Researchers have rediscovered a set of sensory hairs on the wings of bats, shown that they respond to light puffs of air, and found that getting rid of them alters the way bats fly.

Tracking experiments showed that the bats that lacked patches of hair tended to fly faster than usual and took wider turns, possibly as a result. The authors suggest that, in the absence of any sense of air flow, the bats think they're suffering the equivalent of a stall, and speed up to try to compensate.

The fiery Trinidad Scorpion Butch T registers 1,463,700 Scoville heat units, placing it ahead of the current leader recognised by Guinness World Records, the Naga Viper, which comes in at 1,382,118. Jalapenos measure about 2500-5000 and the hottest Tabasco is 30,000.

"They're just severe, absolutely severe," says Marcel de Wit, The Chilli Factory co-owner. "No wonder they start making crowd-control grenades now with chillies. It's just wicked."

Researchers have discovered the first case of a direct transfer of a human DNA fragment to a bacterial genome. The guilty party? Gonorrhea.

"This has evolutionary significance because it shows you can take broad evolutionary steps when you're able to acquire these pieces of DNA. The bacterium is getting a genetic sequence from the very host it's infecting."

Video of an uncontacted tribe spotted in the Brazilian jungle has been released, bringing them to life in ways that photographs alone cannot.

Brazilian government policy is now to watch from afar, and - at least in principle - to protect uncontacted tribes from intrusion.

Unfortunately, uncontacted tribes usually live in resource-rich areas threatened by logging, mining and other development. There's often pressure on governments to turn a blind eye.

The proportion of antibiotics sold in the United States each year that go to animals turns out to be not 70 percent, but rather 80 percent. Here's CLF's Ralph Loglisci, who got the confirmatory numbers from the FDA.

Most of the drugs used in animal agriculture and in human medicine are functionally identical. That's one reason why the overuse of antibiotics in animals is such a concern: When organisms become resistant on the farm to drugs used on livestock, they are becoming resistant to the exact same drugs used in humans.

Hours before its special news conference today, the cat is out of the bag: NASA has discovered a completely new life form that doesn't share the biological building blocks of anything currently living on planet Earth.

Discovered in poisonous Mono Lake, California, this bacteria is made of arsenic, something that was thought to be completely impossible.

Carbon emissions fell in 2009 due to the recession - but not by as much as predicted, suggesting the fast upward trend will soon be resumed.

"If you think about it, it's like four days' worth of emissions; it's peanuts," he told BBC News.

No, it's not a gremlin. It's not Yoda's long-lost cousin. It's a western tarsier (Tarsius bancanus), photographed in the Danum Valley Conservation Area in Sabah, Malaysian Borneo.

The image, Night Eyes, has been highly commended in the Gerald Durrell Award for Endangered Wildlife, part of this year's Veolia Environnement Wildlife Photographer of the Year competition, curated by the Natural History Museum, London.

The Indonesian mimic octopus has the extraordinary ability to pass itself off as many of the toxic fishes or sea snakes that share its habitat.

By flattening its head and arms, using a bold brown and white colour display and adopting an undulating swimming technique T. mimicus can fool predators that it is, in fact, a poisonous flatfish rather than a tasty meal.

Environmental and animal-welfare groups are urging the International Whaling Commission (IWC) to persuade the World Health Organization (WHO) to act over fears about eating whale meat.

The groups say whale meat is highly contaminated with mercury and should not be eaten.