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A rhino poached for its horn in Zimbabwe. Credit: Anti-poaching Unit, Zimbabwe Reeking of infection, the elephant stumbled into the Tanzanian camp where Thomas Appleby works as a safari manager. Its back legs festered with gangrene radiating from the open, pungent wounds that the animal had evidently endured for at least two long weeks

A rhino poached for its horn in Zimbabwe. Credit: Anti-poaching Unit, Zimbabwe Reeking of infection, the elephant stumbled into the Tanzanian camp where Thomas Appleby works as a safari manager. Its back legs festered with gangrene radiating from the open, pungent wounds that the animal had evidently endured for at least two long weeks

When we drive somewhere new, we navigate by referring to a two-dimensional map that accounts for distances only on a horizontal plane. According to research published online in August in Nature Neuroscience , the mammalian brain seems to do the same, collapsing the world into a flat plane even as the animal skitters up trees and slips deep into burrows

Across the animal kingdom, males are competitive when females are scarce. Now a study with people has examined how the number of women affects men’s attitudes about a marker for competitive fitness: Money. Basically, the fewer the women, the more the men threw their money around.

We lie to ourselves all the time. We tell ourselves that we are better than average -- that we are more moral, more capable, less likely to become sick or suffer an accident.

By Ewen Callaway of Nature magazine Human embryonic stem cells that are potentially pure enough to be used in therapies have been deposited into the UK Stem Cell Bank, and will soon be available across Europe.

As if bedbugs weren t gross enough already, entomologists have now found that they get ahead by mating with their own mothers, brothers, sisters and fathers.

We are social animals.

We are social animals. So you might assume our brains are built to excel when we cooperate with each other, as opposed to when we function in isolation

Just like our animal skin–clad ancestors, we gather food with zeal, lust over the most capable mates, and have an aversion to scammers. And we do still wear plenty of animal skins. But does more separate us from our Stone Age forebears than cartoonists and popular psychologists might have us believe

Much of what we know about sex, or think we know, stems from the animal kingdom.

Robots inspired by nature are nothing new--in addition to all the humanoid bots out there, roboticists have mimicked numerous other animal species, for instance with the uncannily canine BigDog robot . [More]