Sea urchin skeletons may owe some of their strength to a common geometric design. Components of the skeletons of common sea urchins (Paracentrotus lividus) follow a similar pattern to that found in honeycombs and dragonfly wings, researchers report in the August Journal of the Royal Society Interface. Studying this recurring natural order could inspire the […]
It’s not easy being ringed. A newly released image from the James Webb Space Telescope, or JWST, shows the Cartwheel Galaxy still reeling from a run-in with a smaller galaxy 400 million years ago. The Cartwheel Galaxy, so called because of its bright inner ring and colorful outer ring, lies about 500 million light-years from […]
Lionfish certainly aren’t the fastest predators on the reef, but new research suggests that they can catch swift prey through pure tenacity, gliding slowly in pursuit until the perfect moment to strike. The finding may help explain part of the lionfish’s impact as an invasive species, and reveal a key hunting strategy that other relatively […]
By his count, Michel Roccati is on his third life, at least. In the first, he was a fit young man riding his motorcycle around Italy. A 2017 crash in the hills near Turin turned him into the second man, one with a severe spinal cord injury that left him paralyzed from the waist down. […]
Call it cellular life support for dead pigs. A complex web of pumps, sensors and artificial fluid can move oxygen, nutrients and drugs into pigs’ bodies, preserving cells in organs that would otherwise deteriorate after the heart stops pumping. The finding, described August 3 in Nature, is preliminary, but it hints at new ways to […]
Sometimes a photo is literally a matter of life, death — and zombies. This haunting image, winner of the 2022 BMC Ecology and Evolution photography competition, certainly fits that description. It captures the fruiting bodies of a parasitic fungus, emerging from the lifeless body of an infected fly in the Peruvian rainforest. The fungus-infested fly […]
Archaeologist Peter Bellwood’s academic odyssey wended from England to teaching posts halfway around the world, first in New Zealand and then in Australia. For more than 50 years, he has studied how humans settled islands from Southeast Asia to Polynesia. So it’s fitting that his new book, a plain-English summary of what’s known and what’s […]
Across the United States, kids are prepping for back-to-school, or are already in classrooms, and parents are buckling up for another pandemic school year. Like me, many are trying to get a handle on what COVID-19 precautions to take. Updated guidance released last week by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention hasn’t exactly […]
There’s nothing like a big mass extinction to open up ecological niches and clear out the competition, accelerating evolution for some lucky survivors. Or is there? A new study suggests that the rate of climate change may play just as large a role in speeding up evolution. The study focuses on reptile evolution across 57 […]
Mini-Neptunes and super-Earths may have a lot more in common than just being superlatives. Four gaseous exoplanets, each a bit smaller than Neptune, seem to be evolving into super-Earths, rocky worlds up to 1.5 times the width of our home planet. That’s because the intense radiation of their stars appears to be pushing away the […]