Understanding convergent evolution helps us … Read more
Plants cannot run away from competition, so many have evolved a chemical warfare strategy called allelopathy: the release of toxic compounds that inhibit the growth of neighboring plants. This invisible battle, playing out silently in soil and leaf litter around the world, profoundly shapes ecosystems and offers surprising lessons for human agriculture and medicine. How … Read more
A study of one of the world’s longest-running disaster warning systems—desert locust monitoring—finds surveillance limits damages and generates returns of up to 680 times the investment. The new…
Stored in an open-air warehouse in tropical Darwin, Australia, are dozens of trays containing cylindrical cores of rock. They are from drill holes bored hundreds of meters below the surface by…
In the early 1990s, crime-loving television audiences could choose mainly between cozy, fictional detective series such as Columbo and Murder, She Wrote. The US docuseries Unsolved Mysteries brought…
For most of the 20th century, the model of human origins was a tree: with the trunk dividing into branches, and then twigs. Each species of human relative (hominin) was a neat, single branch.
Honeybees are among the widely studied insects, due to their sophisticated, hierarchical social organization and their essential ecological role. Bees can move swiftly in natural environments,…
Today’s announcement by Texas-based de-extinction company Colossal Biosciences about a successful hatching of chicks from an artificial egg would represent a major innovation, if the claims can be…
Researchers from UC Santa Barbara’s Benioff Ocean Science Laboratory (BOSL) and local partners in San Francisco have unveiled new technology in their ongoing efforts to prevent whales and oceangoing…
A new Yale study identifies a distinct species of eyeless cavefish, a discovery that challenges long-held conventional wisdom that caves and other subterranean ecosystems are evolutionary dead ends.