A minnow with fangs. A carnivorous sponge. A deep-sea worm that releases green luminescent “bombs” when it is threatened. These are just a few of the top 10 most interesting new species discovered in 2009.

Get up close and personal with brain tissue, kidney cells, cyanobacteria and more. This slideshow lets you glimpse the realm of the tiny through confocal microscope images.

Peer inside bee colonies and meet ants and mole-rats at the Southwest's first Social Insect Science EXPO.

Help choose this year's champion of creepiness in the Ugly Bug Contest.

Algae is the gunk that collects in your fish tank and makes you slip on rocks while crossing a stream. You probably think of algae as a nuisance, if you even bother to think of it at all. Milt Sommerfeld and Qiang Hu think of algae as one of the most useful things in existence. And they think about it every day.

It’s easy to see why scientists want to make vaccines for diseases like HIV and pneumonia. These illnesses kill a lot of people. Bert Jacobs, on the other hand, is developing a vaccine for a disease that no one ever catches—smallpox.

Twenty-five years after the first AIDS case was reported, there is still no cure or vaccine for this deadly infection. What makes this virus such a tricky target?

Roy Curtiss has a new idea for giving out vaccines. He wants people to gulp down the food-poisoning-causing bacterium Salmonella. What on Earth is he thinking?

Imagine if you could get a vaccine by eating a banana or tomato. Charles Arntzen is trying to make that possible.

Sudhir Kumar is trying to answer some of the greatest unanswered questions in biology. How and when did life on Earth evolve? How can scientists identify the genes involved in diseases such as cancer? How does an organism develop from a tiny, fertilized egg into an adult body made up of trillions of cells? Kumar and his team are using new methods and tools to uproot the conventional wisdom of biology. They are giving the tree of life a good shaking.