Microscope work may have solved the puzzle of Asian snails’ “useless” snorkels. The small Alycaeidae land snails of Asia grow what looks like a tiny breathing tube curling partway along the outside of their shells. Similar tubes let some other land snails breathe when a little blast-door operculum shuts the main opening of their shells. […]

To understand human longevity, look to the animal world, says James Carey, a biodemography specialist at the University of California, Davis. Studying other species, from insects to elephants, “provides important information for why we age and why we live as long as we do,” Carey says. By looking at how long other organisms can live, […]

Dark matter has once again given scientists the slip. Physicists with the Large Underground Xenon experiment, or LUX, report that their final set of data, collected from October 2014 to May 2016, contains no evidence of dark matter, the mysterious substance that makes up more than 25 percent of the universe. The LUX detector, located […]

In the arms race of life, a number of animals use venom as a weapon to paralyze prey and jump-start digestion. Meanwhile, venom also helps a variety of other seemingly defenseless creatures improve their odds against larger, stronger or more aggressive foes. In Venomous, molecular biologist Christie Wilcox surveys the animal kingdom’s wide array of […]

The whipsaw of recent Zika news — good, then grim, then good again — paints a dizzying picture of the epidemic’s reach, risks and how to fight it. On July 25, Colombia announced that the Zika epidemic there was over — good news for a country with nearly 100,000 cases of infection reported so far. […]

Here’s something new for real estate agents to boast about in posh neighborhoods: houses with a bigger variety of insects and spiders. Maybe that’s not the best selling point. But what’s called a “luxury effect” appeared among more than 10,000 arthropod samples collected from the insides of 50 houses in urban and suburban Raleigh, N.C. […]

A busy protein known for its role in aging may also have a hand in depression, a study on mice hints. Under certain circumstances, the aging-related SIRT1 protein seems to make mice despondent, scientists report August 10 in the Journal of Neuroscience. The results are preliminary, but they might ultimately help find new depression treatments. […]

It’s all relativeIn “Earth is young at heart” (SN: 6/25/16, p. 5), Emily Conover reported that Earth’s core is more than two years younger than the planet’s surface, according to new calculations. Thanks to the effect of gravity on the passage of time, a clock placed at Earth’s core will tick fractions of a second […]

It’s time to go wild studying antimicrobial resistance, a research team says. Most analyses of how microbes come to laugh off the drugs and disinfectants that should kill them have focused on people in hospitals or livestock on farms, says behavioral ecologist Kathryn Arnold of the University of York in England. Yet a growing number […]

Out-of-reach nutrients could help explain why life on Earth took so long to bounce back from the worst extinction of all time. Analyzing the chemical changes that followed the Permian extinction 252 million years ago, geologists propose that hot sea surface temperatures led to conditions that trapped nitrogen far below the ocean’s sunlit, life-filled layers. […]