Enlarge / These rodents seemingly manage to avoid developing cancer. (credit: Jason Hollinger / Wikimedia Commons ) Cancer is a sad fact of life, as nearly 40 percent of people are diagnosed with it at some point in their lives. But humans aren’t alone in this. Many different species can also develop the disease—some more […]
As humans, we tend to eulogize the extinct with reverence. The Dodo Bird. The Rocky Mountain Locust. The Golden Toad. And why wouldn’t we? It was us who eradicated these precious, sentient creatures. Some theorists would argue it had to do with their inability to adapt. But what if things are adapting at a dangerous,… […]
Enlarge (credit: Bisakha Datta / Getty Images ) In the wake of severe poaching problems, some wildlife authorities have resorted to removing the horns of rhinos in order to eliminate the reason they’re poached in the first place. It turns out that, in the wake of a serious poaching event, evolution came up with a […]
Enlarge Once upon a time, during the Cretaceous period, a tiny crab wandered out of the water onto land and somehow got trapped in amber, which preserved it for 100 million years. At least that’s what a team of scientists hypothesize might have happened in a new paper announcing their discovery of the oldest known […]
Enlarge / Today’s diverse snake populations may trace back to a single ancestral species that survived the dinosaur-killing mass extinction. (credit: Alan Tunnicliffe Photography / Getty Images) The doom of the dinosaurs was good news for snakes. According to new research, snake biodiversity began increasing shortly after the Cretaceous–Paleogene mass extinction—you know, the one brought […]
Enlarge / Health care workers don protective equipment before working with Ebola patients. (credit: Bloomberg / Getty Images) A large international research group released a paper today suggesting that Ebola viruses can emerge from five years of dormancy to start off a new outbreak of infections. While this isn’t the first instance in which Ebola re-emerged […]
Enlarge / Does this look like the face of someone who started off as a cannibal? Why yes, it does. (credit: REDA & CO / Getty Images) The cane toad may be the poster animal for invasive species. Native to South America, it has been introduced to many other ecosystems in the hope it would […]
Enlarge (credit: iStock / Getty Images ) We’re currently watching—often in horror—what happens as a virus and its hosts engage in an evolutionary arms race. Measures to limit infectivity and enhance immunity are selecting for viral strains that spread more readily and avoid at least some of the immune response. All of that is easily […]
Enlarge / Plague-bearing Bambi? (credit: Cheryl E Davis / Getty Images) On Wednesday, the US Department of Agriculture released some rather disturbing news: a survey of wild deer populations has found that large numbers of the animals seem to have been exposed to SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19. The finding indicates that there’s a […]
Enlarge / It sure looks like a crab, but it isn’t. Why are crab-like forms so common? (credit: David Kirkland / Design Pics ) Many organisms on planet Earth aren’t crabs. Dogs, for instance—definitely not crabs. Science also suggests that humans are not, in fact, crabs. But a surprising number of creatures either are crabs […]