Duke University has decided to close its herbarium, a collection of 825,000 specimens of plants, fungi and algae that was established more than a century ago. The collection, one of the largest and most diverse in the country, has helped scientists map the diversity of plant life and chronicle the impact of humans on the […]

People have told stories of strange underwater sounds for thousands of years, but it took until the mid-20th century for scientists to pinpoint one of the causes: whales, singing and whistling and squeaking in the blue. The means by which some whales make these sounds has remained a mystery. A study published Wednesday in the […]

On Fridays at 10 a.m., Richard Bement and Zach Ahmed sign on to their weekly video chat. The program that brought them together provides online discussion prompts and suggests arts-related activities, but the two largely ignore all that. “We just started talking about things that were important to us,” said Mr. Ahmed, 19, a pre-med […]

Faster than Gene Kelly tap-dancing in the rain, many species of poison dart frogs tap their middle toes on their hind feet so rapidly it can look like a blur. Three laboratories in different countries recently set out independently to understand why. Their studies all suggest that the presence of prey influences these frogs’ toe-tapping, […]

The Bomb and I go way back. In Seattle, where I grew up in the 1950s and ’60s, it was common wisdom that in the event of nuclear war, we were No. 2 on the target list because Seattle was the home of Boeing, maker of B-52 bombers and Minuteman missiles. In school we had […]

Over the summer, Lohit Y.T., a river and wetlands specialist at World Wildlife Fund-India, set off with his friends in the drizzly foothills of the Western Ghats in India. They had one goal: to see amphibians and reptiles. “There were five of us, busy searching for the species and avoiding leeches,” Mr. Lohit said. But […]

Scientists have found pieces of a meteorite that fell near Berlin just after midnight on Jan. 21. It is a rare find, from an asteroid that was identified just before it entered Earth’s atmosphere. Only a handful of such events in the recent past have allowed astronomers to trace an incoming rock’s origin in the […]

The damage that air pollution can do is wide-ranging and well-known: The chemicals produced by human activities can trap heat in the atmosphere, change the chemistry of the oceans and harm human health in myriad ways. Now, a new study suggests that air pollution might also make flowers less attractive to pollinating insects. Compounds called […]

Like many captive elephants, Nidia suffered from chronic foot problems. Fissures had formed in the 55-year-old Asian elephant’s foot pads, and her toenails had cracked and become ingrown. Painful abscesses lingered for months. Nidia had lost her appetite and she was losing weight. Dr. Quetzalli Hernández, the veterinarian in charge of Nidia’s care at a […]

The new studies on sleep involved federal data from the Behavioral Risk Factor Surveillance System and the American Time Use Survey between 2013 and 2019. Researchers used those time-stamped surveys from about 190,000 from Black people and about 1,846,000 white people who had been called at random by phone and asked about, among other topics, […]