gear Push settings
The world’s next massive extinction will most likely be caused not by an asteroid impact, volcano activity or alien invasion, but by us humans. A study that looked at the past and present rates of extinction found that plants and animals are going extinct 1,000 times faster than they did before humans walked on Earth’s […]
We’re more used to whales washing up ashore, but sharks also do it sometimes. This juvenile shark was apparently trying to hunt some seagulls and ventured out of the water too much for its own good. However, after struggles and apparent dehydration, the shark was saved by beachgoers. Initially, we see the two meter shark […]
Meet one of slickest and twisted virus nature has to offer. Called IIV-6/CrIV , researchers at Dalhousie University in Nova Scotia discovered the virus effectively castrates crickets, while promoting sexual activity at the same time like an aphrodisiac so it can spread. It’s an incredibly effective strategy for the virus, but can we learn anything from it? […]
In the most comprehensive study ever conducted of the impacts of climate change on critical pollinators, scientists have discovered that global warming is rapidly shrinking the area where these bees are found in both North America and Europe.
If you’ve learned during the biology classes in school that the animals are going to adapt no matter the circumstances, your teacher did a great job. Turns out that frogs aren’t the exception to the rule, quite the contrary. New studies show that tree frogs seem to be using city drains in order to amplify the […]
Cone snails have one of the most dangerous venom in the animal kingdom. This complex venomous soup is made up of thousands of chemicals used both to hunt prey and ward off predators. The venom is enough to kill a human in a matter of minutes. Now, these lethal chemicals could be used to create a new class of painkiller for chronic pain and cancer patients undergoing chemotherapy, according to University of Queensland researchers. The same team also used a genetic and proteomic to find out how the cone snails developed its venom. Apparently, the animals initially used their chemical weaponry as a defense mechanism and later on adapted it into an attack.
The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service has rejected a proposal to list North American wild horses as threatened or endangered, arguing that a horse is a horse, wild or tame, and proponents have failed to show how the behaviour of wild horses differs from that of domestic ones. The number of North American wild stallions has […]
Rising temperatures are fundamentally changing the way Australia's bearded lizards get their gender. Basically, the lizard's sex is not dependent on their genes as before, but on temperature. In time, the male chromosome could disappear, as more and more females are bred - the preferred sex. What this means is that if temperatures reach a critical level, then the lizards could become extinct due to lack of males. This has never happened before and it's as scary, as it is interesting.
Saber-tooth cats, the bane of early humans (and pretty much every creature that co-existed with them), roamed the Earth for 42 million years before going extinct at the end of the ice age. Now, a new study has found that their trademark teeth may have evolved later in their evolutionary stage, but when they grew, they grew […]
Whether it’s Meatless Monday, Weekday Vegetarianism or simply cutting down meat consumption – people from developed countries are eating less meat, and it’s already making a difference. Even though some argue that cutting-back-consumption campaigns don’t push enough of a paradigm-shift, we’re already seeing the changes: 400 million animals were spared in the US alone in 2014 because […]
Today, ray-finned fish make up 99% of all fish species, but it wasn't always like this. In an attempt to find out what triggered this spectacular multi-niche dominance, paleontologists traveled back in time sort of speak and analyzed ancient fossils to see what the fish diversity makeup looked like millions of years ago. Intriguing enough, the ray fish practically exploded in their diversity right after the last great mass extinction which occurred 65 million years ago. An asteroid impact wiped out thousands of species, including all dinosaurs. But there was now enough room for other creatures to take their place. On land, mammals started filling in the large-scale niches eventually reaching a dominant position. In the water, it was the ray-finned fish that seized the opportunity.
You wouldn’t expect a dog and a turtle to be best friends, but as we’ve learned on the Internet, the animal kingdom can create some surprising friendship relationships. It all started when Christine Hilberg, a 29-year-old photography retoucher and animal Instagrammer rescued Puka, a 4-year-old mixed breed with a cleft lip from a homeless man in Los […]
Despite what you might have seen or not seen, there are actually some fireflies living west of the Rocky Mountains, though they mostly keep to themselves and are rarely spotted by humans. Every once in a while, people spot some. This time, one undergrad who was busy insect hunting in the Los Angeles County hit the jackpot after he discovered a new firefly species.
A new study has found that monarch butterfly populations have went down at alarming rates in the past couple of decades, going down on average by 80%. In the forests of Mexico, they went down by as much as 90%.
In the last couple of months, Japanese women flocked in unusual numbers to the Higashiyama Zoo and Botanical Gardens in Japan to see the main attraction in the flesh: a western lowland gorilla named Shabani. Apparently, the young Japanese women are going crazy after the gorilla's alleged good looks.
We seem to be losing the war on elephant poachers, but a new toolset that involves tracing slaughter hotspots in Africa based on DNA taken from ivory might be exactly what law enforcement needed all these years. This way, researchers at University of Washington, in collaboration with INTERPOL, found that most of the ivory seized since 2006 originates in just two areas.
Rwanda's Akagera national park will soon be home to seven lions flown in from South Africa. This is the first time in 15 years that lions will set foot in the country after the entire population was wiped out by cattle herders in the chaos that followed the 1994 genocide. The predators will hopefully mate and steadily replenish lion numbers back to a historical level.
National Geographic invites photographers from around the world to enter the 2015 National Geographic Traveler Photo Contest – but hurry up, the final submission date is 30 June! Eligible contestants can visit natgeo.com/travelerphotocontest to submit photographs in any or all of four categories: Travel Portraits; Outdoor Scenes; Sense of Place; and Spontaneous Moments. The entry fee […]
Coral reefs are as important to oceanic ecosystems as they are vulnerable to global warming and ocean acidification. Coral reefs are being destroyed around the world, not only because of risint temperatures, but also due to coral mining, agricultural and urban runoff, pollution (organic and inorganic), overfishing, blast fishing, disease, and the digging of canals and access […]
When the freakish Hallucigenia was first discovered in the 1970s, paleontologists found it nearly impossible to distinguish heads from tail. Now, the bizarre creature - an ancestor to molding animals like crabs, worms or krill - had its features identified with unprecedented precision, but that doesn't mean it's less freakish looking: worm-like with a mouth adorned with a ring of teeth, bearing seven pairs of legs ending in claws, and three pairs of tentacles along its neck. To finish it off, its back was covered with enormous spikes. Yes, it looks weird, but so were most animals that lived 500 million years ago during the so-called Cambrian explosion - a period of massive bloom in terms of diversity of life and evolution. Most creatures of those times were somewhat primitive, but remarkably Hallucigenia was quite advanced for its age.
Researchers at University of Hawaii, Manoa in collaboration with a team from the University of Tokyo were surprised to find not one, but two species of deep-water sharks that have positive buoyancy. Most sharks have a negative buoyancy, meaning if they stop swimming they'll sink to the bottom, and some researchers have posited that there may be some species with neutral buoyancy. Finding sharks that defy this conventional wisdom is definitely an important discovery. Now the researchers are trying to find out how the positive buoyancy is attained and whether other shark species have this ability.
Geological evidence indicates that our planet has seen five mass extinction cycles since life first appeared on the planet. While they sound like the kind of cataclysmic events that only beardy men with huge boats survive through (read that in a book once, so it must be true), they are actually an integral part of […]
A novel, previously unseen self-repair mechanism was reported by a team of researchers at Caltech who studied the moon jellyfish. A lot of animals, mostly invertebrates, grow back their lost limbs after these are bitten off by predators or lost in an accident. The moon jellyfish, however, employs a different tactic altogether: instead of expending a lot of energy to regrow its lost limb, the animal re-arranges the limbs it has left to regain symmetry. Even when it's left with two limbs out of its initial eight, the jellyfish will still re-arrange itself. This sort of mechanism might prove extremely useful in designing self-repairing robots.
Wild bees provide environmental services worth $3,250 (€2,880) per hectare per year - accounting for billions, globally. Writing in Nature Communications, study authors quantify how much bees are doing for us, and stress that despite all their immense value, we still don't have a concrete plan to stop their numbers from dwindling.
Among the best thing about being a biologist is you get to name things when you discover it. Now, a marine researcher in California will name one of the cutest invertebrates we've ever seen: so adorable, that it might actually be named 'adorabilis'.
Ocean acidification, one of the often ignored dangers associated with climate change is becoming increasingly worrying. As our climate becomes hotter and hotter, the oceans become more and more acidic, and this threatens some animals' ability to create and maintain carbonatic shells.
The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service reports it has classed all chimpanzees, whether captive or wild, under the Endangered Species Act. Previously, chimpanzees kept captive in labs for biomedical research, entertainment or as pets were classed as "threatened".The USFWS director Dan Ashe agrees that this has transmitted an erroneous mixed message to the public. Whether captive (and hopefully cared for) or living in the wild, all chimps belong the same species, and this species is definitely endangered and in dire need of help.
Known to feed mainly on seals, the images Jon Aars at the Norwegian Polar Institute captured of a polar bear dining on dolphins is a "culinary" first for the species. The photographs were taken in the Norwegian High Arctic, mid-April 2014. The bear was seen feeding on the carcass of one white-beaked dolphin, and covering another with snow.
After placing no less than 225 camera traps, a group of researchers has collected a massive database of 1.2 million photos documenting the secret live of the animals that roam Tanzania's Serengeti National Park. The shots offer a raw, unedited glimpse that wouldn't had been possible otherwise; genuinely up close and personal. So personal that some of the lions and other beasrs in the park went a step too far and tried to eat the cameras. At time, the only thing that was left of the camera was plastic shreds, but luckily some memory cards survived. How often do you get to see the last shot made by a camera? With a lion with a fully open jaws staring right at you, no less.
It's nothing new to hear about chimps or monkeys drinking alcohol, most often stolen from unsuspecting tourists, but a new research which documented the chimpanzees of Bossou, south-eastern Guinea, for the past 17 years found some engage in habitual drinking. It's the first evidence of habitual drinking outside humans. Like humans, some enjoy the brew more often than others, while some totally abstain from the habit.
Seven miniature species of frogs living on seven different mountain tops sounds like the premise for the next Kung Fu Panda sequel. But as researcher Marcio Pie of the Federal University of Parana and his colleagues show in a paper published in PeerJ., it is what they have found in the Atlantic Rainforest of Brazil.
A team of biologists from Queensland discovered two new species belonging to a marsupial genus known for mating until it literally dies. The antechinus marsupials look like pouched mice or shrews, but as cute as they may look, they're real beasts in the sack. Typically, once the breeding season starts, males embark in vicious sexual orgies 14 hours at a time, and it doesn't stop for two or so weeks. At the very end, the males suffers from diseases, internal bleeding, their fur falls off and some get ulcer. Ultimately, all that whole lotta love kills them, and rather painful too. Though they've just been discovered, the new antechinus species are considered endangered by the researchers.
A routine DNA test came up with some extremely surprising results - female sawfish in Florida reproduce without mating with males. This is among the very few times this process was observed in vertebrates.
The 2011 Japan tsunami was so massive that even today, debris from it keeps washing up in Washington - and that might be a problem. Scientists report that along with the debris, invasive species are also make their way to the USA.
Some 120,000 critically endangered saiga antelopes were killed by a mysterious disease since mid-May in Kazakhstan, where 90% of the population lives. A third of the endangered saigas died in this sudden lapse that is still leaving veterinarians and researchers in the area scratching their heads. In the past two decades, the long-nosed antelopes went through a number of similar tragedies, both at the hand of disease and over-hunting.
As part of a recent TED Talk (presented at the bottom of this article) photographer Anand Varma captured the incredible 21 day transformation from bee egg to larvae to pupae to adult, all in a breathtaking one-minute time-lapse video: In order to construct this time-lapse, Varma raised bees in his backyard, in front of a […]
A female Yangtze giant softshell turtle (quite possibly the last female of her species) has been given another chance to breed. She has been artificially inseminated at the Suzhou Zoo in China, in a last ditch effort to attempt to preserve her species.
Social media was ecstatic - just look at this video of an orangutan bottle-feeding a tiger cub. Tens of millions of people tuned in to watch this "cuteness overload"... but the truth behind this is not cute at all. It's actually quite saddening. We'll discuss why, after the video.
Giant pandas love to feast on bamboo - it's their favorite food, and they easily make quick work of it, using their powerful jaws to peel the plant's tough bark and get to its tender core. But even though the pandas love it, their stomachs don't - a new study has revealed that the panda's stomach is not adapted to a completely herbivorous diet, and still craves for an omnivorous meal, like other bears.
With bee numbers dropping dramatically in the last years, it's time to take some drastic measures, and a White House task force including participation from more than a dozen federal agencies has concluded that limiting pesticide use may be the last resort we have to maintain bee numbers.
California's record drought has completely dried off large swaths of rivers, including the San Joaquin River, which means that juvenile salmon can't actually reach the sea. In a desperate effort to save an entire generation of hatchlings, authorities are transporting them by truck, on the highway.
A turtle named Akut-3 was fitted with a new, custom made 3-D printed jaw by doctors at the Research, Rescue and Rehabilitation centre at Pamukkale University in Denizli, Turkey. The reptile was found badly injured at sea and brought to the center for rehabilitation. At first, the doctors healed the turtle's wounds and hand fed her, but they knew they had to turn to something more drastic if the animal was to ever fend for herself in the wild again. They turned to a company in Turkey known for custom made prostheses, gave them a detailed CT scan of the turtle's skull, then received a new beak made out of medical-grade titanium. The prosthesis perfectly fit Akut-3, who is aptly named like a cyborg.
We use the word "humane" to describe kind behavior and sympathy towards others, but the term might falsely lend some to believe that this is an exclusive human quality. Far from it. Rats too are kind, sympathetic and as "humane" as any human. For instance, when their peers are in danger of drowning, rats will come to their aid to save them. Even when a tasty treat, like chocolate, is offered instead the rat will most often than not choose to help his dying friend. To hell with chocolate!
Though it's a deep ocean fish, the slender opah is actually fully warm blooded - the first of its kind discovered so far. This remarkable insight was made by accident after researchers at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration dissected the fish and noticed its blue and red blood vessels were located inside the gills, rather than in the fish's swimming muscles. Tuna or sharks, which both have the same vessels but not arranged in the same way, cool their blood once it reaches the gills for oxygen reloading. The opah's vessels are interwoven inside the gill like a net, which means the the veins that carry warm blood away from the hot muscles are interwoven with the arteries that carry cold blood in from the gills. This makes all the difference. Running so close to each other, the warm blood from the heart heats the cold blood from the gills. This way the Opah is 5 degrees Celsius warmer than its surroundings waters!
The proportions of fake animals, the subject of long and heated debates in the scientific community, have been revealed by researchers at University of Manchester. The team used X-rays and CT scans to look inside 800 animal mummies, some of which were more than 3,000 years old. Only a third actually contained an animal skeleton. Another third contained only fractions of a complete skeleton, sometimes just a single bone. The rest were all mud casts, filled with twigs or other organic material, made to look like a real animal was inside. So, is this an exposed elaborate scam routine performed over the millenniums? Not quite - the researchers believe something more innocent is at play.
Graphene - the one atom thick sheet of carbon arranged in a hexagon lattice - is the strongest material known to man, and spider silk is one of the strongest found in nature, second only to limpet teeth. Heck, why not combine the two? Sounds silly, but it surprisingly worked when Nicola Pugno of the University of Trento, Italy sprayed spiders with both graphene particles and carbon nanotubes. The spiders weaved silk infused with the materials, and in some cases the silk was 3.5 times stronger than its natural counterpart. The resulting fiber is tougher than "synthetic polymeric high performance fibers (e.g. Kevlar49) and even the current toughest knotted fibers,” according to the paper published in Materials Science, which obviously entails a lot of real-life applications, industrial or otherwise.
At least 21 cockatoos have been discovered and saved from illegal trafficking; they were recovered at an Indonesian port during an anti-smuggling operation, crammed in 1500 ml bottles. Unfortunately, seven of them didn't survive.
One of the perks of being a writer for ZME Science is that I frequently get to feature some really amazing, yet bizarre creatures. Take for instance Ottoia prolifica (priapulid) or the penis-worm as it's also known, for obvious reasons. This phallic creature actually had a throat full of teeth which it used to munch its meaty prey, and the weirdness doesn't stop here. It could its mouth inside-out and use those teeth for traction so it could easily move about. Talk about double standards. Now, a team has systematically studied these ancient Cambrian fossils (520 million years old) to compile a dentistry handbook to distinguish between other penis worm species. This proved to be wise, since in their compiling work the researchers at University of Cambridge have already reported what they believe to be new Ottoia species.
Apart from echolocation, bats have another ace up their sleeve that makes them formidable flying animals: tiny hairs that sense airflow and transmit this information to key areas of the brain. Here the info is decoded and used to steer the bats' flight for pinpoint accuracy. In combination with echolocation, this makes bats awesome hunters even in pitch black darkness.
Five years after the British Petroleum catastrophe in the Gulf of Mexico, Mexican fishermen have still not received any compensation, so they've decided to sue the oil giant.
