Biology

This Insect Uses Farts to Immobilize Its Prey

I’m sorry, did you not hear me? I said THIS INSECT FARTS ON ITS PREY. At Wired, Gwen Pearson writes at surprising, but nevertheless compelling, length on the unconventional hunting tactics of Lomamyia latipennis, a termite-predating species of Beaded Lacewig. When a baby of the species gets hungry it stuns its prey with what researchers…

US Congress Wants Religious Experts to Weigh in on Three-Parent IVF

Several months ago, the UK approved a groundbreaking reproductive technique in which babies are created from the genetic material of three people. The US is now considering the procedure, but Congress’s new spending bill will require religious experts to review a forthcoming report. As Sara Reardon reports in Nature News, the U.S. Food and Drug…

This “Transitional Turtle” is the Stuff of Creationist Nightmares

The discovery of Pappochelys, a Triassic-era reptile with a set of emerging turtle-like features, is helping scientists fill in an important evolutionary gap. Creationists have a tendency to declare any gap in the fossil record as evidence that Darwinian evolution is flawed. The dearth of transitional species, they argue, poses a huge problem for evolutionary…

XKCD Tips Its Hat to the Microbiome (and so Should You)

When was the last time you thanked the bugs in your belly? Even if the concept of a “healthy” microbiome is flawed, the trillions of microorganisms living in your gut (and mouth, and vagina, and nose, etc.) play a vital role in many of your body’s functions. They’re so essential, many refer to the microbiome…

Are Plastics Making You Infertile?

Recent research into the health effects of the plastic-making chemicals phthalates has reignited concerns about low sperm counts. But the evidence is far from conclusive. Recent research has reignited concerns that exposure to chemicals from plastics might be to blame for low sperm counts in young men. I share the concerns about the high prevalence…

Scientists Can Finally Tell This Bizarre Animal’s Head From Its Tail

The fossilized remains of Hallucigenia sparsa were so strange, that paleontologists originally mistook its tail for its head. Now, four decades after its discovery, a Cambridge University research team has corrected this error with an updated reconstruction (and for an ancient sea worm that featured a frightening row of spikes, it was surprisingly cute). The…

Sure, Racehorses Are Getting Faster, but at What Cost?

A new study shows racehorses have gotten progressively quicker over the past 160 years, and in sprint races, especially. But given the startling number of race-related deaths each year, it’s nothing to be proud of. University of Exeter researchers Patrick Sharman and Alastair Wilson analyzed a dataset of 616,084 British flat races run by 70,388…

Misshapen Penis Corpse Flower Blooms At Cornell University

The Sumatran titan arum’s species name – Amorphophallus titanum – means “giant misshapen penis”. Guess what its flower looks like? At full growth, the flower stands 3 meters high, pulses with heat, and smells like rotting meat. The heat and stench attracts flies and beetles, which pollinate the plant. The whole show lasts 2 days.…

Why Scientists Have Been Scared of Space Germs for Almost 50 Years

The 1967 Outer Space Treaty was one of the few things the U.S. and the Soviet Union managed to agree on at the height of the Cold War. Among other things, it forbid both nations from bringing space microbes back to Earth, or spreading Earth germs to other planets. Article IX of the treaty says:…

Yes, We Are in the Early Stages of a Mass Extinction

A new study suggests that thousands of species on Earth going extinct at a rate that far exceeds what’s typical. We are in the beginnings of a mass extinction, argue scientists, and it could lead to global starvation for humans — as well as many other animals. The new study, published today in Science Advances,…

Watch This Fish Perform One Of Nature’s Most Impressive Vanishing Acts

The slender filefish has evolved the ability to camouflage its body patterns and shape so effectively, it can render itself effectively invisible in a matter of seconds. At New Scientist, Agata Blaszczak-Boxe describes the findings of Justine Allen and her colleagues at Brown University, who have documented the fish’s disappearing act in the shallow waters…

Watch As Waves Of Glowing Genes Build A Spine

Not only do you need all of your organs, you need them all in the proper proportion. How does one segment of the vertebra know how big to get compared to another? Now we can see the spine growing in incredible glowing waves. Scientists at the European Molecular Biology Laboratory (EMBL) took a look at…

40 Years of Bad Science: How Jaws Got Everything Wrong About Sharks

To celebrate the 40th anniversary of its original release, Jaws will be shown on the big screen once more on June 21st. Few other movies have cast such a long shadow into the “real” world as the first summer blockbuster. As a marine biologist whose research focuses on shark conservation, I’ve been living in that…

Police Are Trying to Use Honeybees to Detect Illegal Drugs

With drug laws changing all the time, it’s hard for police sniffer dogs to keep up with what they’re supposed to find and what they aren’t. That’s why police forces are turning to insects to sniff out narcotics. An odd scientific paper in PLoS One today details the very first attempts to get insects to…

Butt Identification, and Other Awkward Biometrics

Biometrics are everywhere. Fingerprint scanners are a standard feature in the newest smartphones, DNA testing is common, and facial recognition is getting more and more terrifyingly reliable. But there are many biometric applications still lurking on the fringe, and some of them get really, really personal. These are the three most embarrassing ways biometrics can…

New research suggests surprisingly few bee species are responsible for pollinating the world’s crops. Globally, a mere 2% of wild bees pollinate 80% of bee-pollinated crops. Monetarily,that equates to $3,000/hectare, or billions of dollars annually, a figure roughly equal to the value of honey bees. Image: USGS/Anthony G Gutierrez/CC

This Heart-on-a-Chip Uses Gravity to Mimic a Human Pulse

This small, clear block may not look much, but it uses some of the world’s most basic physics to accurately recreate the rhythms of the human heart in the laboratory. This certainly isn’t the first heart-on-a-chip to be created. But microfluidic devices like it have in the past required mechanical pumps or hand-driven syringes to…

Left in the Brain: The Potentially Toxic Residue from MRI Drugs

Researchers raise alarms about unknown health risks of GE’s Omniscan and Bayer’s Magnevist, drugs injected to get better MRI pictures that contain the heavy metal gadolinium. With a family history of breast cancer, Marcie Jacobs decided in June 2001 that an MRI screening was her best preventive option. As is common with MRIs, Jacobs was…

How Greyscale In Game Of Thrones Compares To The Real Story Of Leprosy

To fans of Game of Thrones, Greyscale and its disruptive terror might be a reminder of the Black Death or those mysterious poxes and fluxes that chroniclers wrote about in the era before modern medicine. But Greyscale’s allure for contemporary audiences can actually be traced back to a biblical mistranslation of leprosy. In the neighborhood…

Dying White Blood Cells Alert Others To The Presence Of Pathogens

For the first time ever, molecular biologists have filmed the death of a human white blood cell. But the video shows something else, too. These integral components of our immune system do not go quietly into that good night. Rather, they go down alerting their neighbors to the presence of potential pathogens. Scientists from the…