People who grow up in rural environments are less likely to develop allergies. It may because such environments harbor more friendly microbes that colonize our bodies and protect us from inflammatory disorders.

Get ready for more hatching action. The fifth and last of the Cornell Lab of Ornithology live webcam’s great blue heron chicks should hatch any minute now.

Looking at ancient bird fossils is an opportunity to see what birding might have been like millions of years ago. Back then, many birds had enormous teeth, long snouts and long, bony tails. We’ve compiled a quick guide to birding in China’s primitive forest-filled aviary, which thrived about 125 to 120 million years ago.

Watch a Great Blue Heron lay an egg on a livestreaming webcam today between 2 and 4 p.m. PDT.

Buried in the National Library of Medicine’s collection of more than 17 million items are some pretty amazing, largely unseen objects from around the world. The mesmerizing new book Hidden Treasure is filled with images of these objects that are beautiful, enlightening or disturbing, and sometimes all three. The highlights include Hitler’s medical records, detailed graphic depictions of early-20th-century surgical techniques, a Russian book of clinical dermatology from 1887, and a report from the first medical responders to enter Hiroshima after the bomb. This gallery contains some of our favorite items from the book.

A controversial type of pesticide linked to declining global bee populations appears to scramble bees’ sense of direction, making it hard for them to find home. Starved of foragers and the pollen they carry, colonies produce fewer queens, and eventually collapse.

Vote on your favorite name for the San Diego Zoo Safari Park’s new baby condor.

From eerie mushrooms glowing green on fallen logs to microscopic plankton shining near the ocean surface, bioluminescence is found everywhere in nature.

Watch an eaglet hatch live on the Eagle Cam! The first of this years batch of three bald eagle chicks in Decorah, Iowa is ready to hatch in the next couple days.

Do tarantulas owe their apparently gravity-defying climbing ability to silk shot from their feet? Some researchers say they do, but arachnid specialist Rainer Foelix doesn’t think so.

If these teams of scientists succeed, future generations may struggle to imagine a time when we were at the mercy of viruses.

War, illness, and accidents lead to thousands of amputations each year. But the struggle to build a better prosthetic limb is more than an engineering problem.

A giant squid’s soccer ball-sized eyeballs are three times wider than any other animal’s, but explaining why has kept squid researchers busy. Now, thanks to a rare well-preserved squid specimen, they have an idea: The enormous peepers likely evolved to see bioluminescent trails of light left by sperm whales, the squids’ great predator.

Hidden among the obvious reasons why people vote for a politician may be a curious biological knee-jerk: preference for the pitch of a candidate’s voice.

Certain kinds of corals subjected to bleaching can adapt to endure higher water temperatures.

A strange new growth has emerged from the manure pits of midwestern hog farms. The results are literally explosive.

A pair of condors at the San Diego zoo have hatched a new chick. Watch them raise their new baby on the zoo’s live condor cam.

Ready, set, hatch! The first California condor to hatch on live webcam will poke through its egg’s shell this weekend, possibly as early as Saturday.

There is a field guide to almost anything, and microbiologist Jonathan Eisen’s enormous collection contains classic, beautiful and very strange examples including guides to birds, birders and road kill.

Scientists conducting deep-sea dives around the Galapagos Islands have identified a new species of shark. Part of a family known as a catsharks, the new species is about 1.3 feet long, roughly the same size as a typical housecat.