A single aspen colony in Utah called Pando covers 43 hectares as roughly 47,000 genetically identical stems sharing one root system, making…
Aug 24, 2026
What's new in
Life
Biology, animals, plants, and life beyond the human story.
UC Berkeley researchers reconstructing the ancestry of more than 500 living human genomes identified DNA from two unidentified human…
Aug 24, 2026
The mantis shrimp is routinely described as seeing millions more colours than humans, but a 2014 Science study found something stranger
Aug 23, 2026
An octopus has three hearts, but during jet-propelled swimming its main systemic heart can briefly stop—the pressure inside its mantle…
Aug 23, 2026
A kangaroo hopping at high speed can use dramatically less energy than a four-legged mammal of the same size running at the same pace
Aug 23, 2026
Genomic research published in 2026 revealed that koalas suffered a severe population collapse beginning about 100,000 years ago—before…
By Lachlan Brown · Aug 23, 2026
A marine worm with no mouth and no gut makes its own enzyme for digesting the bioplastic its skin bacteria build up, and the same kind of…
Aug 23, 2026
Wild bearded capuchin monkeys in Brazil select heavy stones, sometimes weighing more than a kilogram, carry them to anvils and use them to…
Aug 23, 2026
A fragment of fossil thigh bone was the only piece carrying this specimen's collection number, and losing it hid where the animal came from…
Aug 22, 2026
South Korean men born in 1996 were estimated to be about 15.2 centimetres taller than men born there in 1896
Aug 22, 2026
The textbook reason insects never colonised the deep ocean is that water pressure would crush their airways
By Brendan Brown · Aug 22, 2026
A worm frozen in Siberian permafrost for 46,000 years
By Brendan Brown · Aug 22, 2026