The link between pollinator problems and neonicotinoids, a group of agricultural pesticides commonly associated with declines in honeybees, continues to build with two new studies published this week. Butterflies of Northern California join the ranks of honeybees, bumblebees, moths and other organisms that may be feeling the effects of the infamous insecticides. Butterfly species in […]

A few Tasmanian devils have started a resistance movement against a contagious cancer that has depleted their numbers. Since devil facial tumor disease was first discovered in 1996, it has wiped out about 80 percent of the Tasmanian devil population. In some places, up to 95 percent of devils (Sarcophilus harrisii) have succumbed to facial […]

It’s official: The southern tidewater goby is a thing. And it’s chubbier and nubbier than its northern cousin. Endangered tidewater gobies live in California’s seaside lagoons. Ranging roughly the entire length of the state, the fish used to be considered one species. But a new study confirms that gobies living in Northern and Southern California […]

Jeremy Freeman loves clean, simple lines. To see his bent toward aesthetic minimalism, you need look no further than his spare, calm website that slowly shifts colors. In the past, this fixation with style has occasionally veered toward the extreme. In graduate school at New York University, “he decided that capital letters were ugly,” says […]

Jupiter’s moon Europa might once again be venting water into space, further supporting the idea that an ocean hides beneath its thick shell of ice, researchers reported September 26 at a news conference. Plumes erupting from the moon’s surface, silhouetted against background light from Jupiter, appear in several images taken by the Hubble Space Telescope […]

PASADENA, Calif. — Jupiter’s clouds have deep roots. The multicolored bands that wrap around the planet reach hundreds of kilometers down into the atmosphere, NASA’s Juno spacecraft reveals, providing an unprecedented peek into the giant planet’s interior. “Whatever’s making those colors and stripes still exists pretty far down,” planetary scientist Scott Bolton, head of the […]

A bizarre new birdlike dino was part of an evolutionary extravaganza at the end of the age of dinosaurs. And it was a real stick-in-the-mud, too. Construction workers blasted Tongtianlong limosus out of the Earth near Ganzhou in southern China. “They very nearly blew this thing to smithereens,” says paleontologist Stephen Brusatte of the University […]

Unseasonable shrinking of sea ice could trigger another peril of climate change: increasing ice-overs on land that starve reindeer and threaten Siberian herders’ way of life. The worst of these events in the memory of Nenets herders on Russia’s Yamal Peninsula killed 61,000 of 275,000 reindeer in 2013, a blow to the herders’ livelihood that […]

Living on the bottom rungs of the social ladder may be enough to make you sick. A new study manipulating the pecking order of monkeys finds that low social status kicks the immune system into high gear, leading to unwanted inflammation akin to that in people with chronic diseases. The new study, in the Nov. […]

Narrow channels of moisture snaking through the atmosphere can bring storms that wreck beachfront bungalows — and leave oyster beds bare. Several of these channels, called atmospheric rivers (SN: 2/26/11, p. 20), dumped particularly heavy storms on California in early 2011. The resulting freshwater influx probably left part of the San Francisco Bay without enough […]