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Categories: Energy: Nuclear, Offbeat: Plants and Animals

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New research explains how eating feces (known as coprophagy) shapes wild birds' digestive tracts (gut biota), enabling them to absorb lost or deficient nutrients and adjust to seasonal variations in food sources.

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A new study has answered a long-held question about why medium-sized land animals like cheetahs tend to be fastest.

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While most small insects and mammals urinate in droplets, cicadas urinate in jets. Researchers say the finding could be used to create better robots and small nozzles.

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High-temperature superconductor magnets have the potential to lower the costs of operating particle accelerators and enable powerful new technologies like fusion reactors. But quenches -- the sudden, destructive events wherein a part of the material loses superconductivity -- are a major barrier to their deployment. Scientists have developed an approach to prevent quenches altogether, rather than simply trying to manage them after they occur.

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For the first time, scientists have developed artificial nucleotides, the building blocks of DNA, with several additional properties in the laboratory.

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The oldest fossilized forest known on Earth -- dating from 390 million years ago -- has been found in the high sandstone cliffs along the Devon and Somerset coast of South West England.

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Bumblebees successfully learned a two-step puzzle box task through social observation. This task was too complex for individual bees to learn on their own. Observing trained demonstrator bees performing the first unrewarded step was crucial for successful social learning. Individual bees failed to solve the puzzle without previous demonstration, despite extensive exposure.

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Marine biologists have discovered a new species of deep-sea worm living near a methane seep some 50 kilometers (30 miles) off the Pacific coast of Costa Rica.

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New research finds around a quarter of Labrador retriever dogs face a double-whammy of feeling hungry all the time and burning fewer calories due to a genetic mutation.

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It would be a game-changer if all members of a basketball team could see out of each other's eyes in addition to their own. Biologists have found evidence that this kind of collective sensing occurs in close-knit groups of African weakly electric fish, also known as elephantnose fish. This instantaneous sharing of sensory intelligence could help the fish locate food, friends and foes.

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A new study finds that exposure to chronic radiation from Chornobyl has not damaged the genomes of microscopic worms living there today -- which doesn't mean that the region is safe, the scientists caution, but suggests that these worms are exceptionally resilient.

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Fossils of a strange new species of marine lizard with dagger-like teeth that lived 66 million years ago, show a dramatically more biodiverse ocean ecosystem to what we see today.

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Scientists are embracing imperfection, using less-than-ideal magnetic fields to make the plasma more manageable.

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A new fossil, named 'Attenborough's strange bird' after naturalist and documentarian Sir David Attenborough, is the first of its kind to evolve a toothless beak. It's from a branch of the bird family tree that went extinct in the mass extinction 66 million years ago, and this strange bird is another puzzle piece that helps explain why some birds -- and their fellow dinosaurs -- went extinct, and others survived to today.

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Scientists provide fresh insights on the origins of life, presenting compelling evidence supporting the 'RNA World' hypothesis. The study unveils an RNA enzyme that can make accurate copies of other functional RNA strands, while also allowing new variants of the molecule to emerge over time. These remarkable capabilities suggest the earliest forms of evolution may have occurred on a molecular scale in RNA, and also bring scientists one step closer to re-creating autonomous RNA-based life in the laboratory.

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A new study has found that when humans are suddenly absent from the urban environment, the activity of the crows and ringneck parakeets that 'live' in the area reduces significantly. Conversely, the graceful prinias, who are generally considered shy, increased their activity.

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An orca (killer whale) has been observed, for the first-ever time, individually consuming a great white shark -- and within just two minutes.

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Dung beetles share the load when it comes to showing their affection for each-other, when transporting a 'brood ball'.

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New findings reveal that the body undergoes significant, systematic changes across multiple organs during prolonged periods of fasting. The results demonstrate evidence of health benefits beyond weight loss, but also show that any potentially health-altering changes appear to occur only after three days without food.

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A technique originally devised to extract DNA from woolly mammoths and other ancient archaeological specimens can be used to potentially identify badly burned human remains, according to research.