FLORES, Guatemala — From above, the vastness of the Guatemalan jungle stretches to the horizon in an unbroken swath of dense greenery. On the ground, the forest blends into a blur of foliage. The only sounds are the clamor of cicadas and howler monkeys. But to step through the undergrowth in the northern Guatemalan lowlands is to walk the buried remnants of the ancient Maya civilization. The jungle hides fields, roads, canals and even whole settlements. And that civilization jus ...read more

With a machete, Gildardo Ramirez lops twelve pods off one of his cacao trees, letting them fall to its base. The long, brown pods look like twisted and deflated footballs. Each cacao pod usually encases about 40 beans — the source of cocoa powder and chocolate. The beans are the main commodity that Ramirez produces on his farm in San Francisco, Colombia, some 70 miles southeast of the city of Medellín. On Ramirez’s land, cacao’s red and green leaves fill the sloping hill ...read more

When researchers created a vaccine, they largely put an end to the 2013 bird flu pandemics in chickens, capping a worldwide health scare. But now, scientists have found new versions of the viruses in ducks. Researchers recommend vaccinating the nearly 3 billion ducks produced in China each year straightaway. Virulent Virus Back in 2013, authorities detected H7N9, a version of the flu that infects birds, in Chinese poultry markets. Soon after, they found the viruses in chicken farms. Th ...read more

They're among the most iconic of dinosaurs: the sauropods, long-necked, long-tailed herbivores that evolved into the largest land animals the planet has ever seen. They were essentially the cows of their day. Very, very big cows. But they didn't start out that way. A new dinosaur unearthed in South Africa reveals there are more plot twists to the sauropod story than we thought. Ledumahadi mafube, the "giant thunderclap at dawn," weighed in at about 12 metric tons, or upwards of 26,000 pou ...read more

A version of this article originally appeared on The Conversation. Hear the word “antenna” and you might think about rabbit ears on the top of an old TV or the wire that picks up radio signals for a car. But an antenna can be much smaller – even invisible. No matter its shape or size, an antenna is crucial for communication, transmitting and receiving radio signals between devices. As portable electronics become increasingly common, antennas must, too. Wearable monitors, flex ...read more

Brown tree snakes, Boiga irregularis, are one of Guam's most successful - and devastating - invasive species. That's prompted an international team of scientists, led by the University of Queensland, to study what's made the species so successful. And their venom and traveling ability is the key, according to research published this month in the Journal of Molecular Evolution. With a venom that’s 100 times more toxic to birds than mammals, brown tree snakes have devastated Guam’s ...read more

In a magnetic milestone to make Nikola Tesla proud, scientists have created the strongest controllable magnetic field ever produced. Energy crackled and sparks flew back when physicists from the Institute for Solid State Physics at the University of Tokyo powered up their 400 million amp megagauss generator system. That’s hundreds of times the current of an average lightning bolt. The device was created by University of Tokyo physicist Shojiro Takeyama and his team. And it generated ...read more

Fruits come in a glorious rainbow of colors. Raspberries, kumquats, lemons, avocados, blueberries, figs; the colorful array rivals a 96-pack of Crayola crayons. But scientists have long debated whether fruits evolved their vibrant pigments to entice animals to eat them and spread their seeds. After all, some fruit eating — or frugivorous — seed-dispersers are color blind. Now, researchers show fruit color evolved in response to the visual abilities of local fruit-feasting animals. An ...read more

In what is perhaps the strangest update we’ve heard from ecologists in a while, a Brazilian researcher has documented – on video – a moth feeding on the tears of a sleeping bird. The researcher, Leandro João Carneiro de Lima Moraes from the National Institute of Amazonian Research, was conducting amphibian and reptile surveys in the Brazilian Amazon last November when he noticed the behavior – twice in one night – and got it on camera. Though a human observ ...read more