When a female vampire bat loses a close relative, she may starve, because she depends on her mother and daughters to share blood by regurgitation. Vampires who have more non-kin social bonds (friends), do better when this happens.

By deploying green clay caterpillar models across six continents, researchers unmasked an important global pattern. Their discovery that predation is most intense near sea level in the tropics provides a foundation for understanding biological processes from crop protection and carbon storage to the effects of climate change on biodiversity.

A tiny shark tooth, part of a mantis shrimp and other microscopic marine organisms reveal that as the Andes mountains rose, the Western Amazon sank twice, each time for less than a million years.

Whales from both poles migrate long distances to breed in tropical waters. Smithsonian scientist Hector M. Guzman and Fernando Félix at the Salinas Whale Museum in Ecuador, tagged 47 humpbacks with satellite transmitters to understand how the humpbacks' Southeastern Pacific population moves within breeding areas.

Novel design developed by Brazilian researchers couples light waves and mechanical waves at higher intensity levels. One of its potential applications is in telecommunications as an optical modulator, because the device can sense and excite mechanical vibration, it could be used as an optical switch, turning on or off a laser beam that passes through it far more efficiently than the modulating technologies used today in optical telecommunications networks.