Animals

Animals

Giving cats a special food may one day help people with cat allergies

Research by pet-food maker Purina aims to disable the major allergen carried in cat saliva. It’s a protein called Fel d1.

Fossils

A flexible bone that aids mammals in chewing arose during the Jurassic

A flexible bony structure that helps with chewing may have helped give rise to the Age of Mammals, a new fossil suggests.

Animals

Scientists Say: Hertz

Frequency is how often something repeats over a period of time. Frequency is often measured in hertz, the number of times a cycle repeats each second.

Animals

Ancient crocodiles may have preferred chomping plants, not meat

Fossil teeth of ancient crocodilians suggest that some ate plants and that such green diets evolved in crocs at least three times more than 60 million years ago.

Animals

New treatment offers hope for bats battling white nose syndrome

A fungal disease that has wiped out millions of North American bats has a new challenger: antifungal bacteria. Infected bats treated with the germs had a good chance of surviving.

Animals

Some mama whales may whisper to keep calves safe from orcas

Even enormous whales can fear the threat that orcas pose to their babies. It now seems that some have taken to whispering to help their young stay off the killer whales’ radar.

Animals

Scientists Say: Hagfish

Hagfish are eel-shaped fish with many traits that make them similar to long-vanished fossils. When threatened, they can pump out piles of slime.

Health & Medicine

A fungus plus a spider toxin equals a weapon to kill mosquitoes

A new weapon could help fight mosquitoes that spread malaria. It’s an engineered fungus that infects the insects — then kills them with a spider poison.

Health & Medicine

Bats are now the primary source of U.S. rabies deaths

Although human rabies is not common in the United States, it still occurs. But here dogs are no longer the likely source of this oft-lethal infection: Bats are.

Ecosystems

A million species could vanish, and people are to blame

Human activities are putting a million plant and animal species at risk of extinction, a new study finds. But it’s not too late to save many of them, scientists add.

Animals

Young aphids sacrifice themselves to make home repairs

Young aphids swollen with fatty substances save their colony by self-sacrifice. They use that goo to patch breaches in the wall of their tree home.

Ecosystems

Tiger sharks feast when migratory birds fall out of the sky

Migrating land-based birds that fall from the sky as they cross the Gulf of Mexico can end up in the belly of a young tiger shark.