Raccoons Pass Famous Aesop’s Fable Test—By Upending It
Raccoons are notoriously pesky, but are they as clever as crows? Scientists recently put the masked mammals through the Aesop's Fable test, which measures if animals can discern cause and…
How Bacteria Rule Over Your Body – The Microbiome
What happens when microbes talk to your brain?
What hunter-gatherer gut microbiomes have that we don’t, and breaking the emoji code
Sarah Crespi talks to Sam Smits about how our microbial passengers differ from one culture to the next—are we losing diversity and the ability to fight chronic disease? For our…
Will insects inherit the earth?
Brian Cox and Robin Ince are joined on stage by comedian Dave Gorman, zoologist Tim Cockerill and forensic entomologist Amoret Whitaker. They'll be discovering the joy of creepy crawlies, why…
The Mean, Green, Water-Cleaning Machine
The Algal Turf Scrubber (ATS) is one of the marine ecology field’s best-kept secrets. Invented by Smithsonian scientist Dr. Walter Adey in the 1980s, the ATS harvests algae from large…
Meet Rare Sea Wolves Who Live Off The Ocean And Can Swim For Hours
Along the wild Pacific coast of British Columbia, there lives a population of the sea wolves. “We know from exhaustive DNA studies that these wolves are genetically distinct from their…
The Wastebook
After a senator calls her research a waste of taxpayer dollars, biologist Sheila Patek heads to Capitol Hill to prove what her science is worth. In December 2015, the fight…
Making the Invisible Visible
What does it mean in scientific research to say we can see something?