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Learn more about a parasitic spider mite discovered in Brazil, the second of the genus ever described. Huntsman spiders of the family Sparassidae are found throughout Brazil. While adults can grow to large sizes, with legspans of up to six inches, juvenile spiders are only a few millimeters long. This may explain why a new species, growing from the necks of some young Huntsman spiders in an institute archive in Brazil, went undiscovered for so long. It was only through careful analysis [...]

Learn how research on people who lived past 110 is uncovering clues about immune function and resilience in aging. Living past 110 is rare. Remaining mentally sharp and physically independent at that age is rarer still. Yet a small number of people — known as supercentenarians — do exactly that, resisting disease decades longer than biology would predict. A new viewpoint in Genomic Psychiatry argues that one of the best places to study this kind of resilience has been hiding in plain [...]

Scientists have just found a way to fuse two of nature’s sweetest gifts into one delicious creation — chocolate-flavored honey made using the shells of cocoa beans. A team of researchers, whose study was published in ACS Sustainable Chemistry & Engineering, figured out how to give honey a deep, cocoa-rich twist while also transforming chocolate industry waste into something delicious and surprisingly useful. This new concoction doesn’t just taste like chocolate. It [...]

In a world of shifting rivers, spreading fires, and deepening droughts, early humans held fast to one simple idea — the sharp edge of a stone. At a site in northern Kenya, researchers have uncovered one of the oldest and longest toolmaking traditions in human history, according to a recent study published in Nature. Between 2.75 million years and 2.44 million years ago, early hominins at Namorotukunan shaped the same kind of Oldowan tools for nearly 300,000 years, refining a design [...]

The hell ant shows how insect species evolved, adapted, and spread throughout the ancient world. Newsletter It's one hell of an old ant. Researchers discovered a 113-million-year-old hell ant preserved in a chunk of Brazilian limestone. The find earned it the title of the oldest such specimen, according to a paper in the journal Current Biology. The fossil is a member of Haidomyrmecinae — an extinct subfamily from the Cretaceous period. Those insects were armed with scythe-like [...]

Tropical lowlands that flood during the rainy season and scorch during the sunny season don't exactly sound ideal for agriculture. But the people who lived in what is now Bolivia between 500 A.D. and 1400 A.D. turned those conditions to their advantage by engineering a system of canals to divert excess water and ponds to save it for later. By building a sophisticated irrigation network, the pre-Hispanic Casarabe society of the Llanos de Moxos produced maize year-round — ushering [...]

With over 20 quadrillion ants worldwide, ants dominate the Earth's biomass. Learn why these social insects thrive in nearly every environment. Newsletter It can be startling to look at a world population counter . There are eight billion (and counting — fast) humans on Earth. That's a lot. And humans, of course, have an enormous impact. However, we are far from the most abundant animal on the planet. In fact, mammals are at the bottom of the list, with only about 5,500 or so [...]

Recent camera-trap footage from Brazil’s Atlantic Forest is probing our understanding of self-medication practices in animals. Researchers, in this case, found evidence that suggests a host of tropical mammals regularly visit particular trees known to play a role in traditional medicine. The work was published in the journal BioTropica. Olivier Kaisin, a Ph.D. student at the University of Liège and at São Paulo State University, and his team uncovered the unusual [...]

Two new electric eel species have been identified in the Amazon basin, including one fish with a record-breaking shock, scientists say. Researchers had previously identified only one species of electric eel in more than 250 years of studying the creatures that lurk in South American waters and stun their prey with electric discharges. However, the new genetic and ecological analysis, published Tuesday in the peer-reviewed Nature Communications, identifies a total of three unique [...]