Enlarge / University of California, Riverside scientists suspended fresh pieces of raw chicken from branches to attract carrion-feeding “vulture bees” in Costa Rica. (credit: Quinn McFrederick/UCR) Ask a random person to picture a bee, and they’ll likely conjure up the familiar black-and-yellow striped creature buzzing from flower to flower collecting pollen to bring back to the […]
Enlarge / A painted lady butterfly lands on a flower. The bright iridescent colors in its wings don’t come from pigment molecules but from how the wings are structured. Chitin scales essentially form a diffraction grating tuned to specific wavelengths of light. (credit: Mark Rightmire / Getty Images) One of the best-known poems by Gerard […]
Enlarge / Herpes viruses getting ready to infect new cells. (credit: Thierry Work, USGS ) One of the defining features of viruses is that they rely on host proteins in order to reproduce. A host cell will often copy viral genes into RNAs and then translate those RNAs into proteins, for example. Typically, a mature […]
Enlarge / False color image of bacteria on a human tongue. (credit: STEVE GSCHMEISSNER/ Getty Images) An altered microbiome has been associated with—and thereby either implicitly or explicitly implicated as a partial cause of—a wide range of human maladies. These include immune disorders like celiac disease, asthma, and diabetes; obesity; cancers; psychiatric disorders like depression […]
Europa could harbor complex life, and we’ll have to take care to avoid any cross-contamination. (credit: Ted Stryk/NASA) The Beresheet crash landed on Earth’s Moon in 2019. Part of the ill-fated Israeli lunar lander’s payload was a bunch of tardigrades, or “water bears.” These organisms are under a millimeter long and can survive extreme cold […]
Enlarge (credit: Humphreys et. al.) It is now relatively trivial to determine the order of amino acids in a protein. Figuring out how that order translates to a complicated three-dimensional structure that performs a specific function, however, is extremely challenging. But after decades of slow progress, Google’s DeepMind AI group announced that it has made tremendous […]
Johns Hopkins University researchers discovered precisely how spiders build webs by using night vision and artificial intelligence to track and record every movement of all eight legs as spiders worked in the dark. Ovid’s Metamorphoses speaks of the orb-weavers, said to be descendants of Arachne, a figure in Greek mythology who wove beautiful tapestries and […]
Wellesley College researchers have identified a sound that Asian honeybees use to warn the hive of a “murder hornet” attack. Asian honeybees (Apis cerana) produce a unique alarm sound to alert hive members to an attack by giant “murder hornets,” according to a new paper published in the journal Royal Society Open Science. For the […]
Enlarge / A whole three-banded panther worm from the muscle transgenic line, where the muscle cells are glowing green. (credit: Lorenzo Ricci) In 1961, Osamu Shimomura and Frank Johnson isolated a protein through jellyfish that glow green under UV light. Corals, too, can fluoresce in a wide range of hues, thanks to similar proteins. Now, scientists […]
Enlarge (credit: Raymond Gehman / Getty Images) Earlier this year, researchers found evidence that many wild deer in Michigan had antibodies suggesting that they had been exposed to SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19. That’s a significant cause for concern, as a large population of susceptible animals could act as a reservoir that could allow the […]