Life Cockatoo cracks lock with no prior training Video: Clever cockatoos pick five locks to get food Pathetic human lock Need a locksmith? Call a cockatoo instead. One of the parrots in an experiment proved capable of picking a series of locks with no prior training. Alex Kacelnik and colleagues at the University of Oxford set a number of cockatoos a challenge: pick … 51¶¯Âþ
Health Why is the rich US in such poor health? In the wake of a startling report highlighting the US's poor health compared with other wealthy nations, its study director searches for answers Opinion
Technology Bitcoin sells out as big business moves in The virtual currency has reached a critical new stage in its evolution – and is about to become almost respectable 51¶¯Âþ
Space Ultimate moon shot reveals the sun's flare (Image: Miloslav Druckmuller, Peter Aniol, Martin Dietzel, Vojtech Rusin/Science Faction/Corbis) EERIE at best, terrifying at worst, this 2009 solar eclipse was a monster. Maximum totality – when the sun is completely covered by the moon – in this case lasted a whopping 6.6 minutes, and won't be repeated on such a scale until 2132 . … Regulars
Life The strange ape that's rewriting our family tree The story of our evolution seemed clear. But a string of recent discoveries in Africa is forcing us to radically rethink it Features
Life Kew lays on a feast of fruit and veg for eyes and mind Bompas and Parr with their pineapple surprise (Image: Bompas & Parr) IncrEdibles: A voyage through surprising edible plants , Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, London, until 3 November You are what you eat, but how much do you know about what you consume? IncrEdibles, a newly opened festival at London's Kew Gardens, is designed to put … CultureLab
Free online MIT courses are an education revolution Online learning is the biggest shake-up of education since the advent of the printing press, says Anant Agarwal , an MIT computing specialist You run edX . What exactly is it? EdX is a massive open online course (MOOC) venture founded last year by Harvard University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. We offer free … Careers
Feedback: The mark of the barcode Feedback is our weekly column of bizarre stories, implausible advertising claims, confusing instructions and more The mark of the barcode WHEN we considered conspiracy theory trends on 13 April , we unaccountably failed to mention barcodes, a major subject of scare stories over several decades. In chapter 13, verse 17 of the Bible's very strange … Regulars