Biology
Peta releases video showing experiments on infant monkeys at University of Washington
Animal-rights group released video footage that shows distressed baby macaques undergoing lab experimentsFootage released by the animal-rights group Peta reveals, for the first ti…
Can you solve it? A magical melody from the Mozart of math
Terence Tao teaser timeToday’s puzzle is set by Terence Tao, who may be the world’s most famous mathematician.Tao, aged 51, has been a global phenomenon since the age of ten, when…
Crows make decisions twice as fast as humans and monkeys
University of Tübingen researchers have shown that crows, when confronted with a visual choice, make a decision twice as fast as humans and monkeys. In the experiment, two carrion…
Monarchs report their locations via… cellphone?
Who knew a monarch butterfly could borrow a cellphone to check in with friendly people he met on his journey? That is essentially what happens now that new technology has reduced …
Microorganisms show promise for reducing emissions from manure
Dairy farmers sometimes use additives in their cattle housing to reduce emissions from slurry. Emissions of substances such as ammonia occur when urine and feces mix on the floor …
US military gives Elon Musk’s SpaceX access to sensitive tracking data
This gives the company an advantage in tracking objects in orbit, raising national security concerns and fears of greater control over the space industryThe US military has given …
Sea cucumber–inspired gel could help heal damaged tissue in humans
Inspired by the ability of sea cucumbers to change the stiffness of their bodies, University of Waterloo researchers have developed a gel that could one day help repair damaged te…
‘It’s magic’: scientists rediscover how to make ancient Roman colour-changing glass
Exclusive: Optical engineering that went into 1,600-year-old Lycurgus Cup has baffled experts for centuriesThe Romans’ proficiency in the art of glass-making has produced some of …
Who should have a say in which species are saved? The California condor offers lessons for a global biodiversity treaty
In 1987, biologists captured the last free-flying condor to transfer it to captivity, and the largest flying North American bird species was officially declared extinct in the wil…
Bell pepper colors reveal differences in sweetness, nutrients and ripeness
Raw, grilled, roasted, stuffed—there are many ways to enjoy bell peppers, also called capsicums, sweet peppers or paprika. Bell peppers originated in Central and South America and…
Newly identified protein pathway helps HIV stay hidden despite treatment
Current HIV medicines are effective at suppressing the virus in the blood. However, HIV can remain "asleep" or dormant inside certain immune cells and in the brain. These hidden p…
Seabird family tree predicts which species accumulate plastic better than diet, global analysis finds
What seabirds eat might seem like a good starting point for identifying species that tend to accumulate plastic in their digestive systems. Yet a recent global analysis suggests t…
New long‑clawed British dinosaur is the first of its kind in Europe
The fossilized skull of a new species of mysterious meat-eating dinosaur from the Isle of Wight has been rediscovered in the collections of the Natural History Museum after over 1…
Surveying the genetic battlefield to uncover the rules of rapid evolution
The Malik Lab thrives on competition. But for HHMI investigator Harmit Malik and his team at the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Center, it's the genomes—not the people—that are in conflic…
Habitat explains Finnish animal distributions better than climate, study finds
Researchers at the University of Helsinki wanted to understand which is the dominant factor for species occurrence and abundance: the climate or habitat-related variables, such as…
Glowing plants reveal immune responses around infection sites via two colors
Researchers at the MRC Laboratory of Medical Sciences (LMS) have developed a new way to make glowing biological reporters more accurate, allowing scientists to track gene activity…
Bacteria reinvent their weapons through selection, chance and gene swapping
Many of the most potent antibiotics originate from bacteria. A large proportion belong to a class of compounds known as nonribosomal peptides (NRP). They are produced by large bac…
New marker panel and free web tool help track stem cells as they develop
How can the identity of pluripotent stem cells be determined more reliably during their differentiation? Researchers from the IUF—Leibniz Research Institute for Environmental Medi…
Can we stop antibiotic resistance from ruining promising drugs before they reach patients?
What if we could predict early in drug development which antibiotics bacteria are most likely to become resistant to? In a review published in Nature Reviews Microbiology, researc…
Scientists uncover the molecular pillars that shape our cells' powerpacks
Mitochondria are the tiny powerpacks that supply most of the energy our cells need. Their ability to generate this energy relies on a distinctive architecture: two membranes, one …
Mechanism behind PARP1-mediated DNA repair characterized, offering insight into targeted cancer therapy
When DNA is damaged, cellular processes respond and repair the DNA. Inhibiting DNA damage repair can be therapeutically beneficial in cancers with genetic vulnerabilities related …
Rare fossils reveal what ancient Denisovans may have looked like
Whenever anything is written about the Denisovans, the word "mysterious" is almost guaranteed to appear. That is because we just don't know a lot about this extinct human group th…
From sea anemone to human fertility: A new research organism for understanding meiosis
Every egg cell and sperm cell depends on meiosis, a tightly choreographed process in which chromosomes find their partners, exchange genetic material and then divide. When meiosis…
An ancient virus in chimpanzee DNA switches off a gene that is active in humans
Humans and chimpanzees share almost all their genes. Despite this, our brains have developed in different ways. Researchers at Lund University in Sweden have now shown that a vira…