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Drones reveal how feral horse units keep boundaries

For social animals, encounters between rival groups can often lead to conflict. While some species avoid this by maintaining fixed territories, others, like the feral horses, live in a "multilevel society" where multiple family groups (units) aggregate to form higher level

Print Edition 65: The Food Issue

Issue 65 of the Nautilus print edition combines some of the best content from our November and December 2025 online issues, and a special Food section. It includes contributions from animal rights activist Peter Singer, science writer Amanda Gefter, evolutionary biologist David

SunRISE SmallSats ace tests, moving closer to launch

When the six tiny spacecraft of NASA's SunRISE (Sun Radio Interferometer Space Experiment) mission settle into their orbits high above Earth after launching later this year, they'll function as one giant radio dish to track the rumbles of radio bursts coming from deep within

Q&A: Why Philly has so many sinkholes

In early January, a giant sinkhole formed at an intersection in the West Oak Lane neighborhood of North Philadelphia after a water main break. Just two weeks earlier, the city reopened a section of the Schuylkill River Trail in Center City that had been shut down for two months

Digital media breaks can improve well-being

What effect does it have on our well-being when we put our smartphones aside for a while or otherwise disconnect from digital media? Alicia Gilbert, a research associate at the Department of Communication at Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz (JGU), together with two

Detecting drought stress in trees from the air

Increasing heat and drought are putting our forests under stress. Researchers at the Swiss Federal Institute for Forest, Snow and Landscape Research (WSL) have used drone imagery to investigate how native tree species are responding to climate change. This measurement method

Failed battery chemistry offers new way to destroy PFAS

Researchers in the lab of Asst. Prof. Chibueze Amanchukwu at the University of Chicago Pritzker School of Molecular Engineering (UChicago PME) have spent three years looking for failure, scouring the academic literature for tales of battery breakdowns and degraded electrolytes.

With planning, birds and floating solar can coexist

Solar panels on bodies of water in the northeastern U.S. might generate renewable energy but could also carry risks for birds, especially waterbirds. Now a new study provides a data-informed approach to siting floating solar that could protect waterbirds and others, without

To fight cancer, scientists customize cellular protein

Precise methods for shredding or repairing and replacing specific cancer-causing proteins in a malignant cell, developed at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, could have applications beyond cancer to a wide range of immunological diseases, members of the interdisciplinary