Robotic engineers are no stranger to turning to nature for inspiration. In recent years, birds, dogs, extinct sea creatures, and even humans themselves have all served as jumping off point for new mechanical designs. Now, researchers from Stanford are citing ...

If Spiderman and Antman took their DNA and mixed it together in a petri dish, the result might be something like the spider species Siler collingwoodi (S. collingwoodi). This tiny, colorful, jumping spider found in China and Japan uses a ...

Oh, the wonders scientists see in the field. Documenting the encounters can be an integral part of the discovery process, but it can also pull others into the experience. These seven photos and illustrations are the winners of this year’s ...

It’s no secret that breeding makes for fierce competition in nature—even for creatures that clock in at about 1/25th of an inch long. A study published July 7 in the journal iScience finds that male spider mites will guard premature ...

This article was originally published on Undark. It could have been a scene from Jurassic Park: ten golden lumps of hardened resin, each encasing insects. But these weren’t from the age of the dinosaurs; these younger resins were formed in ...

This story originally appeared in the Messy issue of Popular Science. Current subscribers can access the whole digital edition here, or click here for a new subscription. THE IDEA THAT you swallow eight arachnids each night is a load of malarkey popularized by a list of random ...

Like many wormy discoveries, this one started with murder. In 2019, a parasitology lab at the University of California, Riverside, was tipped off by a breeder whose tarantulas were ravaged by a mysterious infection. Side effects included “lethargy, anorexia, and ...