The plague never really went away. Nearly seven centuries after the Black Death, the same bacterial species, Yersinia pestis, still infects people each year—3,248 reported cases worldwide from 2010 to ...

A loggerhead shrike does not eat every grasshopper it catches. Some are too toxic. Instead, the bird skewers them on thorns or barbed wire and waits, sometimes for two days, before returning to the ...

Viagra became a blockbuster drug by changing blood flow. It wasn’t long before doctors figured out it could also be used as a sexual enhancement pill. Now scientists say its active ingredient, ...

Schematic image showing sperm whales using bubbles while resting. Image purely for illustrative purposes. In one of the ocean’s strangest sleep routines, sperm whales can hang almost motionless in the ...

Today’s 7,600 languages might seem like a lot, but they're just a fraction that survived a vast, ancient extinction.

The Hoba meteorite in Namibia is the largest known natural piece of iron on Earth, weighing about 60 metric tons today. By ...

Most animals let gravity take care of the final stage of digestion. Their feces fall downward, piling into the familiar coiled mounds that inspired the poop emoji. Lugworms do something stranger. An ...

Black marks began appearing on catfish pulled from a lake along the Vermont–Quebec border more than a decade ago. Some looked like dark stains while others formed crusted lumps around the fishes’ ...

A peptide is a short chain of amino acids, the same building blocks that form larger proteins. The human body produces millions of them, using them to carry messages, control hormones, regulate ...

Mosses are among the oldest plants in the fossil record. This is even obvious from their lack of the plumbing that lets trees ...

That’s one of the hallmarks of stupidity, as outlined in The Basic Laws of Human Stupidity, a satirical essay written in 1976 ...

For nearly 1,700 years, only the young woman’s skull remained. Archaeologists knew that she had been buried in fine clothes, with a laurel wreath on her head, unusual cork sandals at her feet and a ...