A Moment of Science

Most insects fly—but, across millennia, many species have lost the ability. Island dwelling insects have been especially prone to this evolutionary trend.

Scientists get a little weary of some people saying that the fact that evolution is a theory means that modern science itself isn't convinced it really happens. Today we review the difference between a theory and a law.

Wolves are predators that hunt and kill large mammals, such as deer. During the season that they rear their pups, they kill prey and bring it back to their den for their pups to eat.

Rewilding is a term coined in the 1990s by those working in conservation and environmental activism. It refers to large-scale wilderness recovery that allows natural processes and native wildlife to flourish in its proper place.

You may already know that chocolate can be lethal to your pet, but did you know that onions can be toxic to your cats and dogs too? And I'm not just talking about their breath.

“Baby talk,” or “motherese,” might not be a language with any native speakers, but most humans seem suddenly fluent in it in certain situations. And it turns out bats might do something similar.

The first picture an expecting mother is likely to see of her developing fetus is not, technically, a picture at all. Most likely, it's an ultrasound image, produced by technology that has more to do with hearing than with seeing.

Part of the appeal of chameleons lies in their ability to fire their long sticky tongues out of their mouths to capture insects to eat. Scientists recently discovered an animal from 99 millions years that had the same kind of tongue.

Some photos appear normal, except for an unearthly red color glowing from the pupils of your loved ones' eyes. Are Grandma and Uncle Felix possessed, or is there some other explanation for this red-eye phenomenon?

The human brain is exquisitely tuned to identify faces and facial expressions, which are so important to human social interaction. Researchers have found that certain areas of the human cerebral cortex are specialized for processing visual information about faces.

Pretty much everyone knows that oxygen is a fundamental requirement for life as we know it, but oddly enough that’s not entirely right. There are many simple life forms, such as some kinds of bacteria and archea, that don’t have a major metabolic pathway that needs oxygen.

Ecologists go in search of birds displaced by hurricanes that make landfall along the coastal wetlands of the southern U.S. The abundant plant life there provides homes to birds that wade through brackish waters and nest in these environments.

In 2020 paleontologists found the oldest fossil evidence of a parasite ever, in 540 million-year-old rocks in Yunnan Province, China.

Today’s A Moment of Science examines brachiation, which is how apes and monkeys swing through the trees. Orangutans, spider monkeys, and chimpanzees can brachiate, but gibbons do it most often.

Bacteria are evolving the ability to resist some of our most important antibiotics. Unless something is done, resistant strains of bacteria may kill 10 million people per year by 2050.

In 2020, an international team of researchers made an important discovery about a parasite called a dodder. Dodders are a group of over a 100 parasitic plant species, found through much of the world.

The molecular working parts of living things are complex organic molecules with a backbone of carbon atoms. Some scientists think that hot springs might have provided the special chemical environments needed to link simple molecules up to form these longer and more complicated molecules.

Cutaneous respiration is the ability to breathe through the skin, and is a common trait in amphibians, although humans can't do it.

Some scientists have an exact figure for how much failure is optimal for learning: they say that learning is most effective when it involves failure 15 percent of the time.

We use money all the time, but have you ever wondered why U.S. banknotes are green? After A Moment of Science researchers did some investigating into the history of the Bureau of Engraving and Printing, it turns out that there are several reasons for the green-back design.

The willows in Yellowstone National Park used to commonly grow up to 157 inches tall. But in the 1990s, most willows in the northern part of the park only grew to be 39 inches.

If we understood how Earth's climate has changed over its long geological history, we could better understand modern climate change. In 2020, geoscientists took a major step towards that goal when they published the most complete reconstruction of the last 66 million years of Earth's climate history.

The ancient Egytians used copper to sterilize wounds and clean their drinking water. They even wrote about it in one of the oldest known medical texts, the Smith Papyrus, which is over four thousand years old.

Crop rotation involves a lot of questions, like a puzzle. There are so many different crops that farmers can choose to plant, and so many different combinations; the possiblities are endless.

Rudist clams were around in the late Cretaceous and are extinct today. Their fossils can tell us a lot of surprising things, such as the length of a day 70 million years ago.