This year it was easy for any story about science or nature to get, quite literally, eclipsed. When the world wasn't fixated on the total solar eclipse that traversed the continental U.S., scientists were making headlines by marching through major U.S. cities.
But there were many other important if less publicized events, ideas, trends, problems and discoveries in 2017. Take, for one, an announcement in July that strongly suggested ravens were capable of cause-and-effect reasoning, planning ahead and skilled bartering.
Psychologists commenting on the paper noted a profound implication — that evolution produced intelligence independently at least twice. Intelligent behavior in apes may have stemmed from the same root as our own, but birds are perched on a different branch of the evolutionary tree, separated from ours by 300 million years.