FIFA World Cup souvenir. A McDonald’s McChicken container from 1996. Decades-old plastic packaging. Look inside the nests of ...

Plastic waste has let common coots reuse nests year after year. Scientists have now used the trash layers to date how old nests are.

What if expiration dates could tell us more than when something goes bad? Scientists have found that dates on plastic food ...

Many different birds, including the common coot, have started incorporating human-made food and drink packaging into their nests. This allowed three biologists to reconstruct the individual ...

Since coots have only been nesting in the city since ... which functioned “like a time capsule of human waste,” writes Science’s Gennaro Tomma. Inside, they found a candy bar wrapper that ...