Biology

What cannabis actually does to your brain

Archaeologists recently found a 2,700-year-old pot stash, so we know humans have been smoking weed for thousands of years. But it was only about 20 years ago that neuroscientists began to understand how it affects our brains. https://gizmodo.com/world-s-oldest-pot-stash-offered-an-afterlife-high-5099717 Scientists have known for a while that the active ingredient in cannabis was a chemical called delta-9-tetrahydrocannabinol,…

io9 Annalee Newitz

20-foot-long shark discovered, almost as big as Jaws

A pair of fisherman hauled in this Jaws-sized monster from Mexico’s Sea of Cortez. This great white shark was only five feet short of Steven Spielberg’s monster, but still big enough to devour any swimming plans we had this summer. Reports have this twenty-foot sea giant weighing in at 2,000 pounds. The fishermen who found…

io9 Meredith Woerner

Polar Bears Aren’t Descended From Brown Bears After All

For a long time, it’s been thought that polar bears are recent descendants of brown bears and that their white coats and webbed feet evolved into being over the last 150,000 years. A new study proves that incorrect: in fact, polar and brown bears share a common ancestor, making polar bears 600,000 years old. The…

Biology Jamie Condliffe

This photo of a spider eating a 1.5-foot-long snake will burn into your brain

As if you needed further proof that Australia is a phantasmagoric hellscape of arachnid horror, here’s a charming photograph of a golden orb spider consuming a half-meter brown tree snake. This battle — which occurred over the course of an hour yesterday — was shot by photographer Ant Hadleigh in a backyard in Freshwater, Australia.…

io9 Cyriaque Lamar

Toxic oceans created the greatest explosion in biodiversity Earth has ever seen

About 600 million years ago, life on Earth was pretty much just a homogeneous bunch of simple, soft-bodied species. But in an evolutionary blink of an eye, that all changed. A longstanding geological mystery could explain why our distant ancestors suddenly developed skeletons. In less than a hundred million years, life on Earth shifted away…

io9 Alasdair Wilkins

10 Pieces of Evidence That Plants Are Smarter Than You Think

Though plants possess nothing even remotely like brains, they can nevertheless communicate, measure time, and even use camouflage. They may not be thinking in a way that we’d recognize, but our chlorophyll-saturated pals are certainly doing a lot more than sitting around splitting water molecules. Here are ten things plants do that look pretty damn…

io9 Annalee Newitz and Sophie Bushwick

Artificially evolved enzyme could protect us against nerve gas attacks

Evolution is generally regarded as pretty good at specializing species for certain ecological niches, but with a glacial pace of adaptation, sometimes it needs a helping hand. Meet the team of the Weizmann Institute of Science in Israel, who decided they wanted to beef up the paraoxonase 1 (PON1) to the point it could combat…

io9 Tim Barribeau

Your Disquieting Fact of the Day: Tsetse Flies Lactate

Science never fails to deliver on the creepy, and today’s fact to try to avoid thinking too deeply about is that the tsetse fly lactates. Not only that, but its lactation can help save human lives. Tsetse flies lactate and give milk to their young. While leaving you to contemplate that, over your cup of…

io9 Esther Inglis-Arkell

Dinosaurs were doomed because laying eggs made them too huge

Sure, an impact event is what started wiping out the dinosaurs 65 million years ago. But why did some species manage to survive while most of the dinosaurs perished? A fascinating new theory suggests it’s all about laying eggs. To understand what’s going on here, we first have to consider just why so many dinosaurs…

io9 Alasdair Wilkins

Can Stem Cells Finally Provide a Baldness Cure That Works?

There has been no shortage of baldness cures over the ages, but they all share one thing in common: none of them really work. Now, a team of scientists has used stem cell therapy to give a hairless mouse a mohawk. There is hope yet. The researchers, from the Tokyo University of Science, have seized…

Tech News Jamie Condliffe

These tiny mammals sing songs that hint at complex language skills

The rock hyrax doesn’t look like much, but it just joined an elite group of animals who display the rudiments of language. The lengthy songs these social mammals sing to each other show evidence of syntax and even regional dialects. Hyraxes are native to Africa and the Middle East, and a recent study of the…

io9 Alasdair Wilkins

Yes, there is a right way to blow up an animal carcass

This, according to the US Forest Service document entitled “Obliterating Animal Carcasses with Explosives,” is the right way. See those rectangles? Those represent sticks of dynamite. Their placement demonstrates how they should be positioned in order to achieve what the document calls “total obliteration.” Pro-tip: The diagram up top illustrates how to explode a carcass…

io9 Robbie Gonzalez

Kangaroos have three vaginas

We interrupt your regularly scheduled news programming to bring you this wonderful piece of trivia about kangaroo genitals. Regular readers will know of my love for Inside Nature’s Giants, the British documentary where anatomists cut up large animals to examine how their bodies work and evolved. It’s a truly incredible show, combining unbridled joy at…

io9 Ed Yong - Discover

A flower that smells like poop and resembles vagina dentata

The rotten-meat-scented corpse flower (Amorphophallus titanum) may get all of the mainstream press, what with its flashy blooming parties that attract admirers from all across the globe. But on the botanical weirdness scale, it’s easily trumped by Hydnora africana, a parasitic flower found in southern Africa. https://gizmodo.com/the-most-disgusting-flower-in-the-world-is-about-to-blo-5795114 The Hydnora’s spherical flower grows on the roots…

io9 Cyriaque Lamar

Bucky Balls Could Double Your Lifespan

Buckminster fullerene molecules, the naturally occurring spheres made up of 60 carbon atoms, have long been suspected to have biological benefits. Now, a study that set out to establish if they were toxic when administered orally has proven quite the opposite—they almost doubled the lifespan of the rats that they were fed to. The experiments,…

Tech News Jamie Condliffe

This microbe could become the “off” switch for biological machines

In the Victorian era people marveled at what could be done by mixing and matching mechanical parts like the wheel, the magnet, the lever, and the piston. Today we mix and match biological parts like the gene, the enzyme, and the organ. Take a look at a new biological part that gives a microbe an…

io9 Esther Inglis-Arkell

Man drowns after being attacked by swan

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: swans, geese, and other large waterfowl are not to be trifled with — especially when they’re defending a nest. According to the BBC: Anthony Hensley, 37, worked for a company that provided swans to keep geese away from property. On Saturday morning, the married father of…

io9 Robbie Gonzalez

Chimpanzee “nests” reveal when hominids first left the trees

When a chimpanzee goes to sleep, it first has to build a “nest”, which allows it to sleep safely up in the trees. Strangely, chimpanzees also build nests when sleeping on the ground, which might reveal a secret about human evolution. These nests are essentially woven frames of broken branches made into sleeping platforms. That’s…

io9 Alasdair Wilkins

Bird eggs evolved a different color in just 40 years

Cuckoo finches are bad news to other birds. They are brood parasites, meaning they lay eggs in other species’s nests to trick their victims into raising the finches’ children as their own. This kicked off a supercharged evolutionary arms race. A frequent target of the cuckoo finch is the tawny-flanked prinia. To defend against these…

io9 Alasdair Wilkins

The asteroid that killed the dinosaurs might have created life in other solar systems

Exogenesis is the theory that the building blocks for life came from elsewhere in the universe. The trouble is it doesn’t explain where those building blocks came from in the first place. But new calculations suggest one intriguing source: Earth. Obviously, we’re not talking about life arriving on Earth from other worlds here – the…

io9 Alasdair Wilkins

What cannabis actually does to your brain

20-foot-long shark discovered, almost as big as Jaws

Polar Bears Aren’t Descended From Brown Bears After All

This photo of a spider eating a 1.5-foot-long snake will burn into your brain

Toxic oceans created the greatest explosion in biodiversity Earth has ever seen

10 Pieces of Evidence That Plants Are Smarter Than You Think

Artificially evolved enzyme could protect us against nerve gas attacks

Your Disquieting Fact of the Day: Tsetse Flies Lactate

Dinosaurs were doomed because laying eggs made them too huge

Can Stem Cells Finally Provide a Baldness Cure That Works?

These tiny mammals sing songs that hint at complex language skills

Yes, there is a right way to blow up an animal carcass

Kangaroos have three vaginas

A flower that smells like poop and resembles vagina dentata

Bucky Balls Could Double Your Lifespan

This microbe could become the “off” switch for biological machines

Man drowns after being attacked by swan

Chimpanzee “nests” reveal when hominids first left the trees

Bird eggs evolved a different color in just 40 years

The asteroid that killed the dinosaurs might have created life in other solar systems

NASA Rover Finds Glowing, Ruby-Like Crystals on Mars for the First Time

Anker Prime Docking Station Hits Its Lowest Price as Amazon’s Spring Sale Winds Down (14 Ports With 160W Output)

Google TV Streamer 4K Drops to an All-Time Low, Final Hours in Amazon Spring Sale to Turn Any TV Smart on a Budget

The New ‘Masters of the Universe’ Trailer Brings Eternia to Life

AirPods Max 2 Review: Still Ridiculously Expensive and Ridiculously Nice

UGREEN Bluetooth Tracker 4-Pack Now Just $7 Each With iOS and Android Support, While AirTag Stays at Full Price

Trump Posts Concept Art of His Presidential Library, and It’s AI Slop

Forget Tower Desktop, GMKtec Mini PC Drops to a Record Low as Amazon Clears Out Final Spring Sale Stock

DJI Osmo 360 Review: The Best 360 Camera for the DJI-Pilled

Aqara Smart Lock U400 Review: Hands-free Unlocking at Its Best

MSI Prestige 14 Flip AI+ Review: A Solid 2-in-1 Laptop With Some Glaring Flaws

Sonos Play Review: Call It a Comeback

Sonos Era 100 SL Review: The Cheapest Way Into Wired Sonos Sound

Asus ROG’s Massive Swift OLED Gaming Monitor Epitomizes Excess in the Best Way

The Ikea Varmblixt Smart Lamp Fills a Donut Hole in My Life

Nothing Headphone A vs. Headphone 1: Which Pair of ANC Wireless Headphones Wins?

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