Celestial navigation: Dung beetles navigate by 'snapshot' of the stars and other top stories.

• Celestial navigation: Dung beetles navigate by 'snapshot' of the stars

  

  Dung beetles are big fans of getting their meals to-go, even if their process is far more involved than visiting a drive-through.To begin with, scientists have observed that once dung beetles have found a new meal, they consult the starry night to decide where to go to enjoy it. The process behind how stars help the beetles orient themselves remains an enigma, but a new study offers a clearer view.Scientists from Sweden’s Lund University have found that the beetles don’t continually check the s..

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• A celebration of migrating birds - The San Diego Union

  

  This one was for the birds.Saturday, dozens of people went to the Tijuana Estuary in Imperial Beach for International Migratory Bird Day, an annual gathering that featured nature walks, games, and arts and crafts, but was mostly a celebration of winged wonder.“Look at them coming right toward us on their red legs!” one woman exclaimed as a pair of black-necked stilts hunted for food in the estuary, the largest coastal wetland in Southern California and a place where 370 species of birds have bee..

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• Top scientists hold closed meeting to discuss building a human genome from scratch

  

  About 130 scientists, lawyers, entrepreneurs, and government officials from five continents gathered at Harvard on Tuesday for an “exploratory” meeting to discuss the topic of creating genomes from scratch — including, but not limited to, those of humans, said George Church, Harvard geneticist and co-organizer of the meeting.The meeting was closed to journalists, which drew the ire of some prominent academics. Advertisement Synthesizing genomes involves building them from the ground up — che..

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• 12-million-year-old fossil points to 'bone-crushing' dog in North America

  

  There’s a new dog in town, or at least there was millions of years ago.Researchers have unearthed a 12-million-year old fossilized tooth in Maryland that could indicate a new species of dog that roamed the ancient East coast of North America.The fossil definitively belongs to a member of the extinct dog subfamily Borophaginae, known informally as “bone crushers,” due to the typically strong jaws and large teeth the animals used to possess, similar to modern hyenas.But besides the strong jaws, w..

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• The seasons on Mars: NASA's Curiosity rover paints a picture

  

  NASA’s Curiosity rover completed its second Martian year - 687 Earth days - on May 11, meaning that its instruments have now tasted the red planet’s tendencies for two full orbits of the sun.This allows scientists to begin separating unique events from those that recur year by year, laying the foundation for an understanding of seasonal variations in a host of different characteristics.The fresh insights come at a time when talk of a manned mission to Mars is edging away from the arena of scien..

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• Honeybees continue to lose numbers

  

  By Chelsea HarveySpecial To The Washington Post Posted May. 14, 2016 at 9:05 PM

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