If there was a 'Just So' story for how the zebra got its stripes, I'm sure that Rudyard Kipling would have come up with an amusing and entertaining camouflage explanation. But would he have come up with the explanation that Gabor Horvath, Susanne Akesson and colleagues from Hungary and Sweden have: that zebra's stripes stave off blood-sucking insects? The team publishes their discovery that zebra stripes is the least attractive hide pattern for voracious horsefiles in the Journal of Experimental Biology.

The movement patterns of critically endangered leatherback turtles vary greatly depending on whether the animals live in the North Atlantic or the Eastern Pacific, with implications for feeding behavior and population recovery, according to research published May 16 in the open access journal PLoS ONE.

Biologists at the University of California, San Diego have succeeded in engineering algae to produce potential candidates for a vaccine that would prevent transmission of the parasite that causes malaria, an achievement that could pave the way for the development of an inexpensive way to protect billions of people from ...

A landmark effort to sequence the genome of a South American butterfly has revealed the key behind its unusual ability to mimic other butterflies.

A team of Israeli and German scientists from Ben-Gurion University of the Negev (BGU) and the Max Planck Institute of Colloids and Interfaces have found an enamel-like layer in the mandibles of freshwater crayfish, according to an article in Nature Communications titled "Enamel-like Apatite Crown Covering Amorphous Mineral in a ...

University of Wisconsin-Madison plant breeders have developed a new oat variety that's significantly higher in the compound that makes this grain so cardio-friendly.

For decades, scientists have studied Caenorhabditis elegans – tiny, transparent worms – to glean clues about how neurons develop and function. A new Harvard study suggests that the worms' nervous system is much more capable and complex than previously thought, and has a way to monitor its own motion, a ...

Swiss researchers have found evidence that plants also "invented" the dosage compensation of sex chromosomes. They detected this phenomenon in the white campion.