New Scientist

Digging sand or grit into clay soils is a drainage fix that has been around for years, but James Wong turns to nature to find a less backbreaking solution

From an orchid bee to a violet carpenter bee, these images show the insects in amazing detail

A bristly bump on some mantises’ chests is a never-before-seen “gustifolium”, which may have evolved to help the insects with their highly specialised lifestyles

Red foxes and Arctic foxes dive headfirst into snow at up to 4 metres per second to catch small rodents, and the shape of their snouts reduces the impact force

Commercial bowhead whaling ended in the early 20th century, but the industry’s lasting effects on the whales’ genetic diversity are leading to declines again

When alpacas mate, males deposit sperm directly into the uterus, a reproductive strategy not confirmed in any other mammals

The neurons in wasp brains that help them recognise hive mates are similar to those in the brains of primates, including humans

Intensive breeding since the 19th century has created thousands of varieties of rose, but a reduction in genetic diversity could leave them vulnerable to diseases and climate change

Targeted culling of crown-of-thorns starfish has resulted in parts of the Great Barrier Reef maintaining and even increasing coral cover, leading researchers to call for the programme to be dramatically scaled up

Using genomic data from more than 9500 species, biologists have mapped the evolutionary relationships between flowering plants

A set of large, distinctive footprints suggest a raptor dinosaur that lived in East Asia 96 million years ago grew to a length of 5 metres

Six full-body fossils of Ptychodus sharks have been formally analysed for the first time, revealing that they were fast swimmers that preyed on shelled creatures

A group of around 40 scientists signed a declaration calling for formal acknowledgement of consciousness in a range of animals, including insects and fish – but the evidence is still lacking

An Australian bull ant is the first animal known to use the patterns produced by polarised moonlight to navigate its environment

By measuring how birds’ vocal muscles move while they are asleep and using a physical model for how those muscles produce sound, researchers have pulled songs from the minds of sleeping birds

The vertebrae of Vasuki indicus, a snake that lived 47 million years ago, suggest it could have been as long as 15 metres

The jawbone of an ichthyosaur uncovered in south-west England has been identified as a new species, and researchers estimate that the whole animal was 20 to 25 metres long

Weeding robots can sometimes struggle to tell weeds from crops, but genetically modifying the plants we want to keep to make them brightly coloured would make the job easier, suggest a group of researchers

Up to 17 US states could be peppered with more than a trillion cicadas this spring, and though it has been a while since these two specific broods emerged at once, double broods are not that rare

We know little about how embryonic development in animals evolved from single-celled ancestors, but simple organisms with a multicellular life stage offer intriguing clues