Coral reefs are some of the world's most diverse ecosystems. Despite making up less than 1% of the world's oceans, one quarter of all marine species spend some portion of their life on a reef. With so much life in one spot, researchers can struggle to g

A new study using the largest network of microphones to track birds in the United States is providing crucial insights for managing and restoring fire-prone forests across California's Sierra Nevada region.

A team of researchers has rediscovered a frog species which has not been seen in more than 130 years. First described in 1902, Alsodes vittatus had evaded detection since then, despite multiple search efforts. The researchers discovered two populations of

Look around, and you'll see it everywhere: the way trees form branches, the way cities divide into neighborhoods, the way the brain organizes into regions. Nature loves modularity—a limited number of self-contained units that combine in different ways to

For the Liu Lab, necessity is truly the mother of invention. The researchers were examining how the 3D organization of the genome controls development and needed to image hundreds of RNA molecules in a thick tissue sample to understand where and how genes

For more than 140 years, Mixodectes pungens, a species of small mammal that inhabited western North America in the early Paleocene, was a mystery. What little was known about them had been mostly gleaned from analyzing fossilized teeth and jawbone fragmen

A team of environmental researchers, Earth scientists and pollution specialists at Nanjing University, the Chinese Academy of Sciences and colleagues from Germany and the U.S. has found evidence that microplastics have a negative impact on photosynthesis

A team of neurologists, environmentalists and bioengineers at the University of Queensland, in Australia, has found that male blue-lined octopuses paralyze females prior to mating to avoid being eaten. In their study published in the journal Current Biolo

A simple neural change alters mating preferences in male butterflies, aiding rapid behavioral evolution, Nicholas VanKuren and Nathan Buerkle at the University of Chicago, US, and colleagues, report in the open-access journal PLOS Biology.

The Triassic is one of the most important periods in the evolution of life on Earth. After one of the greatest mass extinctions 252 million years ago, not only the dinosaurs but also many other groups of terrestrial tetrapods emerged and conquered numerou

Bacteria and other single-celled microorganisms in the seas around Antarctica are strongly influenced by water temperature and the amount of sea ice. This is shown by coordinated measurements taken off the coast of the west Antarctic Peninsula.

Teeth recovered from a beloved zoo elephant that died in 2008 are helping University of Utah geologists develop a method for tracking the movements of large herbivores across landscapes, even for animals now extinct, such as mastodons and mammoths.