Starfish (aka sea stars) are master climbers. These many-armed invertebrates traverse vertical, horizontal, and even upside-down surfaces: it seems no substrate is too rocky, slimy, sandy, or glassy. And they do so without a centralized nervous system, let alone a brain.
A new paper written…
Virus. The word evokes images of illness and fears of outbreaks. Yet, in the oceans, not all viruses are bad news.
Some play a helpful, even critical, role in sustaining marine life.
In a new study, an international team of scientists and I examined the behavior of marine viruses in a large…
“By definition, invasive species are harmful in some regard,” says Jacob Barney, a professor of invasive plant ecology at…
They intuited that molecules near the surface behave differently from those deep within the ice. Ice is a crystal, which means each water molecule is locked into a periodic lattice. However, at the surface, the water molecules have fewer neighbors to bond with and therefore have more freedom of…
In preparation for winter, the common shrew (Sorex araneus) shrinks its brain by 30 percent to conserve precious energy. Then, come spring, the shrew miraculously ‘regrows’ its shrivelled brain, neurons fully intact.
Scientists have now traced the evolutionary origins of this rare adaptation…
Fallen whale carcasses offer islands of nutrition within an otherwise sparse seafloor, and with help from bone-eating zombie worms, they can sustain an entire ecosystem for decades.
But in recent years, scientists have found the zombie worms (genus Osedax) are missing in action off the coast…
Hours before sunrise, society’s earliest larks begin their day. Tales of Apple’s Tim Cook attending to his email at 3:45 a.m.,…
