As horror-flick titles go, Night of the Living Chaos and Rosemary’s Nonlinearity aren’t the catchiest. But filmmakers know that chaos — the mathematical kind — is scary. Now scientists know it too.
sciencenewsFilmmakers use chaotic, unpredictable …

In the popular imagination, the colossal squid is fast and terrifying, able to dispatch whales and submarines with ease.
But the image of the squid as a nasty predator of the deep is probably more mythology …

The wings were willing, but the feathers were weak. Delicate, thin-shafted plumage would have made flapping difficult if not impossible for two prehistoric birds, a new analysis of fossil feathers suggests.
sciencenews Their feathers probably would …

After a judge excluded brain scan evidence offered by the plaintiff, a jury quickly found for the defense in a Brooklyn sexual harassment case this week.
The case, which drew national attention following a Wired.com article …

From wings to low-density bones to echolocation, the evolution of flight in bats required many radical changes. But the most important change may have been metabolic.
A genetic comparison of dozens of mammal species shows that …

The Allan Hills meteorite, named for the site where it was found in Antarctica, was once thought to contain fossil traces of life. That idea has been mostly dismissed, and now the rock also appears …

Two 1.9 million-year-old skeletons found in a South African cave have added a new and intriguing member to the primate family.
Dubbed Australopithecus sediba, it has many features — including long legs and a protruding nose …

In the muck of the deep Mediterranean seafloor, scientists have found the first multicellular animals capable of surviving in an entirely oxygen-free environment.
Some types of bacteria and other single-celled organisms can live without oxygen, but …

A late-winter expansion of Arctic sea ice is a good example of ice-forming dynamics that could keep the Arctic from hitting a “tipping point” in the near future.
Some scientists have predicted that rising temperatures could …

Birds, bats and lizards may play an important role in Earth’s climate by protecting plants from insects that forage on foliage. A new study suggests that preserving these animals could be a low-tech way to …

If bones could scream, a bloodcurdling din would be reverberating through a 500-year-old cemetery in Peru. Human skeletons unearthed there have yielded the first direct evidence of Inca fatalities caused by Spanish conquerors.
sciencenewsEuropean newcomers killed …

It’s the ultimate love-at-first-sight story: In the middle of the desert, hundreds of miles from anything else, lonely sand grains meet up in a crowd and decide to electrify each other. Sparks fly.
sciencenewsPhysicists have long …

A massive search for a prime suspect in the mystery of the missing heritability has come up empty.
Known as copy-number variations, or CNVs, these extra or missing sequences of the genome have been linked to …

A new study cites spikes of ammonium in Greenland ice cores as evidence for a giant comet impact at the end of the last ice age, and suggests that the collision may have caused a …

Bats are nocturnal, but some need sunlight to set their internal compass.
“Recent evidence suggests that bats can detect the geomagnetic field,” wrote Max Planck Institute ornithologists Richard Holland, Ivailo Borissov and Bjorn Siemers in an …

Early this morning, two proton beams collided in the Large Hadron Collider’s 17-mile-long ring at a combined energy of 7 TeV, three times higher than ever before. Finally, the flood of data particle physicists have …

Bats can subtly adjust the frequency of the sounds they use to do echolocation to adjust to particularly cluttered terrain.
In a laboratory testing room filled with dangling plastic chains, bats wearing tiny, half-gram microphones were …

Lines at the grocery store might become as obsolete as milkmen, if a new tag that seeks to replace bar codes becomes commonplace.
sciencenewsResearchers from Sunchon National University in Suncheon, South Korea, and Rice University in …

A new member of the human evolutionary family has been proposed for the first time based on an ancient genetic sequence, not fossil bones. Even more surprising, this novel and still mysterious hominid, if confirmed, …

A survey of 200 sites in 20 countries around the world has found that bisphenol A, a synthetic compound that mimics estrogen and is linked to developmental disorders, is ubiquitous in Earth’s oceans.
Bisphenol A, or …