When I was young, Pluto was still a planet and nine was my lucky number, so I really liked that we had nine planets in our solar system – it made it easy for me to remember. My love of astronomy out-lasted Pluto’s status as a planet, and as I write this I am actually wearing a solar system necklace; each planet is represented, yet it only has eight planets on it.
Imagine an alien. If you’ve been influenced by movies and television at all, the creature you’re picturing is probably two-legged, two-armed, bipedal and with a reminiscently human layout – head, eyes and mouth somewhere near the top. And while most of us recognise that this vision of extra-terrestrial life is a bit silly, conversations about life elsewhere in the universe are often still painfully unimaginative.
Genetically modified organisms, especially plants, get a lot of hate. People – even some very environmentally conscious people – seem to fear or hate GM crops. Yet, as someone who is very worried about climate change, very worried about the human-induced mass extinction event that is happening before our eyes, and worried about the livelihoods of farmers and about those people that have so little food they go to bed hungry every night…
Fathers can breath a sigh of relief. Although biologists have found cuckolding, where one male unwittingly raises the offspring of another male, is common in animal societies, it appears humans are one of the few exceptions.
A recent review published in Trends in Ecology & Evolution on 5th April claims that across modern and ancient human societies, women tended to be faithful to their partners.
Overfishing is a serious global issue, and many people have turned to farmed fish, or ‘aquaculture’ as a solution to dwindling wild populations. But intensive farming of any kind often comes with problems, and a new study shows that these fish farms are the perfect breeding ground for virulent diseases.
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The extinct carnivore, Kolponomos, looked like a bear, and bit like a sabre-toothed tiger.
A group of carnivores that went extinct around 20 million years ago looked superficially like modern bears, but new research shows their bite was more similar to sabre-toothed cats. Known as Kolponomos, these extinct bears were thought to feed on shelled organisms, like modern otters, but with few fossils to go on, their diet and lifestyle has remained contentious.
Scientists have developed a cool new technique for getting targeted gene control into insects, which could offer a flexible tool for the biological control of pests as well as disease vectors.
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Male honeybees produce antimicrobial chemicals in their semen to protect new queens from a fungal disease.
Sex always comes with the risk of contracting a sexually transmitted disease, so male honeybees have evolved to produce antimicrobial chemicals in their semen. The fungus Nosema apis is a specialised pathogen of honeybees, which can be transmitted to new queens when they mate, but new research shows that male honeybees’ semen has powerful antifungal activity, disrupting the lifecycle of the Nosema spores and reducing their viability.
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Scientists have found the final missing link answering a long-standing question about how social behaviour evolves. New research shows that a social supergene in fire ants coordinates a host of biological processes and behaviours, that ultimately determine how sociable their colonies are, and who they choose to be their queen.
Giraffe hearts pump less blood than other mammals, to make sure oxygen reaches the top of their long necks – compromising volume for pressure.
The Ant Man movie doesn’t claim to be scientifically accurate (and it isn’t), but it does include a lot of “science”. And most importantly, the film is wrong in some really interesting ways. So read on for a critical appraisal of the science of Ant Man, from the perspective of an ant biologist (ex).
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Animals use smell to sniff out predators, and to hide from them.
For humans, vision is the dominant sense, and we often overlook the importance of odour (although we’re reminded on those occasions we find ourselves sat next to someone who’s never discovered deodorant, or driving past a particularly pungent farm). But for most animals, it’s all about smell. Two new studies published last month highlight the importance of smell in the lives of animals as different as flies and snakes.
Many mammals become dormant for the winter, conserving energy and avoiding predators during the colder months. New research published in functional ecology shows that this winter rest is important to rodent survival, but may be lost as the climate warms.
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