Why is Christian Science in our name? Our name is about honesty. The Monitor is owned by The First Church of Christ, Scientist, and we’ve always been transparent about that. The church publishes the ...

If Miss Muffet in the children’s nursery rhyme had known more about garden spiders, she might not have been so frightened. Spiders are beneficial garden inhabitants that are much more interested in ...

Although many people have a built-in aversion to them, spiders rank as one of the gardener's best tools for biological pest control. They also are one of the few pest predators that don't eat plants. ...

At night in the forests of East Asia, fireflies glow to attract mates. But sometimes their signals are hijacked. Sheet web spiders have been caught turning these insects into unwilling accomplices, ...

Orb-weaver spiders produce fine threads made of nanofibers, arranged like beads on a string with puffs and intermediate zones. The spiders have an organ called a cribellum, which pushes out silk ...

What happens when an insect touches a spider’s web? Most web-spinning spiders line their silken threads with droplets of glue, which snag blundering insects. But one group—the cribellate spiders—does ...