Rabbit

Researchers in New York City have analyzed the DNA of urban coyotes and discovered that the coyotes eat a variety of native prey species and supplement this diet with human-sourced food items. The study is published in PeerJ.

Every modern mammal, from a platypus to a blue whale, is descended from a common ancestor that lived about 180 million years ago. We don't know a great deal about this animal, but the organization of its genome has now been computationally reconstructed by an international team of researchers. The work is published Sept. 30 in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Donna Kalil loves snakes. She's been fascinated by them since she was a kid living in the mountains of Venezuela's capital in the 1960s, where her father was stationed as an Air Force pilot.

A team of researchers at Nankai University has developed a thermal management multi-layer material that responds to heat or cold by folding or unfolding itself without the need for an external power source. In their paper published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, the group describes how they came to develop the material and detail its performance when tested.

To better understand what drives biological diversity on Earth, scientists have historically looked at genetic differences between species. But this only provides part of the picture. The traits of a particular species are not merely the result of its genes but also the proteins those genes code for. Understanding the differences between species' proteomes—or all of the proteins that can be expressed—is, therefore, as important as understanding differences between genomes.