Last updated: October 24, 2026.
This guide collects the studies on animals, plants and microbes covered on Nexo Science, grouped by topic. Each link goes to a full article about one peer-reviewed paper: what was found, how it was measured and what is still uncertain.
Animal minds and behavior
- That Viral 'Angry Monkey' Video May Not Prove What You Think
It's one of the most famous videos in animal behavior: a monkey rejects a cucumber after watching another get a grape. Two decades and 60,430 observations later, the largest analysis of its kind finds no real evidence that animals feel it at all. - The Friendlier the Monkey Society, the More Expressive Its Faces
Three macaque species, filmed muscle twitch by muscle twitch, reveal a pattern: monkeys living under looser, friendlier hierarchies also use a far wider and more flexible range of facial expressions than their strictly ranked relatives. - Sperm Whale Clicks Follow the Same Building Blocks as Human Speech
A catalogue of sperm whale sounds that stood for two decades just got rewritten. Nearly nine thousand recorded clicks show these animals combining rhythm, tempo and two previously undocumented features into patterns that work a lot like the building blocks of human speech. - Bigger Brains, Longer Childhoods: What Animal Parenting Reveals About Intelligence
A newborn brain is nearly useless. It cannot feed the animal carrying it, it cannot avoid a predator, and biologists now argue that this helplessness is exactly what allowed some species to evolve the biggest brains on the planet. - Winter Truce: Why Fiercely Territorial Songbirds Suddenly Start Helping Each Other
Birds that spend the breeding season singing rivals into retreat turn into surprisingly generous neighbors once conditions get hard, and the switch happens almost overnight. - 'A kind of immunization': Kenyan elephants may dose their calves with medicinal plants
A Roman writer once told of a speared elephant that healed itself on olive blossoms. Kenyan scouts now say elephants self-medicate with dozens of plants. - Does Rising Heat Change How Animals Find a Mate?
A cricket sings faster on a warm night than a cold one, and for decades biologists have assumed heat simply speeds up courtship across the animal kingdom. A new review of more than fifty studies says the real picture is far messier. - Wildlife Is Rescheduling Its Whole Day to Dodge Humans
What happens to predators and their prey once every animal in the forest starts avoiding people?
Wildlife under pressure
- By 2070, Humans and Wild Animals Will Share More of the Planet Than Ever
You might never notice it, but the wild animals sharing your world are about to get a lot closer. A sweeping new global analysis just mapped where, and why, human-wildlife overlap is set to explode by 2070. - More Than Half the World's Bird Species Are Raising Fewer Chicks as the Climate Warms
What happens when spring arrives at the wrong time? A 50-year, six-continent analysis of 745,962 bird nests found the answer splits species into clear winners and losers, and body size decides who ends up on which side. - Watch How Wildlife Is Quietly Losing Its Genetic Diversity
A blood sample from a tagged wolf. A feather from a migrating songbird. A fin clip from a fish released back into a river. Multiply moments like these by tens of thousands across three decades of fieldwork, and a quiet global pattern emerges in the numbers. - Tropical forests hold most of the world's land vertebrates, and reptiles are the lone exception
How many species actually live in tropical forests? Nobody had ever checked properly, and a new global count finds the answer scientists have repeated for decades holds up, with one awkward gap. - Why Do Some Island Beetles Give Up Their Fighting Jaws?
If you compared two male stag beetles from islands only a short boat ride apart, you might guess they belonged to different species just from their jaws. A new genomic study points to the exact gene behind the change.
Plants, fungi and microbes
- Meet the vine that only turns deadly once it reaches the top of the tree
If you have ever seen a tree vanish under a green blanket, a new study in BMC Plant Biology suggests the killing begins the instant the vine runs out of trunk to climb, when sugar pools at the bend in its stem and wakes up a wave of dormant buds. - What Makes a Flower Petal Shimmer Like a Soap Bubble?
Flowers do not paint their most striking blue. They manufacture it, and a Cambridge team has shown that the recipe is chemical rather than merely mechanical. - Botanists split this desert agave into three. Its genome barely splits at all
Half a century ago, a botanist sorted the agaves of Baja California into three species by their flowers. Their genomes, read for the first time, hardly tell them apart, and the most distinctive population is the one climate models put at risk. - What two decades of fertilizer couldn't do to the bacteria hiding inside pine needles
Bacteria living inside Scots pine needles fix nitrogen from the air, and years of heavy fertilizer failed to switch them off, breaking a rule that holds almost everywhere else in the forest. - Nearly every lichen on Earth carries the same hidden bacteria, and they may be paying a vitamin debt
A survey of hundreds of lichen genomes found the same few bacterial families on every continent, and their genes suggest each partner covers a vitamin the others can no longer make. The authors caution that nobody has yet watched the trade happen. - Scientists thought richer soil was stopping these root-eating worms. It was the bacteria all along.
Fertility, the explanation everyone reached for, turned out to be nearly irrelevant: ryegrass rotation works because the bacteria it leaves behind kill root-knot nematodes and switch on rice's own immune system.
Life in the deep past
- How warm was T. rex? Its teeth point to an elephant's body heat
Tooth enamel puts Tyrannosaurus rex at about 97 degrees Fahrenheit, close to an elephant and clearly warmer than the crocodiles that shared its rivers.
We update this page as new studies come out.