In 2011, a paper revealed that Dictyostelium discoideum, a single-celled organism, picks up edible bacteria, carries them to new locations and harvests them like crops - basically, it is the world's smallest farmer. (Nature 469, 393-396 doi:10.1038/nature09668)

There is lots of speculation about the impact of climate change on polar bears but little data. Society needs to understand the potential impact of sea ice retreats but polar bears are difficult to study in the wild.

"Direct behavioral observations are nearly impossible," says Amy Cutting, Oregon Zoo curator.

Enter Tasul, an Oregon Zoo polar bear, who is now wearing a high-tech collar to help get some climate change answers. Within the collar is an accelerometer, like the one found in most smart phones the NSA is monitoring you with, and it detects minute changes in motion and direction of movement.

A new mineral, cubic boron nitride, has been officially approved by the International Mineralogical Association as “qingsongite.”  You'd think there aren't a lot of mineral discoveries happening every day but this had been in committee since 2009. Geology paces itself and perhaps so do naming conventions. But  it turns out there are at least 100 proposals for new minerals and their names submitted each year. To-date, more than 4700 species of minerals have been recognized.

Qingsongite was named after Qingsong Fang (1939–2010), a professor at the Institute of Geology, the Chinese Academy of Geological Sciences, who found the first diamond in the Tibetan chromium-rich rocks in the late 1970s, and contributed to the discovery of four new mineral species.

The intensity of the jets of water ice and organic particles that shoot out from Enceladus, a moon orbiting Saturn, depends on its proximity to the ringed planet, according to data obtained by NASA's Cassini spacecraft.

The finding adds to evidence that a liquid water reservoir or ocean lurks under the icy surface of the moon. This is the first clear observation the bright plume emanating from Enceladus' south pole varies predictably. 

Cassini, which has been orbiting Saturn since 2004, discovered the jets that form the plume in 2005. The water ice and organic particles spray out from several narrow fissures nicknamed "tiger stripes."

A color image, taken on May 1st, 2013 by the Wide Angle Camera (WAC) instrument aboard NASA's MESSENGER spacecraft orbiting Mercury, features the Hovnatanian crater, named for Armenian painter Hakop Hovnatanian.

The crater's elliptical shape and the bright rays' butterfly pattern indicate that a very oblique impact produced the crater. The brightness of the rays indicate that they are relatively young features on Mercury's surface.

The sleeping patterns of baby birds are similar to that of baby mammals they even appear to change in the same way as it does in humans.

Studying barn owls in the wild, researchers from the Max Planck Institute for Ornithology and the University of Lausanne discovered that this change in sleep is strongly correlated with the expression of a gene involved in producing dark, melanic feather spots, a trait known to covary with behavioral and physiological traits in adult owls. They speculate that sleep-related developmental processes in the brain contribute to the link between melanism and other traits observed in adult barn owls and other animals.