Not many people think about what it's like to be a bat, but for those who do, it's enlightening and potentially groundbreaking for understanding aspects of the human brain and nervous system.

Investigations continue into the cause of a mysterious illness that has resulted in the deaths of thousands of bats since March 2008. At more than 25 caves and mines in the northeastern U.S, bats exhibiting a condition now referred to as “white-nosed syndrome” have been dying.

“Don’t eat the green parts of tomatoes, cut the green off the potatoes.” Any child would know that eating these parts of vegetables is a bad idea. The reason behind this is that they contain secondary plant compounds which may have detrimental effects on the consumer.

Gareth Jones, Professor of Biological Sciences, works on the ecology and behaviour of bats. He has been visiting China for seven years, during which time he has seen a staggering change occur in Chinese science.

Researchers have developed a computer algorithm that can imitate the bat’s ability to classify plants using echolocation. The study, published March 21st in the open-access journal PLoS Computational Biology, represents a collaboration between machine learning scientists and biologists studying bat orientation.

Natural flyers like birds, bats and insects outperform man-made aircraft in aerobatics and efficiency. University of Michigan engineers are studying these animals as a step toward designing flapping-wing planes with wingspans smaller than a deck of playing cards.

An epidemic of some strange illness spread among bats in northeastern U.S. and caused death of thousands of animals. New York state wildlife officials say that this may be fraught with extinction.

Bats are the most vocal mammals other than humans, and understanding how they communicate during their nocturnal outings could lead to better treatments for human speech disorders, say researchers at Texas A&M University.

New research shows how different species of plants evolve unique floral adaptations in order to transfer pollen on different regions of bats’ bodies, thus allowing multiple plant species to share bats as pollinators.

A collaborative team of scientists reported findings today demonstrating the presence of Marburg virus RNA genome and antibodies in a common species of African fruit bat (Rousettus aegyptiacus).

Do bats use their ultrasonic echolocation calls to recognise their own species" A new study in the Journal of Biogeography by Danilo Russo and colleagues suggests that this is certainly the case for horseshoe bats (Rhinolophidae). These bats find their way in the dark and detect insect prey by emitting long ultrasound calls mainly made of a constant frequency.

An expedition led by the Wildlife Conservation Society (WCS) to a remote corner of the eastern Democratic Republic of Congo has uncovered unique forests which, so far, have been found to contain six animal species new to science: a bat, a rodent, two shrews, and two frogs.