The banana duct-taped to a wall was created to be a "reflection on what we value." An upcoming auction may deliver an answer

Grizzly 399 became a celebrity of Grand Teton National Park in her lifetime. Now, her death has drawn attention to wildlife-vehicle collisions and how they might be reduced

While most wooden artifacts disintegrate after thousands of years, the newly unearthed oak tool has remained in remarkable condition

By analyzing an old lidar survey, researchers found evidence of more than 6,500 ancient structures in a previously unexplored area of Campeche

After a summer that tied for the country's hottest, meteorologists say an unusually warm autumn is delaying snowfall

The one-minute composition, which dates to the 1830s, was found on a piece of paper about the size of an index card at a museum in New York City

A new study suggests the seismic energy traveled outward from a previously unmapped fault, emanating from the hypocenter in bouncing waves that shook distant areas

The fragile 18th-century containers, which likely held alcoholic beverages that were shared among passengers and crew members, survived for centuries at the bottom of the Atlantic Ocean

Introduced in 1934, the federal duck stamp contest has raised more than $1.2 billion and protected at least 6.5 million acres across the nation. Now, an art exhibition at Connecticut’s Bruce Museum honors the competition’s history

A new exhibition spotlights the Spanish artist's printmaking talents, which he began honing in his 20s. In the decades that followed, he produced thousands of breathtaking creations

When fishermen found the endangered loggerhead sea turtle off Vancouver Island in February, she was listlessly floating in a bed of kelp

The species may have been carried to the Sacramento–San Joaquin Delta in ballast water on ships

The 237-million-year-old remains are among the oldest silesaurid fossils ever found, adding to paleontologists' understanding of this still-mysterious group of prehistoric reptiles

The Manhattan district attorney's office has obtained an arrest warrant for Edoardo Almagià, who has been accused of working with looters and dealing stolen artifacts for years

The farthest spacecraft in the universe went momentarily rogue, but scientists breathed a sigh of relief when it reconnected at an unexpected radio frequency

Antonia, a cloned black-footed ferret at the Smithsonian's National Zoo and Conservation Biology Institute, has produced two healthy offspring that will help build genetic diversity in their recovering population

On its 66th flyby of the king of planets, Juno has captured spectacular views of the stormy atmosphere, processed by citizen scientists

The beloved reptile in Australia died last weekend and was thought to be up to 120 years old, though that age is only an estimate. Research on his bones might reveal a more exact number

The viral king penguin chick at Sea Life Melbourne Aquarium is beginning to lose his youthful down, a process that will give him his distinctive and waterproof adult plumage

Found in a cremation cemetery in Belgium, the skeleton includes bones dating to the Neolithic period and a Roman-era skull, according to a new study

Once the first primate made a break, the 42 others followed suit in a simple case of monkey-see, monkey-do

Lula the bear and Simba the lion have been evacuated to a wildlife shelter in Jordan

An investigation by David D. Kirkpatrick of the New York Times revealed the buyer's identity

See photographs of the beautiful natural wonders from the Smithsonian Magazine Photo Contest

In the late 19th century, city officials turned the final resting place for 10,000 souls into what's now Greenwich Village’s James J. Walker Park

Getting the perfect shot requires great timing, the right equipment and nerves of steel

It's curtains for the NASA mission's close relationship with the satellite

As of last Wednesday, at least 3,500 sea turtles have been rescued from freezing waters in the midst record-breaking winter storm

In summer months above the North and South Poles, glowing clouds occasionally form naturally at sunset under the right conditions

The trend is a result of women deciding to have children later in life and the use of medically assisted reproduction methods

In a twist befitting its pages, the satirical, anti-establishment publication that delivered laughs and hijinks to generations of young readers gets the respect it always deserved with a new museum exhibition

A new book charts the history of pet cemeteries and honors the universal experience of grieving an animal companion

Renaissance paintings, medieval archives, cloistered orchards—how one Italian scientist is uncovering secrets that could help combat a growing agricultural crisis

It fell to Belle da Costa Greene, a Black woman whose racial identity was kept secret for decades, to catalog J.P. Morgan's immense collection of books and art

On the island of Laeso in Denmark, one man is reviving the lost art of eelgrass thatching and, in doing so, bringing attention to a plant that has great potential

Newfoundland filmmaker Justin Simms is releasing his latest film called Sons. It was prompted by the birth of his son and left him wondering how traditional masculine behaviour is learned.

Bombardier control box recovered during second dive to a World War 2 bomber at the bottom of Gander Lake.

Monday marks the first Remembrance Day ceremony at the National War Memorial in St. John's to include the tomb of the Unknown Soldier. We're proud to present again two documentaries that tell a remarkable story.

After a year of negotiations, the postal union has given Canada Post a 72-hour strike notice. At a solidarity rally in St. John's last week, local president Craig Dyer says a strike could mean parcels — including Christmas presents — won't make it to rural communities.

Pat White, an entrepreneur who launched EVAS Air and the Gander Flight Training, has died. He was 69 years old.

Nurses' union president Yvette Coffey says more must be done to ensure young nurses stay in the province. Newfoundland and Labrador Health Services says work is underway to match students with job openings.

People using the library in the Arts and Culture Centre in St. John's are being forced to use alternate entrances due to an unsafe staircase in front of the building.

A woman who says she was repeatedly denied emergency care last spring is blasting the Newfoundland and Labrador health-care system, saying she’s been left psychologically scarred after being told several times that her gangrenous appendix was simply anxiety or constipation.

As Nova Scotia politicians make their fall election promises, Julie Leggett is urging them to commit to helping people on income assistance stay cool during heat waves.

The City of Montreal wants to sell more land to community organizations, housing co-ops and other groups to build off-market housing. 

Ten years after their formation, the members of The Brooks discuss how they’ve evolved and how they view their collaboration.

Quebec provincial police have confirmed that the body found in a Montreal nature park on Oct. 30 was that of kidnapping victim and cryptocurrency influencer Kevin Mirshahi.

In insects, gustatory neurons sense chemicals upon contact and directly inform many behaviors critical for survival and reproduction, including biting, feeding, mating, and egg laying. However, the taste sensory system is underexplored in many anthropophilic disease vectors such as mosquitoes, which acquire and transmit human pathogens during blood feeding from human hosts. This results in a big gap in vector biology—the study of organisms that spread disease by transmitting pathogens—because insect vectors closely interact with humans while selecting suitable individuals and appropriate bite sites for blood meals. Human sweat and skin-associated chemistries are rich in nonvolatile compounds that can be sensed by the mosquito's taste system when she lands on the skin. Taste sensory units, called sensilla, are distributed in many organs across the mosquito body, including the mouthparts, legs, and ovipositors (female-specific structures used to lay eggs). Each sensillum is innervated by as many as five taste neurons, which allow detection and discrimination between various tastants such as water, sugars, salts, amino acids, and plant-derived compounds that taste bitter to humans. Single-sensillum recordings provide a robust way to survey taste responsiveness of individual sensilla to various diagnostic and ecologically relevant chemicals. Such analyses are of immense value for understanding links between mosquito taste responses and behaviors to specific chemical cues and can provide insights into why mosquitoes prefer certain hosts. The results can also aid development of strategies to disrupt close-range mosquito–human interactions to control disease transmission. Here we describe a protocol that is curated for electrophysiological recordings from taste sensilla in mosquitoes and sure to yield exciting results for the field.

Mosquitoes take blood meals from a diverse range of host animals and their host associations vary by species. Characterizing these associations is an important element of the transmission dynamics of mosquito-vectored pathogens. To characterize mosquito host associations, various molecular techniques have been developed, which are collectively referred to as blood meal analysis. DNA barcoding has diverse biological applications and is well-suited to mosquito blood meal analysis. The standard DNA barcoding marker for animals is a 5' fragment of the cytochrome c oxidase I (COI) gene. A major advantage of this marker is its taxonomic coverage in DNA sequence reference databases, making it feasible to identify a wider range of mosquito host species than with any other gene. However, the COI gene contains high sequence variation at potential priming sites between vertebrate orders. Coupled with the need for primer sequences to be mismatched with mosquito priming sites so that annealing to mosquito DNA is inhibited, it can be difficult to design primers suitable for blood meal analysis applications. Several primers are available that perform well in mosquito blood meal analysis, annealing to priming sites for most vertebrate host taxa, but not to those of mosquitoes. Because priming site sequence variation among vertebrate taxa can cause amplification to fail, a hierarchical approach to DNA barcoding-based blood meal analysis can be applied. In such an approach, no single primer set is expected to be effective for 100% of potential host species. If amplification fails in the initial reaction, a subsequent reaction is attempted with primers that anneal to different priming sites, and so on, until amplification is successful.