60-second Science

Prey animals flash biochemically produced light to confuse elephant seals hunting in the dark. But at least one seal turned the tables.

Analyzing keywords on Twitter can offer a loose measure of the subjective well-being of a community, as long as you don’t count three words: good, love and LOL.

The Silent Cities project is collecting sound from cities around the planet during the coronavirus pandemic to give researchers a database of natural sound in areas usually filled with human-generated noise.

Here are some brief reports about science and technology from around the planet, including one about an incredibly well-preserved horned lark (Eremophila alpestris), like the one pictured, that lived 46,000 years ago.

Exposed to mildly warmer waters, some corals turn neon instead of bleaching white. The dramatic colors may help coax symbiotic algae back. Christopher Intagliata reports. 

A gene whose mutated form is associated with cancer in humans turns out to have a role in burning calories over a long evolutionary history.

Mosquitoes that like to bite at night are being thwarted by bed nets, leading to the rise of populations that prefer to bite when the nets are not up yet.

President Trump pointed out yesterday that if we didn't do any testing for the virus we would have very few cases, which forces us to confront the issues posed by testing in general.

Food sharing is mainly found in adult animals as a part of social bonding. But in a rarely observed behavior in birds, older barn owl chicks will share food with younger ones.

Dehydrated blood that could be kept at room temperature for years may be possible thanks to a sugar used to preserve donuts—and made by tardigrades and brine shrimp so they can dry out and spring back with water.

To entice female ring-tailed lemurs, males rub wrist secretions, which include compounds we use in perfumes, onto their tail and then wave it near the gals.

They don’t stand on one leg around just anybody but often prefer certain members of the flock.

Horses picked out photographs of their current keepers, and even of former keepers whom they had not seen in months, at a rate much better than chance.

The large herbivores appear to prefer disturbed areas over more intact ones and spread many more seeds in those places through their droppings.

Bees infected with a virus cut back on interactions within their hive but find it easier to get past sentries at neighboring hives.

Wild cats kill more animals than domestic ones do. But pet cats kill many more of them in a small area than similarly sized wild predators.

Here are a few brief reports about science and technology from around the planet, including one about what the eruption of Mount Vesuvius might have done to one ill-fated resident of Herculaneum.

Oxpeckers riding on rhinoceroses feast on ticks, and their calls warn the nearsighted herbivores about approaching humans.

In a teleconference promoting her participation in Earth Day events on the National Geographic Channel, Goodall talked about what gives her hope during the pandemic and what she hopes we all learn from it.

Here are some “highlights” from the past 13.5 years of this podcast.