A spider in the Moroccan Sahara rolls like a tumbleweed and can do powerful, acrobatic flips through the air.

Cebrennus rechenbergi runs for a short time, then stretches out its front legs, spinning into the air and returning to touch the ground with its hind legs.  The move doubles the spider’s speed, to two meters per second. But since it uses so much energy, the maneuver is a last resort, called on only to escape predators. 

“I can’t see any other reason,”  said Peter Jäger, a taxonomist at the Senckenberg Research Institute and Natural History Museum in Frankfurt, Germany, who identified the spider. “It is a costly move. If it performs this five to 10 times within one day, then it dies.”

Everyone has heard of the Cuban Missile Crisis, a stand-off over missiles off the shores of America. It's considered a highwater mark during a Cold War culture that was concerned about mutual assured destruction.

Outside testing, nuclear weapons have not been detonated since 1945 but there have been ‘disturbing near misses in which nuclear weapons were nearly used inadvertently’ owing to miscalculation, error or sloppy practices. 

Not once, but nearly 13 times since 1962 - and the risk of nuclear weapons being detonated today is higher than people know.

A team of scientists has found that the woody growth of forests in north Borneo is half as great again as in the most productive forests of north-west Amazonia, an average difference of 3.2 tons of wood per hectare per year.

The new study, published today in the Journal of Ecology, examined differences in above-ground wood production (one component of the total uptake of carbon by plants) which is critically important in the global cycling of carbon.

Trees are taller for a given diameter in Southeast Asia compared with South America, meaning they gain more biomass per unit of diameter growth, and this in part explains the differences observed.

A genomic investigation by University of British Columbia researchers has revealed that a lethal parasite infecting a wide range of insects actually originated from pond scum, but has completely shed its green past on its evolutionary journey.

A team led by UBC Botany Prof. Patrick Keeling sequenced the genome of Helicosporidium – an intracellular parasite that can kill juvenile blackflies, caterpillars, beetles and mosquitoes – and found it evolved from algae like another notorious pathogen: malaria.

A comparison of the genomes of polar bears and brown bears reveals that the polar bear is a much younger species than previously believed, having diverged from brown bears less than 500,000 years ago.

Patients whose lost red blood cells are recycled and given back to them during heart surgery have healthier blood cells compared to those who get transfusions of blood stored in a blood bank, according to the results of a small study at Johns Hopkins.

To recycle the blood, a machine known as a cell saver is used to collect what a patient loses during surgery, rinse away unneeded fat and tissue and then centrifuge and separate the red cells, which are then returned to the patient if thy need it. Disposable parts of the cell saver, which can be used to process multiple units of blood, cost around $120, compared to $240 for each unit of banked blood.