Earth’s oceans are well-stocked with otherworldly inhabitants, but few of these critters are quite as strange as sea spiders, which look like something that would lurk in the crawlspace under Slender Man’s house. With their impossibly spindly legs, sea spiders—which aren’t even actual spiders—stride across the ocean…
It’s not every day one stumbles upon a 400 pound whale heart, but when you do, you put that shit in a museum. Thankfully, that’s exactly what the folks at the Royal Ontario Museum (ROM) did when they uncovered a dead blue whale in Newfoundland back in 2014. Since then, biologist Jacqueline Miller and her team at ROM…
In the 1993 cult classic Jurassic Park, a T. rex manages to scare the living shit out of kid heroes Lex and Tim Murphy by casually ripping apart their Ford Explorer like it’s a scrap of meat. It’s a scene that crystallized the destructive power of this extinct apex predator in the public consciousness—and as a new…
We already knew the deep ocean is full of nightmare creatures—twisted amalgams of tooth, jaw and fin sprung to life from some tortured corner of the multiverse. But good news—it gets even weirder! Scientists have just learned that one deep sea predator has a flexible attachment between its head and its skull that…
New research suggests that the appendix, long believed to be a throwback to our evolutionary past, may serve an important purpose by boosting immunity and acting as a “safe house” for helpful gut bacteria.
Do not be alarmed, but the menfolk of two newly-identified species of desert bees look an awful lot like ants, and scientists have no idea why.
Way back in 2014, Rachel Ciavarella created an unusual plush toy called Morris that could be turned inside out, revealing the fish’s inner biology. The stuffed animal was actually just an experiment in textures and materials, but so many people reached out wanting to buy one that Rachel is finally making the toy…
The island of Giraglia is a windswept pile of rocks that sits within eyeshot of the northern tip of Corsica in the Mediterranean sea. Humans never lived here, but two types of geckos do. One runs free; the other’s a prisoner—and their story may help unravel a longstanding evolutionary mystery.
Using pneumatic pistons and servos to power robots makes them fast and strong, but also bulky and extremely heavy. No one is going to mistake ATLAS for a real human being. To eventually create humanoid-looking robots like the Terminator we need to mechanically replicate every part of the human anatomy—starting with…
As if we needed more evidence that cephalopods are on the verge of a global uprising that will end in humanity’s destruction, our favorite tentacled invertebrates appear to have an insane visual system that allows them to perceive color despite being technically colorblind. This, along with distributed brains and the…
It’s a well-known fact that the cadavers of adult men were utilized in medical research and for educational purposes in the 18th and 19th centuries. However, a new anthropological study from the University of Cambridge offers fascinating details about another common, but poorly-documented, area of human medical…
Just in time for Halloween, University of Glasgow medical student Mike McCormick released diagrams of the female and male reproductive systems made out of all the kinds of candy I hated to get when I went trick-or-treating as a kid.
The tuatara isn’t actually a lizard. It’s the last survivor of a 250 million year old group of reptiles that mostly went extinct with the dinosaurs. It doesn’t have a penis, and ironically, that’s made it a linchpin for understanding how penises evolved in vertebrates.
When Penguin Books US hired French artist Malika Favre to illustrate the cover of its 2011 edition of the Kama Sutra, she created letterforms that highlighted the erotic nature of the text, riffing on the two thousand-year old manual’s recommendations for sex positions.
The human hand is a marvelous evolutionary invention: it can tie knots, tap out blog posts, wield tools and wire circuit boards. But how did we get these hands, with their long, dextrous fingers and conveniently opposable thumbs? It’s likely that tool-grasping played a role, but according to one evolutionary…
Howler monkeys are loud. (If you doubt me, just click on the video and listen.) They can bring on the noise because they have a built-in amplifier: a huge cup-shaped throat bone that resonates to their song. But a study up in today’s Current Biology suggests that the males with the biggest voices also have the…
A couple of months ago, the Twitter hashtag #JunkOff got biologists to post photos that displayed the extravagant weirdness of plant and animal genitalia. Yesterday, evolutionary geneticist Tom Houslay dared them to write about what animals actually do with their junk.
The Ig Nobel awards ceremony is a marvelous spectacle encrusted with tradition. But if you really want to know how the winners did their work and why, you need to go to the Ig informal lectures, held at MIT the Saturday after the awards.
Countdown to Life: The Extraordinary Making of You, a new BBC series focused on how our prenatal development shapes our lives, has brought new attention to a group of seemingly sex-swapping people in the Dominican Republic.
Some mammals have a dangerous-looking penis because their glans is covered in spines. In a few cases, we know why they’re there (typically, to induce ovulation during copulation). But in many other species, the purpose of the spiky bits is something of a mystery.
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