New Year, new viral diet — literally. Tiny, pond-dwelling Halteria ciliates are virovores, able to survive on a virus-only diet, researchers report December 27 in Proceedings of the National Academy…
Category: Life
These adorable Australian spike-balls beat the heat with snot bubbles
Animals cover themselves in all kinds of unsavory fluids to keep cool. Humans sweat, kangaroos spit and some birds will urinate on themselves to survive hot days. It turns out…
Sea life offers a lens for self-exploration in ‘How Far the Light Reaches’
How Far the Light ReachesSabrina ImblerLittle, Brown & Co., $27 In How Far the Light Reaches, Sabrina Imbler shows us that the ocean, in all its mystery and dazzling glory,…
Harbinger Issue #2: Race, Racism, and White Supremacy
After two years of pandemic delay, we’re very excited to announce that the new issue of Harbinger: a Journal of Social Ecology has now been released. issue features nine timely contributions, all…
50 years ago, scientists sequenced a gene for the first time
Molecular biology’s flower child — Science News, January 6, 1973 During the past several years, some artificial genes have been synthesized…. But no one had unraveled a real gene that dictates…
Meet some of the microbes that give cheeses flavor
Cheese making has been around for thousands of years, and there are now more than 1,000 varieties of cheese worldwide. But what exactly makes some cheeses like Parmesan taste fruity…
Jumping beans’ random strategy always leads to shade — eventually
Given enough time, jumping beans will always find their way out of the sun. Jumping beans, which are really seed pods with twitchy moth larvae inside, hop around in a…
Squid edit their RNA to keep cellular supply lines moving in the cold
WASHINGTON — Squid don’t have thermostats to control ocean temperatures. Instead, the cephalopods tweak RNA to adjust to frigid waters, a study suggests. Usually, genetic instructions encoded in DNA are…
These are our favorite animal stories of 2022
From spiders that catapult their way to safety to sea sponges that sneeze themselves clean, here are the creature features that most impressed us in 2022. Fishing fox Pics or…
Mysterious ichthyosaur graveyard may have been a breeding ground
Some 230 million years ago, massive dolphinlike reptiles called ichthyosaurs gathered to breed in safe waters — just like many modern whales do. That’s the conclusion that researchers arrived…
