60-second Science

Food sharing is mainly found in adult animals as a part of social bonding. But in a rarely observed behavior in birds, older barn owl chicks will share food with younger ones.

Dehydrated blood that could be kept at room temperature for years may be possible thanks to a sugar used to preserve donuts—and made by tardigrades and brine shrimp so they can dry out and spring back with water.

To entice female ring-tailed lemurs, males rub wrist secretions, which include compounds we use in perfumes, onto their tail and then wave it near the gals.

They don’t stand on one leg around just anybody but often prefer certain members of the flock.

Horses picked out photographs of their current keepers, and even of former keepers whom they had not seen in months, at a rate much better than chance.

The large herbivores appear to prefer disturbed areas over more intact ones and spread many more seeds in those places through their droppings.

Bees infected with a virus cut back on interactions within their hive but find it easier to get past sentries at neighboring hives.

Wild cats kill more animals than domestic ones do. But pet cats kill many more of them in a small area than similarly sized wild predators.

Here are a few brief reports about science and technology from around the planet, including one about what the eruption of Mount Vesuvius might have done to one ill-fated resident of Herculaneum.

Oxpeckers riding on rhinoceroses feast on ticks, and their calls warn the nearsighted herbivores about approaching humans.

In a teleconference promoting her participation in Earth Day events on the National Geographic Channel, Goodall talked about what gives her hope during the pandemic and what she hopes we all learn from it.

Here are some “highlights” from the past 13.5 years of this podcast.

Introducing herds of large herbivores in the Arctic would disturb surface snow, allowing cold air to reach the ground and keep the permafrost frosty.

In mice, a test for lung cancer involves nanoprobes that recognize tumors and send reporter molecules into the urine for simple analysis.

As he endorsed Joe Biden today, former president Barack Obama touched on some environmental, economic and science matters.

Researchers studying yellow warbler responses to the parasitic cowbird realized that red-winged blackbirds were eavesdropping on the calls and reacting to them, too.

Well, it’s probably there because the odds on its presence have gone way up in the past 40 years. But such parasites are still much more of a health problem for whales and dolphins than they are for us.

Although the tusk can be a weapon, the variation in tusk length among animals of similar body size points to it being primarily a mating status signal.

Pulitzer-winning Laurie Garrett, author of The Coming Plague: Newly Emerging Diseases in a World Out of Balance, talks about the dangers of politicians offering coronavirus misinformation.

Tigers and lions at the Bronx Zoo have tested positive for the virus, and studies show that house cats—but apparently not dogs—can become infected.