Featured
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News |
Sex, food or water? How mice decide
Neurons that regulate a mouse’s response to hunger and thirst also influence social interactions with the opposite sex.
- Heidi Ledford
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Research Highlight |
This fish knows its own face in a mirror
The bluestreak cleaner wrasse attacks composite images of its own body and another fish’s head — but not pictures of its own head on another fish’s body.
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Research Highlight |
Fluffball foxes wander thousands of kilometres to find a home
The Arctic fox, which weighs less than many house cats, covers long distances in the frigid north.
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Research Briefing |
Worms exposed to virulent bacteria show changes in social behaviour
Disease-causing microorganisms can alter the social behaviour of their hosts. Caenorhabditis elegans hermaphrodite worms exposed to an infectious bacterial strain become attracted to a mixture of pheromone cues instead of avoiding it. This boosts mating with males in the hermaphrodites, increasing the ability to produce genetic diversity in the face of microbial challenge.
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News & Views |
From the archive: how kangaroo rats limit their salt intake, and searching for trout
Snippets from Nature’s past.
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News & Views |
From the archive: biological clocks, and a pollen puzzle about flies
Snippets from Nature’s past.
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News & Views |
From the archive: human memory, and fungal cultivation by ants
Snippets from Nature’s past.
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Research Highlight |
New Year’s fireworks chase wild geese high into the sky
Tracking data show that the birds fly farther than usual on the last evening of the year and are more likely to switch roosting spots.
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News & Views |
A fluid role in ant society as adults give larvae ‘milk’ from pupae
Parental-care behaviours include mammalian lactation to provide milk for offspring. The discovery that adult ants harvest nutritious fluid from pupae and give larvae this fluid reveals social feeding that aids colony success.
- Patrizia d’Ettorre
- & Kazuki Tsuji
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Nature Podcast |
Mysterious fluid from ant pupae helps feed colony
A previously unobserved source of ant nutrition, and the latest from the Nature Briefing.
- Benjamin Thompson
- & Noah Baker
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News |
Pupating ants make milk — and scientists only just noticed
A nutritious fluid secreted by pupating ants helps to feed the rest of the colony, and could play a part in the evolution of social structures.
- Miryam Naddaf
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News |
Parasite gives wolves what it takes to be pack leaders
Study is one of the few to show the behavioural effects of Toxoplasma gondii in wild animals.
- Emma Marris
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News |
Why do bat viruses keep infecting people?
Landmark study reveals ‘spillover’ mechanism for the rare but deadly Hendra virus.
- Smriti Mallapaty
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News Round-Up |
Octopus TV, vaccine hoarding and climate inequality
The latest science news, in brief.
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News |
Duck! Octopuses caught on camera throwing things at each other
Cephalopods living unusually close together have been filmed throwing shells, algae and silt — sometimes at another octopus.
- Emma Marris
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Article
| Open AccessAccommodating unobservability to control flight attitude with optic flow
Attitude can be extracted from optic flow when combined with a motion model that relates attitude to acceleration direction, which leads to stable flight attitude control with slight oscillations due to unobservable conditions.
- Guido C. H. E. de Croon
- , Julien J. G. Dupeyroux
- & Franck Ruffier
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News & Views |
Female birds disguised as males get extra food
Around 20% of female hummingbirds have plumage that is characteristic of the males of the species. Evidence for why this happens offers a surprising perspective on how evolution helps to maintain colour variations.
- Tim Caro
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Where I Work |
Preventing disease transmission between people and wildlife
Conservation scientist Gladys Kalema-Zikusoka looks after the health of mountain gorillas and livestock in southwest Uganda and teaches local residents how to avoid illness.
- Christopher Bendana
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Research Highlight |
Got rhythm? Male rock hyraxes that keep the beat have breeding success
The little mammals are accomplished vocalists — but some males are more accomplished than others.
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News Feature |
The fraught quest to account for sex in biology research
Funders and publishers are increasingly asking researchers to account for the role of sex in experiments — a requirement that’s contentious and hard to get right.
- Emily Willingham
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Research Highlight |
Dogs cry with gladness when greeting their humans
Canines’ weeping makes them the first non-human animal known to shed happy tears.
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News |
How a scandal in spider biology upended researchers’ lives
Although Jonathan Pruitt, the researcher at the centre of a retractions scandal, has resigned, former lab members and collaborators continue dealing with the fallout.
- Max Kozlov
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Research Highlight |
Bonobo apes pout and throw tantrums — and gain sympathy
Primates that showed infantile behaviour after losing in a conflict drew consolation from their companions.
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Research Highlight |
The fungus that entices male flies to mate with female corpses
Dead, spore-infested female flies lure males to their doom, perhaps with an attractive odour.
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News |
Ear fossils hint at origin of warm-blooded mammals
Analysis suggests that the cold-blooded ancestors of mammals evolved faster metabolisms in the Late Triassic period, roughly 230 million to 200 million years ago.
- Bianca Nogrady
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Research Highlight |
What’s the only farming mammal besides us? Maybe this buck-toothed rodent
A species of North American gopher fertilizes and harvests roots, encouraging their growth.
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Research Highlight |
‘Helmets’ shield shrimp from their own supersonic shock waves
The snapping shrimp’s headgear is the first known biological armour that protects against blasts.
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News Round-Up |
Celebratory science statue, polar bear survival and unappreciated research
The latest science news, in brief.
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Article
| Open AccessOptimization of avian perching manoeuvres
To perch safely, large birds minimize the distance flown after stalling when swooping up from a dive to a perch, but not the time or energy required.
- Marco KleinHeerenbrink
- , Lydia A. France
- & Graham K. Taylor
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Outlook |
The dogs learning to sniff out disease
Veterinarian Cynthia Otto explains how we might harness animals’ ability to smell human illnesses — including COVID-19.
- Julianna Photopoulos
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Research Highlight |
Frog-eating bats remember an annoying ringtone — for years
Bats trained to respond to an artificial sound can recall it up to four years later.
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Research Highlight |
The salamander that can parachute from atop the world’s tallest trees
The wandering salamander glides to the ground from on high by splaying its limbs and pumping its tail.
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Technology Feature |
The overlooked variable in animal studies: why diet makes a difference
Careful consideration and documentation of laboratory animals’ diets will boost the reproducibility of experiments.
- Jyoti Madhusoodanan
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News |
Bats buzz like hornets to scare off owl predators
Alarming impression is first known case of a mammal copying an insect to deter hostile species.
- Freda Kreier
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Nature Podcast |
Swapping in a bit of microbial 'meat' has big eco-gains
A forecast of the environmental benefits of switching to microbial protein, and the neurons that help mosquitoes home in on humans.
- Benjamin Thompson
- & Nick Petrić Howe
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News |
Massive study of pet dogs shows breed does not predict behaviour
Data from more than 18,000 canines show that pedigree is not destiny.
- Freda Kreier
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Research Highlight |
Speedy catapulting saves spiders from predators: their mates
After a sexual encounter, the male of an Asian spider species vaults off the female at a rate that can exceed 80 centimetres per second.
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News & Views |
Insights from orangutans into the evolution of tool use
Gaining the ability to make stone tools was a useful development for early human ancestors in the hominin branch of the evolutionary tree. Could studying orangutans provide clues to how this behaviour arose?
- Michael Haslam
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Career Column |
Why I got a PhD at age 61
A chance meeting at a scientific retreat took Zoltán Kócsi from the electronics industry to the entomology lab.
- Zoltán Kócsi
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Research Highlight |
These birds fly high when the full Moon hangs in the sky
Moonlit nights lure the northern black swift to altitudes of more than 4,000 metres — much higher than they soar on nights when the Moon is new.
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News & Views |
From the archive
Nature’s pages consider the ingredients needed for a successful conference, and examine the mysteries of swallow migration.
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Research Highlight |
The secrets of shark sleep
Look to a shark’s posture, not its eyes, to gauge whether it’s asleep.
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Research Highlight |
Even six-legged diners can’t resist sweet-and-salty snacks
Bees and butterflies prefer sodium-spiked nectar to plain, according to experiments conducted in a flowery meadow.
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Research Highlight |
Timekeeping rats estimate how long a task will take
The rodents learn from their mistakes to become accurate at judging the time needed to execute a lever push.
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Research Highlight |
Killer whales teach pals a new snack source: fishing lines
Orcas in one area of the southern Indian Ocean now snatch some 180 tonnes of valuable Patagonian toothfish from fishing lines every year.
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News & Views |
Ear anatomy traces a family tree for bats
How should the bat family tree be arranged? Analysis of bats’ inner ear anatomy supports a previously proposed arrangement that was based on DNA analysis. The findings also shed light on the evolution of echolocation.
- M. Brock Fenton
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Article |
Evolution of inner ear neuroanatomy of bats and implications for echolocation
The presence of a variety of highly derived spiral ganglion structures of the inner ear is associated with diverse echolocation strategies in yangochiropteran bats and distinguishes them from Yinpterochiroptera.
- R. Benjamin Sulser
- , Bruce D. Patterson
- & Zhe-Xi Luo
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Research Highlight |
Hippos know strangers’ voices — and make a filthy reply
The mammoth mammals can use each other’s ‘wheeze-honks’ to distinguish between neighbours and strangers.