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One whiff of an alarm pheromone sends figurative shivers down a mouse's little spine. Animals in distress release such pheromones, which serve as warnings to others of their kind. But [...]

No one likes making mistakes on the job, but it's easy to lose focus when you're stuck doing the same thing over and over. What if you could predict--and prevent--such [...]

Sailors and scientists have been mapping ocean currents for centuries, but it turns out they've missed something big. How big? The entire ocean is striped with 100-mile-wide bands of slow-moving [...]

The burning of biomass, such as wood or dung, and of certain fossil fuels releases particulate black carbon, or soot. Until now, soot has been considered a minor player in [...]

Almost 2,000 years ago the Maya concocted a pigment, since dubbed Maya blue, which has endured the harsh climate of southern Mexico on murals, pottery, and sculptures. Archaeologists, however, never [...]

Pirates may not come across as the most civic-minded folk, but a new study shows that pirate crews operating in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries adopted a democratic [...]

At the start of each breeding season, male red-backed fairy-wrens high enough on the social ladder darken their bills and shed their lackluster brown feathers for a flashy black-and-red set [...]

Saltwater crocodiles aren't known for their sentimentality, but they are prone to bouts of homesickness, according to a new study. Conducted with the help of the late Steve R. Irwin--the […]

Scientific consensus that humans have caused global warming coalesced in about 1995. Yet for the next decade many Americans still believed that humankind's role in the emerging crisis was a […]

Coping with rattlesnakes is a fact of life for California ground squirrels. Fortunately, adult squirrels are immune to the snake's venom. To protect their susceptible pups, when a rattler comes […]

Flowering plants provide food to their animal visitors in exchange for pollination, so both groups are in big trouble if their schedules fail to mesh. Will global warming disrupt their […]

The abundance of pre-Columbian bronze, copper, and silver artifacts in Peru indicates that the region was a center for metallurgy in the New World. But archaeologists have long been puzzled […]