Science

Why making if-then connections might be the key to consciousness

5 minutes

Our Earth, shaped by life

Darwin was the first to see that all lifeforms, from worms to corals, transform the planet. What does that mean for us?

Olivia Judson

To understand the limits of human senses, look to the wild world of animal cognition

45 minutes

Symmetry rules life on Earth – but it comes with many fascinating exceptions

9 minutes

There’s no one way for an insect to fly, but they’re all amazing in close up and slo-mo

7 minutes

Fortune favours the shrewd

Attaining and maintaining power lies at the heart of almost all animal societies. And it’s as devious as human politicking

Lee Alan Dugatkin

Like pop music, humpback whale songs spread, mutate, and fall out of fashion

9 minutes

What on earth is a xenobot?

The more we understand how cells produce shape and form, the more inadequate the idea of a genomic blueprint looks

Philip Ball

Connected-up-brains

Bat friends, monkeys sharing, and humans holding hands: the brains of social animals synchronise and expand one another

Sofia Quaglia

The split-body problem

Why we need to stop thinking about parents, offspring and sex when we try to understand how life reproduces itself

Gunnar O Babcock

The web of life

Classic evolutionary theory holds that species separate over time. But it’s fuzzier than that – now we know they also merge

Juli Berwald

The master-of-disguise creature whose whole life is an elaborate lie

5 minutes

Promethean beasts

Far from being hardwired to flee fire, some animals use it to their own ends, helping us understand our own pyrocognition

Ivo Jacobs

This riotous life

There’s no rhythm to mass extinctions, no pattern to evolutionary recovery. Life bursts forth, in cacophonous adaptation

Riley Black

Why simplicity works

Does the existence of a multiverse hold the key for why nature’s laws seem so simple?

Johnjoe McFadden

What animals think of death

Having a concept of death, far from being a uniquely human feat, is a fairly common trait in the animal kingdom

Susana Monsó

An idea with bite

The ‘selfish gene’ persists for the reason all good scientific metaphors do: it remains a sharp tool for clear thinking

J Arvid Ågren

Watch the elegant flow of a sheep herd, seen from the sky above Israel

1 minute

An ode to the humble rotifer – one of nature’s simplest and strangest creatures

9 minutes

Blend up a hydra, and its cells will coalesce back into a full creature. How?

5 minutes