Human parents usually have one or sometimes two offspring at a time, and when babies get delivered we pour all our energy into childrearing. But other animals raise lots of babies at once. And the weaker individuals can be at a big disadvantage. If t...
Canada Geese Taking a Winter Staycation Over the last few decades, Canada geese have been wintering further and further north, which was interesting, because the winters have gotten a little more mild over the last few years, but still its pretty col...
Sharks Rule the Reef's Underwater Food Chain Predators like wolves affect their ecosystems by eating their prey. But a more subtle impact involves fear. Predators also terrify prey species. And when, for example, elk are hiding, they don't spend as m...
Small, tasty mammals like dwarf mongooses have one main goal: do not get eaten. So the animala type of weaselhas a surveillance system. While most of the group focuses on finding food, a handful of others watch for predators. They take turns so that...
Populations of frogs, salamanders and other amphibians are declining around the worldeven in protected areas, like U.S. national parks. Ecologists needed a simple method to track the animals numbers. Now, researchers have found an effective way to ke...
Baby Bats Can Learn Different Dialects Bats are sophisticated communicators. And not just when theyre in vampire form. New research finds that Egyptian fruit bats actually have regional dialects, depending on the bat chatter that surrounds them as th...
Just as humans understand the shape of oursurroundings by how light reflects off objects, batsuse reflections of sounds they produce insteadwhat's called echolocation. But despite theirexcellent sensing abilities, one type of obstaclevexes the animal...
Radiation Might Help Heart Regain its Rhythm That beeping sound is the normal beating of a heart. But here's what the same heart sounds like, during a bout of ventricular tachycardia, or VT the racing beats are caused by an electrical short circuit i...
You Live In a Strange Solar System The more astronomers study the heavens, the more they realize: our solar system is weird.There are a few things that make the solar system kind of strange.Lauren Weiss, an astrophysicist at the University of Montrea...
Which Came First: The Proboscis or the Flower? To learn about the plant life of long ago, scientists dig through layers of the Earth, looking for fossil clues. Like bits of fossilized pollen, or spores.And that's where I come in. Timo van Eldijk (EL-...
Ah yes.The ol' fluoride rinse at the dentist. Not pleasant. But hey, good for your teeth, right? 没错，这是牙医洗牙用的含氟漱口水。确实够闹心的。但毕竟对你的牙齿有益不是吗? Well now materials scientists have been...
When we humans talk to other humans, the soundswe make all have very specific meanings. When Isay apple you immediately imagine something thathas the characteristics of an apple. Yossi Yovel, aneuroecologist at Tel Aviv University in Israel. Andthe q...
Finches Can Learn to Sing Differently Than Their Genetics Dictate In the most recent podcast we discussed how baby bats learn their callsfrom all the other bats in their crowded colonies. And we mentioned in passing that songbirds usually get tutored...
It's particularly concerning that 56 million Americans a month admit that they drive when they haven't gotten enough sleep and they are exhausted.Charles Czeisler. Hes the director of the Division of Sleep Medicine at Harvard Medical School. 需要特别...
Pain and Weather Fail to Connect Are you one of those people who can tell when a storm is approaching based on your achy knees? Well, you may think you are. But a new study of more than 1.5 million seniors finds no relationship between rainfall and d...
