The cochlea in the inner ear, where sound is transmitted to the brain, has a spiral shape resembling a snail shell. It's not just to save space, researchers have found.
The R&D 100 award, previously given for inventions like the fax machine and automated teller machine, has been given this year for a biologically-inspired design that could revolutionize society in many ways.
"Heidelberg Man" has been a modern name imposed on certain fossil humans that have been unable to speak for themselves. Now, their bones appear to overlap with Neanderthals. But don't modern humans have Neanderthal DNA? Do the distinctions make any sense?
Here are more stories about animals, plants and cells attracting scientists with their astonishing capabilities, proving that biomimetics is one of the hottest trends in science.
Stalin, who read Darwin in divinity school and turned atheist, became a ruthless dictator whose reign of terror killed multiple millions more than Hitler. One of his evil deeds is being remembered: a railroad project in Siberia that was never completed despite causing the deaths of at least 100,000 people.
The way to make a concept impregnable is to use rhetorical devices to render competition out of bounds, and then nationalize the favored view. An AP story demonstrates how this is done with evolution.
Today's transit of Venus, in which our sister planet appears to cross the disk of the sun, will be the last till 2117. As observatories and millions of people watch the rare planetary alignment, few may know the stories of astronomers who predicted them and explorers who risked life and limb to observe them.