Enlarge (credit: Science & Society Picture Library | Getty Images) Researchers have long debated what the 10-foot-long tooth that erupts from a narwhal’s head is actually for. Perhaps it has something to do with sexual selection, and males with longer horns attract more females. Or maybe the things sense salinity. Or perhaps a narwhal uses […]
Enlarge / Northwestern University scientists have developed the first mechanical simulation of a rat whisker inside its follicle, to better understand how that sensory input is communicated to the brain. (credit: Niccirf/Getty Images) Rats, cats, and many other mammals have whiskers, which they typically use to sense their surrounding environment, akin to the sense of […]
Enlarge (credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech) Colombia’s rainforest looked very different 66 million years ago. At present, the humid and biodiverse ecosystem is jam-packed with plants and is covered in a thick, light-blocking canopy of leaves and branches. Notably, there are no dinosaurs. But prior to the dinosaurs going away with the Chicxulub impact, signaling the end of […]
Enlarge (credit: Lori Oberhofer/NPS) In addition to being home to men with questionable decision-making skills, Florida also seems to have some issues with bizarre animal behavior, whether it’s freezing iguanas dropping from trees or alligators battling pythons in the Everglades. When it comes to those animals, however, Floridians can truly put the blame on non-natives. […]
Enlarge / A mouse embryo with the nervous system highlighted in blue. (credit: Lawrence Berkeley Lab) Embryos start out as a single cell, and have to go from there to a complicated array of multiple tissues. For organisms like insects or frogs, that process is pretty easy to study, since development takes place in an […]
Enlarge / The bacteria (yellow) live inside a larger eukaryotic cell. (credit: MAX PLANCK INSTITUTE FOR MARINE MICROBIOLOGY) Deep in Switzerland’s Lake Zug swims a microorganism that has evolved a strange way to “breathe.” A team of researchers discovered a novel partnership between a single-celled eukaryote—an organism with a clearly defined nucleus holding its genome—and […]
Enlarge (credit: Barcroft Media / Getty Images) In the US, a 2016 Gallup poll found that the majority of schools want to start teaching code, with 66% of K-12 school principals thinking that computer science learning should be incorporated into other subjects. Most countries in Europe have added coding classes and computer science to their […]
Enlarge / Scientists have developed a new type of light sensor inspired by the eyes of the mantis shrimp. (credit: Brent Durand/Getty Images) Smartphone cameras have improved dramatically since the first camera-equipped cell phone was introduced in 1999, but they are still subject to tiny errors in the alignment of different wavelengths of light in […]
At least two species of sacoglossan sea slugs are capable of severing their own heads from their bodies and then growing an entirely new body, including a heart and other internal organs. The authors of a new study published in the journal Current Biology postulate that the secret to the decapitated slugs’ survival might lie in […]
Enlarge Susanne Foitzik is a proud myrmecologist: an entomologist who specializes in ants (it was a new vocab word for me, too). Her lab at the Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich studies the dynamics between slave-making ant species, which capture ants of other species and get them to work for them, and the host species […]