The leaves of the common roadside milkweed plant are poisonous to people and most other creatures. Alongside many other plants, its leaf tissues contain cardenolide poisons as a natural defense.

Scientists in China recently discovered that a supposedly simple, ancient creature had an unexpectedly complicated nervous system. The creature was an extinct arthropod found in Cambrian rocks, and it had remarkably preserved nervous tissues that showed it had a three-lobed brain connected to fully developed eyestalks.

DNA is a biochemical that contains genetic information. And like all other cellular ingredients, it decays if cellular systems don't maintain it. Now, scientists are more confident about how fast it falls apart after a cell dies.

Sorting fact from fiction when it comes to outer space can be tricky, especially when scientists assert that certain stellar features are real when they are not. Why should school textbook authors, or the students and teachers that rely on them to deliver accurate information, trust these scientists' more speculative assertions when they routinely name structures that don't exist?

The evolutionary community has been buzzing over bacteria's new ability to obtain citrate, a carbon-containing chemical, from their environment and use it as a food source. Some say this confirms evolution in action, but what if the bacteria were designed to modify themselves? That might disappoint evolution enthusiasts.