Enlarge (credit: David Aubrey ) Over the last decade or so, the science community has been concerned about what has been called the “reproducibility crisis”: the apparent failure of some significant experiments to produce the same results when they’re repeated. That failure has led to many suggestions about what might be done to improve matters, […]
Enlarge (credit: Justin Lewis) Medical authorities have spent years convincing people to use sunscreen to limit their exposure to UV light. But that effort has had a bit of a setback, as several locations have recently banned the use of sunblocks by beachgoers. Those bans took effect after local waters were found to have high […]
Enlarge / In the case of the samoyed, selection for physical characteristics produced a dog that sure looks happy. (credit: Zhao Hui) Many dog breeds are purely about appearance—think poodles and the Pekingese. But plenty of other breeds are devoted to specific tasks, like racing greyhounds. For many of these tasks, physical appearance isn’t enough: […]
A male orb-weaving spider catapults off a female after mating. Survival could mean another chance to fertilize her eggs. A male orb-weaving spider catapults off a female after mating. Survival could mean another chance to fertilize her eggs. Rudyard Kipling famously observed in a 1911 poem that “the female of the species is deadlier than […]
Enlarge (credit: Júlia d’Oliveira) They were the largest land creatures the Earth has ever known. But what survived millions of years of fossilization in one specific area of the Ponte Alta region of Brazil was not their massive bones, rather, it was their rare and relatively tiny eggs. And many of them! The first titanosaur […]
Enlarge / Meet Big John. (credit: Zoic Limited Liability Company) It’s difficult to tell which feature of the triceratops is more striking: the two large horns that jut from its forehead or the large frill that extends out from the back of its skull. In the minds of many paleontologists, the two features appear to […]
Enlarge / Image from a 2018 observational study of ballooning in large spiders depicting a crab spider just as it is about to take off. (credit: Cho, M. et al., 2018/CC BY-SA 4.0) In 1832, Charles Darwin witnessed hundreds of ballooning spiders landing on the HMS Beagle while some 60 miles offshore. Ballooning is a […]
Enlarge / Tawny crazy ants (Nylanderia fulva) feeding on a cricket. (credit: Lawrence E. Gilbert) Several years ago, staffers at Estero Llano Grande State Park in Weslaco, Texas, noticed a new type of invasive ant species. Tawny crazy ants were so aggressive that they were driving birds out of their nests and occasionally swarming over […]
Enlarge / The three-dimensional structures of proteins provide many opportunities for specific interactions. (credit: Getty Images) Thanks in part to the large range of shapes they can adopt and the chemical environments those shapes create, proteins can perform an amazing number of functions. But there are many proteins we wish didn’t function quite so well, […]
Enlarge / Brown University biologists x-rayed boa constrictors to determine how they manage to breathe while squeezing prey to death. (credit: John Capano) Watching a boa constrictor capture and consume its prey is quite something. First, the snake strikes and latches onto the prey with its teeth, then it coils its body tightly around the […]