Porcupines sport some 30,000 quills, which easily penetrate fleshand then stay stuck in it. Now, scientists have analyzed the shape of individual quills to discover what makes them so effectiveand how we can harness their power for medical devices. T...
Who was the better artist, a caveman or Leonardo da Vinci? It turns out that early depictions of four-legged animals walking are more accurate in some ways than modern oneseven those crafted by the Renaissance master. The study is in the journal PLoS...
Many of us talk with our hands. But some researchers suspect we may listen with our hands, too. Cognitive scientists had subjects listen to spoken sentences, each in the third person and present tense, such as John walks to work. As they listened, th...
Cigarettes are bad for your health. But thats only if you smoke em. If you use them to line your nest, they might actually do you some good. Because birds that decorate their digs with discarded cigarette butts are less bothered by parasites. Thats a...
Mercury tends to show up in strange places, like swordfish and sharks. Now researchers have detected small amounts of mercury in the fog that bathes the California redwoods, near Santa Cruz. The mercury levels they've measured are in parts per trilli...
In the last decade scientists have managed to sequence the genomes of everything from bacteria and fruit flies to individual human beings. But often overlooked are the genomic sequences of our food. We know the genomes of apples, bananas, potatoes, w...
