Biology

Aug 4th, 2025 - Nestled inside a tiger reserve in the Shivalik Mountain Range, the southernmost foothills of the Himalayas, India's first "biosphere" is teeming with life. About two years back, this 32-acre patch of land was steeped in barrenness. Then came Jai Dhar Gupta , a 52-year-old entrepreneur. When he came across this patch during a trip to Uttarakhand, it popped a light bulb in his brain, and he decided to breathe new life into this barren piece of land . Re-animated, today, this fragment sits in the ... [Read More]

Aug 4th, 2025 - New research has identified specific regions of DNA that regulate hibernation by tweaking metabolism. The findings could offer pathways to new treatments for metabolic disorders like type 2 diabetes in humans. When hibernating animals wake, they reverse dangerous health changes similar to those seen in type 2 diabetes, muscle atrophy , Alzheimer's disease and stroke. Researchers hope that unlocking hibernation regions in the human genome could help develop treatments for these potentially ... [Read More]

Aug 4th, 2025 - Size really does matter in tarantula romance. In the world of tarantulas, a male's courtship is often a dangerous affair — especially for the males. His survival can hinge on a swift and successful mating, as an unimpressed or hungry female may decide to turn him into a meal. Now, a team of scientists has described a new genus that uses a striking approach to stay safe: really long reproductive organs. Satyr King Tarantulas The new tarantulas were found in the Arabian Peninsula and the ... [Read More]

Aug 4th, 2025 - Differences in the skulls of carnivorous dinosaurs suggest some dinosaurs ripped flesh while others crushed bones A closer look at the skulls of gigantic dinosaurs reveals some preferred to shred their prey, while others attacked with bone-crushing force. Andre Rowe and Emily Rayfield at the University of Bristol in the UK looked at the skulls of 18 species of theropods from across the Mesozoic Era. This diverse group of dinosaurs, which includes T. Rex , Giganotosaurus and Spinosaurus , walked ... [Read More]

Aug 4th, 2025 - It starts with a twist. One arm pretzels in on itself. Then another. Then another. Before long, the writhing arms detach from the body and begin crawling away zombielike on their own. The skin festers with lesions and internal organs ooze out from the inside. By the end, the starfish is nothing more than a puddle of goo. This scene worthy of a horror movie has replayed billions of times along the Pacific Coast. Over the past decade, a mysterious wasting disease has ravaged some 20 species of ... [Read More]

Aug 4th, 2025 - Wildlife conservation often depends on simple but vital numbers. How many animals are left? Where do they gather? Are their populations growing or shrinking? In the dense forests and winding rivers of the Amazon, answering such questions is far from easy. A team of researchers from the University of Florida has found a better way to count animals. Their method, which uses drones and statistical models, confirmed the largest known nesting site for Giant South American River Turtles. The site ... [Read More]

Aug 4th, 2025 - Scientists have a new clue in the long quest to decipher what makes us uniquely human: tiny changes in brain chemistry that set us apart from our closest hominin cousins . In a study published Monday in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences , an international team of researchers scrutinized a version of a gene, ubiquitous in humans today, that is not present in Neanderthals or Denisovans — the hominins that lived alongside our ancestors . In a lab dish, the modern form of ... [Read More]

Aug 3rd, 2025 - The fossil skeleton nicknamed Lucy has long been the poster child for Australopithecus afarensis – a small, bipedal human ancestor that walked East Africa roughly three million years ago. For decades, researchers have debated whether males and females of A. afarensis differed sharply in body size or whether, like modern humans, the sexes overlapped substantially. A newly published study now answers that question – and upends some familiar assumptions. "These weren't modest ... [Read More]

Aug 3rd, 2025 - Chemical analysis of early human ancestors shows that hominins were eating carbohydrate-rich foods before they even had the ideal teeth to do so. Such an adaptable diet may have been a driver of evolution in early humans. Our ancient ape ancestors may have climbed out of the trees and started to walk on 2 legs as early as 7 million years ago . Scientists believe this was likely a response to the changing environment – the dense African forest where our ape ancestors evolved began to thin ... [Read More]

Aug 2nd, 2025 - QUICK FACTS Name: Aye-aye ( Daubentonia madagascariensis ) Where it lives: Madagascar What it eats: Seeds, nuts, fruits, nectar, plant matter, fungi, insect larvae and honey Native to Madagascar, this lemur looks like a strange mix of several animals. It has the round eyes of an owl, the ears of a bat, rodent-like teeth that never stop growing and a wiry, bushy tail longer than its body. Aye-ayes are the world's largest nocturnal lemur, weighing around 4 pounds (1.8 kilograms) and reaching up ... [Read More]

Aug 2nd, 2025 - Walk through any African rainforest at the height of fruit season, and you will eventually stumble upon a surprising scene: apes foraging not in the treetops but on the forest floor, scooping up fallen figs or overripe marulas that have begun to ferment. Until now, primatologists have documented the behavior but lacked a word that sets it apart from ordinary fruit eating. A new paper led by Dartmouth College anthropologist Nathaniel Dominy and University of St Andrews primatologist Catherine ... [Read More]

Aug 1st, 2025 - Wolves on an Alaskan island are showing a remarkable adaptation. Pleasant Island in Alaska is not exactly befitting of its name. The frigid, 20-square-mile island is uninhabited by humans, but it hosts a remarkably large and rich ecosystem that features deer, otters, red squirrels, and even brown bears. But in 2013, the island got a new addition: wolves. When wolves colonized the island in 2013, it set up a natural experiment. "This provided a great opportunity to study predator-prey dynamics ... [Read More]

Aug 1st, 2025 - New peer-reviewed research found an average of seven pesticides in each of 10 butterflies tested A 2024 mass monarch butterfly die off in southern California was probably caused by pesticide exposure, new peer-reviewed research finds, adding difficult-to-obtain evidence to the theory that pesticides are partly behind dramatic declines in monarchs' numbers in recent decades. Researchers discovered hundreds of butterflies that had died or were dying in January 2024 near an overwintering site, ... [Read More]

Aug 1st, 2025 - We hear a lot about how climate change affects animals – but what if the reverse is also true? New research suggests that when animals disappear from forests, the forests lose one of their key tools for fighting climate change. That connection between animals and climate may be even stronger than we thought. Scientists at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology have found that tropical forests regrow much more effectively when they still have healthy populations of seed-dispersing ... [Read More]

Jul 31st, 2025 - Ant-eating mammals evolved independently over a dozen times since the fall of the dinosaurs. In South American rainforests, giant anteaters dig into termite mounds with their long, sticky tongues. In Africa and Asia, pangolins and aardvarks use strong claws to break into ant nests. These animals aren't closely related, but they've all evolved to hunt the same thing—ants and termites. A sweeping new study published this month in the journal Evolution has revealed just how ... [Read More]

Jul 31st, 2025 - They're one of the world's most important food crops and delicious roasted, mashed or fried, but the exact genetic origins of the humble potato have long been something of a mystery to scientists. Now, researchers say the modern-day potato evolved from hybridization of the ancestors of tomato plants and another potato-like plant, known as etuberosum, in South America up to 9 million years ago. The hybridization created the petota lineage — which includes the cultivated potato seen in ... [Read More]