A jumping insect has gears, scientists have discovered, a rare instance in which man and nature independently converged on the same idea. It was not easy to verify. One species of plant hopper is tiny, just a bit larger than a flea. And it ...

The larva of a Vietnamese moth has devised a unique form of transport — constructing a leaf cone and thrashing about inside to make it jump, a recent study showed. Even more remarkably, the tiny caterpillar manages to steer its leafy vehicle in a ...

From the elephant to the mayfly, biologists say there is a general rule about longevity: the bigger the animal, the longer it lives. But an intriguing exception is the Brandt’s bat, a native of temperate areas of Europe and Asia. The insect-munching mammal tips ...

Mosquito season is in full swing. A lucky few people seem immune to the bites of the pesky insects. Others can’t seem to avoid them. New research explains mosquitoes’ apparent selectivity. According to an article in Smithsonian magazine, an estimated 20 percent of people ...

Warfare was uncommon among hunter-gatherers, and killings among nomadic groups were often due to competition for women or interpersonal disputes, researchers in Finland said Thursday. Their study in the U.S. journal Science suggests that the origins of war were not — as some have ...

Two billion years from now, an ever-hotter sun will have cooked the Earth, leaving microbes confined to pockets of water in mountains or caves as the last survivors, a study says. The bleak scenario was proposed by astrobiologist Jack O’Malley-James of the University of ...