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Category: Biology

Scientists have discovered only a tiny fraction of living insect species

Scientists have discovered only a tiny fraction of living insect species

Science reports: From half-meter-long moths to fairy wasps smaller than sand grains, insects come in a stunning variety of shapes and sizes and constitute the most diverse animal group on Earth. But the insect species discovered so far may represent just a fraction of the total crawling, flying, and burrowing around the planet, according to a new study published today in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. Using statistical methods borrowed from another field, a team of entomologists…

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Cells have a secret power line: Scientists discover how the nucleus gets its own direct energy supply

Cells have a secret power line: Scientists discover how the nucleus gets its own direct energy supply

Centro Nacional de Investigaciones Cardiovasculares: For decades, biologists assumed a cell’s energy simply diffused to wherever it was needed. It turns out the most important destination of all has a private delivery line An international team of scientists led by Dr. Ivan Menendez-Montes, Assistant Professor at the University of Arizona, and Dr. Hesham A. Sadek, Director of the Sarver Heart Center at the University of Arizona and Group Leader at the Centro Nacional de Investigaciones Cardiovasculares Carlos III (CNIC), has…

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Are memories transferable — or edible?

Are memories transferable — or edible?

Claire L. Evans writes: It was the dead of winter in Boston. The surface of the Charles River was frozen solid. But Zachary Kelso braved the biting cold to finally put to rest a mystery that has haunted neuroscience labs for over half a century. To do that, Kelso, a research assistant in the Harvard lab of the neuroscientist Sam Gershman, needed some worms. Specifically, planarians: arrow-headed flatworms, which are among the simplest creatures to possess a brain and a…

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The chemistry of life is not exclusive to life

The chemistry of life is not exclusive to life

Siddhant Pusdekar writes: For 15 years, Sébastien Fontaine has been trying to kill dirt. The biochemist, who runs a lab at the French National Institute for Agriculture, Food, and Environment, wanted to know how much carbon is released by soil — just dirt alone, completely devoid of life. His team sealed dirt into jars and blasted them with sterilizing gamma radiation. Then they waited for the carbon dioxide released by the soil — a sign of ongoing microbial respiration —…

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How ecotypes harbor the genetic memory of a species’ past

How ecotypes harbor the genetic memory of a species’ past

Marlowe Starling writes: When she was a graduate student in the 1970s, the evolutionary biologist Kerstin Johannesson regularly walked the shores of a Swedish archipelago, scanning the ground for pebbles that moved: marine snails. Her adviser, a taxonomist, had tasked her with describing the species present there by documenting their traits. She noticed that snails with thicker shells stayed on the shore, while those with thinner shells seemed to prefer wave-battered rocks, and in between the two habitats were snails…

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A vast meshwork of soil-bound fungi governs life aboveground

A vast meshwork of soil-bound fungi governs life aboveground

Max G. Levy writes: One Tuesday in June 2025, a white Chevy Suburban set off down the northernmost highway in North America. The sun of Alaska’s polar summer hadn’t set in 40 days, and it wouldn’t set again for another 35. But for Michael Van Nuland, the biologist in the driver’s seat, time was already running out. The SUV, packed with four days of fieldwork essentials — rubber boots for mucking in marshes, GPS for centimeter-level precision, a steel tube…

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New finding refines how scientists study animal happiness

New finding refines how scientists study animal happiness

Science News reports: For nearly a decade, Vincent Bombail has been tickling rats. It’s been a standard technique used in the study of animal happiness. But not all rats particularly enjoy the experience, data show. Female rats prefer gentler, more playful tickling than males, Bombail and his colleagues report April 15 in Biology Letters. The findings suggest that the same physical experience evokes a different emotional response in different individuals, potentially influencing the results of studies on animal happiness. “This…

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Are you as easily fooled as AI? Depends what you see in this image

Are you as easily fooled as AI? Depends what you see in this image

This optical illusion from the natural world is testing the limits of computer vision. Learn more: https://t.co/geC0qeRePT #ScienceMagArchives pic.twitter.com/RKajt7r1zk — Science Magazine (@ScienceMagazine) May 10, 2026 Science reports: If you see a curled leaf in the image above, you’ve fallen for the intricate camouflage of the green fruit-piercing moth (Eudocima salaminia)—a citrus-loving insect that uses the ruse to hide from predators. But don’t feel too bad: Even artificial intelligence (AI) is easily fooled, according to a study published today in…

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If wings came before flight, what were they for?

If wings came before flight, what were they for?

Lily Burton writes: Flight may be one of evolution’s most iconic innovations, but zoologist Piotr Jablonski is convinced that early wings were first meant to be seen, not to fly. The idea came to Jablonski after studying bird behavior in the American West. He noticed some birds would fling out their wings or fan out their tail feathers to lure insects into the open. Then the birds would catch and eat the bugs. If early winged dinosaurs were the ancestors…

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How much of our personalities are determined at birth?

How much of our personalities are determined at birth?

Laurie Clarke writes: In 2009, Abdelmalek Bayout faced a nine-year prison sentence in Trieste, Italy, for stabbing and killing a man who had mocked him in the street. Aiming to reduce the sentence, his lawyer made an unusual legal argument. His client’s DNA, he said, indicated the presence of the “warrior gene”, a mutation that decades of scientific research had tied to aggressive behaviour. Because of this, the argument went, he couldn’t be held fully accountable for his actions. The…

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Neuroscientists are studying octopuses for insights into how intelligence evolved

Neuroscientists are studying octopuses for insights into how intelligence evolved

Nature reports: Three hearts; blue blood; no skeleton; arms like tongues. These are just some of the alien features of octopuses, squid and cuttlefish — members of the cephalopod family. The outlandish list continues. Cephalopod skin can taste chemicals, sense light and change colour and texture rapidly. In many species, the sucker-covered arms can even regenerate. These invertebrates have evolved independently from the vertebrate lineage for more than 600 million years. Their last common ancestor was probably a worm-like creature…

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How understanding bioenergetics can help our brain health

How understanding bioenergetics can help our brain health

Hannah Critchlow writes: About 2 billion years ago, evolution performed an improbable experiment. A larger ancestral cell engulfed a smaller bacterium. It should have been a meal. Instead, it became a merger. The bacterium survived inside its host, and together they forged one of the most consequential partnerships in the history of life. The host offered shelter and access to oxygen. The bacterium supplied something revolutionary: a vastly more efficient way to generate energy. From this intimate alliance emerged the…

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Evolution before life

Evolution before life

Dyna Rochmyaningsih writes: A story about the origins of life in the cosmos starts at Earth’s equator, where Dian Fiantis, a professor of soil science at Andalas University in Indonesia, investigated how seemingly dead environments come back to life. In 2018, she traveled to Mt. Anak Krakatoa (which emerged after the famous Krakatoa’s eruption) to collect the volcanic ash it ejected two months before. In her lab, she found out that volcanic glass (SiO2), the dominant chemical found in the…

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Ocean voices: Sperm whales’ speech is as subtle and complex as human language, study finds

Ocean voices: Sperm whales’ speech is as subtle and complex as human language, study finds

The Guardian reports: We may appear to have little in common with sperm whales – enormous, ocean-dwelling animals that last shared a common ancestor with humans more than 90 million years ago. But the whales’ vocalized communications are remarkably similar to our own, researchers have discovered. Not only do sperm whale have a form of “alphabet” and form vowels within their vocalizations but the structure of these vowels behaves in the same way as human speech, the new study has…

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How farming changed us: Ancient DNA reveals natural selection sped up in recent human evolution

How farming changed us: Ancient DNA reveals natural selection sped up in recent human evolution

Harvard Medical School: A massive study of ancient DNA from nearly 16,000 people across more than 10,000 years in West Eurasia reveals that natural selection has shaped modern human genomes far more than previously thought. Before now, studies of ancient human DNA had identified only about 21 instances of directional selection—the type of natural selection that occurs when one version of a gene that confers an extreme form of a trait, such as lactose tolerance after infancy, proves advantageous enough…

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