The test is simple: pigment colour looks the same from every angle, and structural colour changes as you move. Once you know that, a great deal of the natural world…
The useful way to read these is as solutions rather than as homes. Each one is addressing a specific physical problem, and the structure follows from the problem rather than…
The recurring problem is the same everywhere: sleep appears to be necessary, and being asleep is dangerous. Almost every solution below is a compromise between those two facts. Here are…
Animal navigation combines several systems at once, which is why removing one rarely stops an animal entirely. Here are seventeen of the tools involved.
1. Reading the Earth's Magnetic Field…
There are a small number of biological rules that hold across every vertebrate: a spine, a heart, and haemoglobin to move oxygen around the body.
The last one has exactly…
The honeycomb is probably the most cited example of mathematics in nature. Rows of near-identical hexagonal cells, walls meeting at consistent angles, packed with no wasted space — and produced…