15 August 2024
Scientists have known for centuries that sunflowers wobble in seemingly random ways as they grow – but it seems that those movements actually optimise how much light each plant gets
12 March 2024
When the moon hides the sun in a total solar eclipse, some animals seem to think that it is briefly nighttime, while others pace anxiously or even gaze up at the sky
6 December 2023
Spinning locusts in a centrifuge to mimic hypergravity seems to cause their exoskeletons to adapt, giving them stiffer legs – but too much gravity and they simply died
15 March 2023
Martian soil is generally poor for growing plants, but researchers have used CRISPR to create gene-edited rice that might be able to germinate and grow despite the hostile habitat
13 March 2023
Most iridescent fish shine because of structures in their scales or skin, but the transparent ghost catfish gets its shine from prism-like structures in its muscle fibres
20 April 2022
Feathers of different colours have been found on a fossilised pterosaur skull, hinting that an ancestor of these winged reptiles had feathers far earlier than we thought
2 September 2021
Stingrays have protruding eyes and mouths, which seem like they would make swimming less efficient, but they actually create vortices that let the rays swim faster
3 February 2021
Common spiders sometimes capture prey much larger than themselves, and they use many strands of silk to lift their prey off the ground and render it helpless
23 November 2020
Bees tasked with flying through a narrow gap will turn sideways to avoid touching the edges, showing that they are aware of how big they are
12 May 2020
Fossils have revealed that after the extinction of the dinosaurs, anchovies evolved into metre-long predators with sharp sabre-like teeth to devour other fish
