A male Southern Painted Turtle (Chrysemys picta dorsalis). (Credit: André Karwath / Courtesy of Wikimedia Commons)

Turtles nesting along the Mississippi River and other areas are altering their nesting dates in response to rising temperatures, says a researcher from Iowa State University.

Fred Janzen, a professor in ecology, evolution and organismal biology, has studied turtle nesting habits […]

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The population of house sparrows in Britain has fallen by 68% in the past three decades, according to the RSPB.
A report by the charity said the paving over of front gardens and removal of trees had caused a big decline in insects that the birds eat.

It suggests sparrows are now disappearing altogether from cities such […]

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The fate of the world’s few remaining Western Grey Whales now rests on the outcome of appeals to Russian authorities and courts following the refusal of an oil consortium to consider alternatives to a proposal to lay an oil pipeline through a shallow lagoon crucial to the whales’ food supplies.

Last month the Russian government ignored […]

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Gibbon. The modern human foot first appeared about 1.8 million years ago, but our ape-like ancestors probably took to walking several million years earlier, even though their feet were more ‘floppy’ and ape like than ours.
(Credit: iStockphoto/Chanyut Sribua-rawd)

The human foot is a miracle of evolution. We can keep striding for miles on our well-sprung […]

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A team led by a Texas A&M University anthropologist has discovered a group of primates not seen alive in 85 years. The pygmy tarsiers, furry Furby-like, or gremlin-looking, creatures about the size of a small mouse and weighing less than two ounces, have not been observed since they were last collected for a museum in […]

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When cockroaches flee their predators, they choose, seemingly at random, amongst one of a handful of preferred escape routes, according to a report published on November 13th in Current Biology, a Cell Press publication.

"By using one of a number of possible trajectories, we think that cockroaches may behave with sufficient unpredictability to avoid the possibility […]

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A beautiful book out this month takes readers on a mosquito-free tour through the tropical rainforest, which, as E O Wilson reminds us in the foreword, is rapidly disappearing.

Tropical rainforest covers an area roughly equal to the US, and human activity is destroying an area equivalent to South Carolina each year - that’s a football […]

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Australian researchers are launching the world first detailed map of the kangaroo genome, completing the first phase of the kangaroo genomics project.

Researchers at the ARC Centre of Excellence for Kangaroo Genomics (KanGO), including University of Melbourne, ANU, WEHI, University of Sydney, University of NSW and the Australian Genome Research Foundation (AGRF) have built a framework […]

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It is well known that plants growing under unfavourable conditions are generally smaller than those growing in stress-free conditions: indeed it is estimated that in the US, abiotic stress reduces the yield of agricultural crops by an average of 22%.

A spectacular example of the effect of stress – in this case, repeated wounding – on […]

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Steeped in tradition, Europe’s vintners have found themselves hard pressed to compete with the modern processes used to produce New World wines. Now European researchers are offering the continent’s winemaking industry the opportunity to improve quality, save water and reduce pesticide use without giving up age-old practices.

An automated wireless precision monitoring system that uses sensors […]

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