Anteaters are very good animals. They somehow pull off the whole “slurp up ants with their sticky, noodly, bendy straw tongues” so confidently you forget how weird that is. And scientists agree that, yes, anteater tongues are weird. But they’re also understudied.
If you read Stellaluna as a child, chances are, you like bats. Who wouldn’t? These nocturnal cuties are full of cuddles. Sadly, they’re also teeming with disease. While we understand the impulse to snuggle a bat, it’d be in their best interest—and ours—if humans just left them alone.
The human body isn’t just your cells, but a home for trillions of bacteria. We know that many of those bacteria serve important purposes, and imbalances or a lack of diversity could lead to illness. But research into this field is pretty new. At least, new enough that you shouldn’t just transplant someone else’s gut…
Monroe MacKinney thought he had reeled in just another largemouth bass from his parents’ eight-acre pond. But after peering into the fish’s mouth, the Missouri fisherman realized he’d actually hauled up a Russian nesting doll of nightmares.
What has a body like a humpless camel, legs like a skinny rhino, and a face like the short-trunked saiga antelope? Until only recently, the accepted answer was Charles Darwin’s, and I paraphrase: “I have no idea what the hell this is.”
Humans may have big, bulbous brains, but when it comes to pure muscle power, we’re often considered the weakest of the great apes. Even chimpanzees, who are significantly smaller than us, exhibit levels of strength that are practically super-human by our standards. New research shows the degree to which our primate…
The vast majority of infectious human diseases come from animals, yet we know surprisingly little about which animals pose the greatest risk. A new study helps resolve this shortcoming, ranking the mammals that are most likely to spread infectious diseases to humans.
Banana slugs are slow. Like, ridiculously slow. Watching them eat is tantamount to watching paint dry, which is why Canadian photographer R. Jeanette Martin wisely set her phone to record in timelapse mode when she encountered a particularly hungry mollusk in her garden.
A global coral bleaching event that’s been killing reefs around the world since early 2015 finally appears to be ending, according to a report just released by the National Oceanic Atmospheric Administration. That said, reefs aren’t out of hot water yet.
Despite thousands of years of pant-crapping history, there’s a surprising amount we don’t know about diarrhea. There’s a couple ways we’ve figured out how to treat the symptom. But lots of scientists’ understanding of diarrhea—from illnesses like traveler’s diarrhea—is more based on intuition than data.
Last month, a group of Dutch fishermen discovered a double-headed harbor porpoise (Phocoena phocoena). The unusual little fellow was definitely DOA, and fearing that keeping it would get them in trouble, the fishermen took a few photos of the beast and threw it back in the ocean. What the crew didn’t realize was…
Most city dwellers would agree that pigeons are sentient garbage. They eat pizza off the ground and defecate with abandon, sometimes on pedestrians’ heads. Worst of all, they don’t seem terribly bothered by humans—they’ll flap their filthy wings in our faces and move on as if nothing happened. But today just so…
Over two billion people around the world are now affected by weight problems, according to new research published today in The New England Journal of Medicine. At the same time, more people are dying from weight-related health conditions than ever before—a development the authors are describing as a “growing and…
Tubelip wrasses live on coral reefs stretching from the eastern coast of Africa to far-flung atolls in the South Pacific. They get their name from their bizarre lips, which are conspicuously curled, making them look like someone glued a PVC pipe onto their face. It’s these lips that allow the wrasse to feed on their…
Narwhals are empirically cute—they’re the closest we’ll ever get to seeing real-life unicorns. However, new drone footage from the WWF in Canada suggests these “unicorns of the sea” are also pretty hard core. The video illuminates what narwhals actually use their “horn” for, and let me tell you, folks, it’s not fuzzy…
Researchers from Wyss Institute and Harvard SEAS have developed a soft robotic exosuit that significantly boosts a person’s running performance. The device requires a tether and external power supply to work, but once it becomes portable, it could help athletes run faster and further than before, smashing their…
Life gets pretty weird in the cold abyss of the deep sea. One deep ocean oddity presented itself to researchers at Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation (CSIRO) just the other day—the strange beast has now been referred to dozens of times as the “faceless fish.” While the nickname is pretty…
In recent years, Australia has been embroiled in an effort to cull kangaroos—this year alone, it’s expected to kill over a million of them in an effort to protect endangered species in its grasslands. While the mass culling has sparked outrage among animals rights activists, waging war on its fauna is nothing new for…
Here’s some news you desperately need today: A team of intrepid scientists has boldly gone where others have never dared, into the minds of tiny prairie voles in love. By studying the neural circuits of these adorable rodents, the researchers have uncovered some of the mechanisms behind their social bonding.…
Introducing Hyalinobatrachium yaku, a newly-discovered species of glassfrog that lives in the Amazonian lowlands of Ecuador. Like other glassfrogs, it features transparent skin on its belly, but this tiny critter takes things to another level by exposing the entire contents of its underside—heart and head included.
