Sunbirds suck their nectar, in dramatic contrast to hummingbirds, which sop it up
Peer-Reviewed Publication
Updates every hour. Last Updated: 13-Apr-2026 23:15 ET (14-Apr-2026 03:15 GMT/UTC)
Hummingbirds and their Asian and African counterparts, sunbirds, feed by sticking their tongues and beak tips into pools of nectar. While hummingbirds sop up the liquid with their spongy tongues and squeeze it out with their beaks, sunbirds found a different solution unique among vertebrates. A study by biologists at Brown University and UC Berkeley discovered that they create suction with their tongues against the roofs of their mouth to draw in nectar.
Harvard SEAS researchers show mathematically that when many robots share a space, adding a certain amount of randomness in their paths improves their efficiency.
According to new research from Duke University, the creative outputs of commercial LLMs are more similar to each other than users might hope. When challenged with three standard tasks assessing creativity, answers from commercial LLMs are much more alike than their human counterparts.
SAN DIEGO, APRIL 13, 2026 ― Jennifer Wargo, M.D., professor of Surgical Oncology and Genomic Medicine at The University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center, has been elected to the 2026 class of Fellows of the American Association for Cancer Research (AACR) Academy in recognition of her pioneering work to define interactions between the microbiome, cancer biology and treatment response.
New Cornell University research finds an Ithaca cemetery is home to one of the largest and oldest recorded aggregations of ground nesting bees in the world, with an estimated 5.5 million individual bees. That’s the equivalent of more than 200 honeybee hives in a 1.5 acre plot of land.
In the deserts of southeastern Arizona, harvester ants congregate with serrated jaws agape outside the nests of much smaller cone ants. However, the nests’ inhabitants are not threatened. Instead, they crawl all over the harvester ants and lick and nibble their body surfaces—the first known example of an ant that cleans a much larger ant species. The unusual behavior, described for the first time this week in the journal Ecology and Evolution, was observed by entomologist Mark Moffett, a research associate at the Smithsonian's National Museum of Natural History.