Becky Ferreira

These three competitors demonstrate intelligence, cosmopolitan distribution, an aptitude for survival, and near-human levels of cheeky boldness. They are already eating our lunch—both metaphorically and literally, in some cases. To confirm or refute this hypothesis, I asked smart people with expertise on rats, raccoons, gulls, and evolutionary transitions to vet my candidates—as well as the premise of the thought experiment.

He was hanging out in an ancient Roman port town 2,000 years ago, when something struck him (a deadly volcanic eruption).

Welcome back to the Abstract! Let me start this column with a question: Are you a man or a mouse? Or a mammoth? Or a mammoth mouse?

This week, we journey into the human brain and find some disturbing stuff in there.

“Go away.” – Mexican tetra.

As they cling to leaf tips, newborn warty birch caterpillars produce vibrations that can ward off invaders approaching their millimeter-size domain.

The pong pong tree—also known as the “suicide tree”—may be a plot point in the season finale of the HBO series. But the plant was known to cause thousands of deaths a year in the past.

A novel brain device allowed a woman who had suffered a stroke to speak full sentences for the first time since 2005.

“It was like we were in the ‘Twilight Zone’ and peering at a negative of the real world,” said one mariner.

One of the most compelling cases for extraterrestrial life has been found on K2-18b, a planet 124 light years from Earth.