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Chimps, our favorite primate cousins, communicate with each other through a complex gesture language, partially decoded by scientists. Depending on the situation and the gesture, chimps tell each other things like “Stop that,” “Climb on me,” or “Move away.” Now, an exciting new study found that chimps also communicate through vocalization. Researchers found that the primates would "speak" to their peers and relay what their favorite fruits are and where the best trees can be found.
What do you do if you need to catch your own food... but you're just not fast enough? That's the problem cone snails had to face, and the solution they came up with is pretty amazing: they kill fish by lowering their sugar levels with a unique type of insulin, researchers found
Researchers from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) have found a way to enlarge and map brain samples. This inexpensive technique will now allow scientists to get a much closer look at the human brian and perhaps figure out some of its long standing secrets.
The New Zealand tuatara (Sphenodon) is one of those unique animals that warrants revision for biology textbooks. The lizard-like reptile that is the only survivor of a group that was globally widespread at the time of the dinosaurs uses its highly specialised jaws to slice its food like a "steak knife". Typically, chewing is associated with high metabolism in animals, but in this instance this is far from being the case.
Having a smart strategy doesn't require a brain, a new study has shown. Researchers found an insect-eating plant from Borneo which can outsmart ants and temporarily turn off its trap to attract more prey.
Buttereflies are pretty awesome insects - the pupal transformation into a butterfly through metamorphosis is one of the most spectacular processes in the biological world. For one month, until February 16, Drexler University will exhibit a spectacular sample: a butterfly suffering from bilateral gynandromorphism - in other words, a butterfly that is half male, half female.
A female orangutan born in the wild has learned to use her tongue to whistle and produce vowel sounds just like a human - suggesting that all giant apes are able to do so. Although orangutans are known to create diverse vocalisations, what Tilda can do is unique.
In 1833, biologist Constantin Wilhelm Lambert Gloger showed that animals with warm blood that live closer to the equator tend to be darker. The finding took surprised biologists at the time and now, a new study has shown that this applies for flowers too.
A giant reptile which looked somewhat like a dolphin but had the behavior of a dinosaur was discovered around what is now the Isle of Skye, in Scotland. The predator, an Ichtyosaur lived 170 million years ago and its diet probably consisted of fish and invertebrates, but it may have also eaten sharks and even dinosaurs.
Only humans and great apes can recognize themselves when looking in a mirror, but new findings suggest that it's possible for rhesus monkeys to realize they're looking at themselves if trained properly. The findings bear important implications for humans as well, since they suggest patients with impairment of self-recognition can have their condition remedied with training.
Using innovative microfluidics devices, US researchers were able to study thousands of bacteria individually, something extremely difficult if not impossible to do in the past, and found that generation by generation bacteria actually change their size and shape, but collectively retain the same volume. The bacteria stick to this behavior as if governed by a rule or law; something that might help explain why animal organs are always of particular size and shape, why are individual cells of a particular shape for that matter or, ultimately, what is it that regulates all this.
For the very first time, engineers have used the DNA origami assembly method to build complex DNA-based mechanism that performs a repeatable and reversible function. Mechanical engineers at The Ohio State University built their devices such that they may function like any regular macro-object, like opening and closing hinges. Their approach, however, is different than other […]
The bright, rainbow-colored thermal pools of Yellowstone park may owe their spectacular color to tourist pollution, a new study suggests. Using mathematical models, the study showed the initial colors of the ponds – the ones they had before tourists started polluting them. Morning Glory Pool is a hot spring in the Upper Geyser Basin of […]
Some animals have extraordinary sensorial abilities; there have been scientific works documenting dogs which react to an earthquake 5 minutes before the waves reached the surface, but this is perhaps even more spectacular – some birds can sense an earthquake from 900 km away (560 miles). It seems that have avoided a devastating storm by fleeing […]
It has been known for quite some time that male praying mantises can get their heads ripped off while copulating with females. But a new study has shown that deceptive females can trick the males and eat them even without copulation; basically, they lure them in pretending to be full of eggs and eat them when […]
They say that when two people fall in love, you can see sparks flying. Well, that may or may not be true, but researchers from the US have shown that when sperm meets and egg – sparks definitely fly. Fertilization Fireworks These are the first images captured at the exact moment when a mammal’s egg is […]
There isn’t a less dreaded sight in any respectable bar than a beer bottle gushing foam. It’s not the bartender’s fault though (not necessarily), since different assortments of beer have their signature foam – some make more, some make less. Breweries nowadays use all sorts of anti-foaming agents, and now food scientists in Belgium – the […]
A mind blowing international project performed a mass genome sequence to build the entire avian tree and reveal how birds evolved, particularly after the fall of the dinosaurs some 65 million years. A fallen dinosaur kingdom was replaced by a bird republic, as the direct descendants of the dinosaurs began to fill all the now […]
Transferring knowledge from one individual to the other forms the basis of all human cultures, whether we’re talking about learning how to chop wood, how the Earth actually revolves in a counter-intuitive manner around the sun and no the other way around, or how the Earth is a planet in the first place and everything […]
Arguably the most efficient predator in the world today is the dragonfly, which boats a 95% success rate. Obviously, there’s more to the dragonfly than meets the eye or more than you would expect from some random insect, at least. One of the reasons it’s so successful may be due to how the dragonfly moves […]
Two specially adapted pseudoscorpions have been reported in a cave on the northern side of the Grand Canyon. The creatures, which are not really scorpions, have adapted to their lightless environment by losing their eyes. Unlike true scorpions, pseudoscorpions don’t have a tail with a venomous stinger and are harmless to humans; as a matter […]
The world isn’t just fight or flight, there’s also a third option: hide. The reef-dwelling fish (Oxymonacanthus longirostris), also known as the harlequin filefish, is a true master of disguise that not only blends with its environment to avert itself from the gaze of a hungry predator, it also dissimulates its odor. In other words, the fish not […]
A rare 520-million-year-old fossil shaped like a ‘squashed bird’s nest’ has been discovered by a Chinese team of paleontologists. The team believes that the fossil, which is in excellent shape, will help us better understand how the Earth’s seas were like during the Cambrian.The fossil probably belongs to the ‘chancelloriid’, a group of bizarre, balloon-shaped creatures […]
Scientists have made a significant step towards developing fully artificial life – for the first time, they demonstrated evolution in a simple chemistry set without DNA. In a way, the researchers showed that the principle of natural selection doesn’t only apply to the biological world. Using a simple a robotic ‘aid’, a team from the University of […]
A team of researchers from University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee (UWM) has revealed how the atomic structure of proteins changes during photosynthesis using an X-Ray laser which captures snapshops with unprecedented temporal resolution. As if conventional lasers weren’t awesome enough, scientists invented X-Ray lasers – which use stimulated emission to generate or amplify electromagnetic radiation in the near […]
The Electric Eel, a scaleless fish from the Amazon possesses an electroshock system very similar to a Taser. Not only can it stun its prey with the shock, but it can also make it twitch involuntarily, revealing its position. The electric eel is able to generate powerful electric shocks of up to 650 volts, which it uses […]
The human body is a complex biological machine, where each part of the system works in tandem, from cells to whole organs, to keep us alive. When something in the system goes astray or downright haywire, disease creeps in. I’m not going to go into biological details on how the human body works – there […]
High speed photography is no longer a new thing… but then again, it depends what you mean by high speed photography; you likely don’t mean one hundred billion frames per second (100,000,000,000 fps) – but that’s exactly what Liang Gao, Assistant Professor at Stony Brook University means. He and his team have developed the world’s fastest […]
People who chronically abuse marijuana may be able to quit by replenishing the supply of a molecule that normally activates cannabinoid receptors in the brain, thus reducing anxiety and relieving mood. A truly natural high In the 1980s and 90s, researchers identified cannabinoid receptors, long, ropy proteins that weave themselves into the surfaces of our […]
Evidence of ancient bony fish suggests that they copulated even though many of their descendants stopped doing so. Paleontologists believe this is the first-known animal to stop reproducing by spawning and instead mate by having sex. The primitive fish (Microbrachius dicki) measured about 8cm long and is now long extinct. As it often is today, the first sexual […]
It’s very small and incredibly old – scientists have found the egg of a 240 million year old parasite – a pinworm, to be more precise. It’s the oldest pinworm ever found, and one of the oldest evidences of parasitism ever found. The pinworm, also known as threadworm, is a parasitic intestinal worm, pretty common […]
Charle’s Darwin’s original notes during which he first scribbled down the ideas which led to evolution have been digitized and published online by Cambridge University. Over 12,000 high-res images have been published online – including the ones with the pages where he actually coins the term ‘natural selection’. “One may say there is a force […]
Dr Nick Longrich from Bath University was studying bones from two horned dinosaurs from the ceratopsian family (related to Triceratops), when he discovered that the two were actually previously unknown species. The findings highlight that dinosaurs in area were more diverse than previously thought, and they also show that sometimes, museum archives can yield surprising information. “We […]
Since June, 2013 swarms of dying starfish have been riddling the North American western coast. The disease, called sea star wasting syndrome (SSWS), causes the star-shaped echinoderms to first curl from the tips, then swell and twist like a pretzel, followed by festering sores appearing on the flesh and ending in complete degeneration. A starfish […]
We’re used to hearing how elephants are driven off by habitat lost, but never the other way around. Researchers at University of Florida claim that as overhunting has dramatically cut the number of elephants in the wild, but since these also disperse seeds, it seems like dominant tree species are also dying off. Along with the trees, […]
There’s an immense body of evidence that proves that meditation has significant beneficial effects for mental health, but it’s only recently that researchers in Canada discovered a link between mindfulness meditation and altered cellular activity in cancer patients. Biology and meditation: no longer mutually exclusive “We already know that psychosocial interventions like mindfulness meditation will […]
You just have to applaud the researcher that study mushrooms growing on horse dung to see what medicinal properties they have. Microbiologists molecular biologists at ETH Zurich and the University of Bonn have discovered a new agent in fungi that kills bacteria. The substance they found in the mushroom is called copsin. Copsin has a similar […]
One of the most fundamental question evolutionary biologists are trying to answer is how did multicellular life evolve from single celled organisms. Researchers from New Zealand, Germany and the USA believe they have found a counter-intuitive hint after studying organisms evolve in real time: cheating, non-cooperative cells may have pressured evolution to work on a program that […]
In all likelihood, we won’t be seeing a manned mission for Mars before 2030, but until this happens forefront research is pushing the limits so we can finally get there. This includes synthetic biology, which promises to play a key role in reducing payload – a major concern in every space application, manned or not […]
An international team of more than 100 scientists has undertaken a most complex and challenging task: they’ve determined the timings and patterns of evolution for most of the insect family tree, until they arrived at at the original insect foremother which lived some 500 million years ago. Thus, the researchers were able to pinpoint when the […]
A breakthrough study authored by Harvard University developmental biologists has finally resolved the mystery of how sexual organs appeared for the first time in vertebrates. According to their findings, shortly after our sea-dwelling ancestors migrated on land, creatures were pressured to quickly evolve genitalia – which they didn’t require up until then. These sexual organs, at least […]
Fossil hunting can be exciting and highly rewarding, but sometimes, fossils are also found through a fluke. Jeff Dornbusch, a volunteer with the Truth or Consequences museum in southern New Mexico (a museum of local history and tradition), was taking a hike on his day off when he stumbled on what he initially thought was a pile […]
According to a study from Women’s College Hospital and the Institute for Clinical Evaluative Sciences (ICES), Canada, it doesn’t matter whether you live in a rural or urban setting when it comes to heart disease – the risk if the same for both environments. The general consensus is that those living in rural areas are […]
A Yale undergrad may force us to rewrite geology and biology books, after reporting a find which suggests that life can exist much deeper than currently believed, at temperatures at which DNA is barely stable. Geologists found carbon isotopes in rocks on Washington state’s South Lopez Island; these isotopes suggest the minerals grew from fluids flush […]
Climate change has many unexpected consequences – as a research has shown yet again. This time, a team of Montana scientists have shown that the tea flavors are changing, mainly as a result of shifting rainfall patterns. This variability can jeopardize the livelihood of tea growers and has significant effects on the end product we […]
Megalodon is quite possibly the most dangerous predator to ever live in the Earth’s waters in the recent geological history – roaming the seas between 28 to 1-3 million years ago. We’re still not sure why it went extinct, but a recent study suggests that its extinction paved the way for whales to grow more and more, […]
It was about as big as T-Rex, but not quite as fit – new fossils have revealed that Deinocheirus mirificus had quite a beer belly. “This is an entirely new body plan” for such dinosaurs, says Stephen Brusatte, a vertebrate palaeontologist at the University of Edinburgh, UK. Indeed, few scientists would have imagined such a scientific appearance. The […]
When you think about changing colors, the word ‘chameleon’ usually comes to mind. But there are other animals which can change their colors – the mimic octopus is the most noteworthy example, and there’s also the fish that mimics the mimic octopus. Now, researchers have found yet another fish which can change its color – the […]
Regeneration of the spinal chord following a paralyzing injury was thought to be impossible, but groundbreaking efforts stirred by surgeons in Poland and Britain have turned this paradigm upside down. A team of dedicated surgeons and scientists transplanted cells from the nasal cavity of a patient who had been paralyzed from the waist down for […]
A new milestone study found that mitochondria – the energy factories in animal and plant cells – were initially very similar to parasitic bacteria some two billion years ago, and only later did they become energy sources. Very little is known about the origins of mitochondria, but by probing the genomes of bacteria closely related to […]
