Ellie Harper 
The mother ate badly. The pup paid permanently. A C57BL/6 laboratory mouse pup whose mother ate a low-fiber diet while nursing it nearly doubled in weight by weaning. The researchers then put it on a healthy, fiber-balanced diet for nine weeks. The Proteobacteria kept blooming in its gut. The weight kept climbing. The mother’s three-week … Read more
Bees Dance Worse to a Bored Room The waggle dance of the Western honey bee (Apis mellifera) has always been sold as fixed code: a forager returns to the hive, runs a tight figure eight on the vertical comb, and hands out the same coordinates to whoever happens to be standing nearby. A study published … Read more
The One-Tonne Dinosaur With a Sail on Its Back In 2025, in the journal Papers in Palaeontology, Dr. Jeremy Lockwood and his colleagues named a new dinosaur: Istiorachis macarthurae, an iguanodontian, a member of the plant-eating dinosaur group that includes Iguanodon. It comes from Early Cretaceous rock on England’s Isle of Wight, laid down more … Read more
One Snake, Two Costumes Two snakes pulled from the sandy wadis around AlUla, in Saudi Arabia’s Hejaz region, look nothing alike. One is brick-red with a solid black collar wrapped just behind its eyes, as if its head had been dipped in black paint before the rest of the body was left its natural reddish … Read more
The Ambush An assassin bug that lives near the hives of stingless bees in Thailand and China doesn’t wait around empty-handed. Pahabengkakia piliceps, a true bug in the family Reduviidae (the assassin bugs, named for the raptorial front legs they use to grab and hold prey), sits at the hive entrance, dips its front and … Read more
The Cow Who Knows Which End Is Which Veronika picks up a broom and already knows what she’s going to do with it. Bristles for her back. Handle for her navel and udder. She decides before she grips, not after. Veronika is a Braunvieh, a Swiss brown dairy breed, kept as a family pet on … Read more
The Puppy Who Is Already Nine Months Old An 8-week-old Labrador retriever, the age at which most puppies leave the litter for a new home, has an epigenetic age (a biological age read off chemical markers on DNA, not off a calendar) that matches a 9-month-old human infant. That comes from a study led by … Read more
The Butterfly That Can’t Fly Straight Watch a white cabbage butterfly (Pieris rapae) hover over a flower and it looks like it’s fighting gravity and losing. The body jolts up, then down, then up again, in a stutter that reads less like flight and more like a malfunction. Park a hoverfly over the same bloom … Read more
The Coral That Flexes Touch a branch of Leptogorgia chilensis, the red gorgonian that lives on rocky seafloor beneath the kelp forests of the Pacific coast from California to Chile, and it stops swaying. One moment it is bending in the current like any other soft coral, an octocoral with no stony, reef-building skeleton to … Read more
The Fact That Shouldn’t Be True Between 1995 and 2019, polar bears on Svalbard got fatter, not thinner, while the sea ice under their paws disappeared at roughly twice the rate of most of the Arctic. Jon Aars and his colleagues at the Norwegian Polar Institute captured and measured 770 adult bears, 1,188 captures in … Read more
