New Scientist

Breaching is a common behaviour in a wide range of sharks and rays, and it is thought to have functions related to courtship, birthing and hygiene

The largest pterosaurs, ancient reptiles that were the first vertebrates to master flight, may have mostly soared while smaller ones flapped their wings, a pattern that persists in today's birds

Cyanobacteria exposed to shorter days are better at surviving cold conditions, showing that even simple organisms can prepare for the arrival or summer and winter

The deeply researched podcast series Tested tells the stories of Namibian sprinter Christine Mboma and Kenya’s Maximila Imali, and how their early successes made their womanhood suspect to some

The books, TV, games and more that New Scientist staff have enjoyed this week

These images are taken from a new book, Seeds: Time capsules of life, which explores how plant life has flourished in the past 360 million years

A survey found 66 species of insects making their homes in cobbled pavements on the streets of Berlin, and greater biodiversity near insect-friendly flower gardens

Tracking data from a pregnant porbeagle shark near Bermuda suggest it was eaten by a great white shark – a kind of predation that has never been seen before

Marmosets are the first non-human primates shown to use personalised signifiers to refer to each other – the discovery could help us better understand how language evolved

High-speed camera recordings show that springtails spin at up to 368 rotations per second when they jump away from danger

These photos showcase some of the intricately created birds' nests found in the Natural History Museum in Tring, UK, home to one of the world's largest ornithological collections

The Origins and Habitability Lab at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory is a testbed exploring how geological conditions could impact life in environments such as early Earth, Mars or the icy moons of Jupiter

The veteran presenter adds authority to Secret Lives of Orangutans, a film about a family of endangered orangutans in Sumatra. File this new entry in his vast oeuvre under lovable but lightweight

Our ability to exert conscious control over our family sizes is unique – and can be transformational, says Christopher Wills

A big rethink of our planet’s early years adds to growing fossil, chemical and DNA evidence that Earth was only a few hundred million years old when life began

Up to 100,000 extraordinary species, from spiders and beetles to salamanders and fish, live in subterranean caves and cracks. They aren’t as safe down there as we thought

Male fireflies caught in an orb-weaver spider’s web start flashing in an unusual pattern, a deadly deception that seems to attract additional victims for the spider

See the incredible shots that have won this year's BMC Ecology and Evolution and BMC Zoology Image Competition

The noises made by organisms like ants and worms as they move around in the soil can be used to assess whether an ecosystem is in good shape

Scientists have known for centuries that sunflowers wobble in seemingly random ways as they grow – but it seems that those movements actually optimise how much light each plant gets