For the first time, scientists have produced snake venom toxins in the lab, opening up a much-needed path for developing drugs and venom antidotes that doesn’t involve having to breed and milk real-life snakes.   The toxins have been produced through mini glands called organoids, following a process adapted from growing simplified human organs –

There are some awe-inspiring secrets hiding under the ocean, and scientists diving off the coast of the Philippines have just found a new one. Below the waves, 60 metres (200 feet) down, the ocean floor is bubbling like champagne… with vast amounts of carbon dioxide.   For once, humans aren’t the cause of these emissions.

In an effort to trace a pathway from non-evolving organic chemistry to the first truly living cells, scientists from Harvard Medical School in Massachusetts have proposed those early building blocks contained little-known nucleic acids that aren’t part of any modern genome.   The question of how we evolved genomic libraries encoded in DNA that are

Mysterious fossils that had been sitting idle for decades in a Belgian museum have just been identified, and they’re something wonderful. According to new analysis, these are fungal structures dating between 715 and 810 million years ago – making them some of the earliest fungus specimens ever recorded.   And, with the discovery, the history

In 2015, a team of scientists from the United States and China traveled to Tibet to gather samples of Earth’s oldest glacial ice. Earlier this month, they published a paper on the pre-print server bioRxiv detailing their discovery of 28 new virus groups in the 15,000-year-old ice – and warning that climate change could free

During a devastating and unprecedented bushfire season, Australians in Sydney and the surrounding central coast were practically begging for rain. A “bonanza” of deadly spiders was not exactly part of that request, and yet experts at the Australian Reptile Park strongly suspect that’s what’s coming.   “We are issuing a message of warning to the

Thank you, evolution. Source link

Throughout its life, our planet has been pummelled by countless asteroids and comets – even more so than the crater-ridden Moon. Today, thanks to Earth’s continually changing surface, there are remarkably few scars left to tell the tale.   Australia’s relatively stable and ancient landscape not only harbours potentially the largest of those blemishes, scientists

A 120 million-year-old fossil is helping paleontologists to bridge the ‘phantom’ evolutionary leap between feathered dinosaurs and modern birds. Dubbed “the dancing dragon”, or Wulong bohaiensis, this newly described species is a strange mix between bird and dinosaur, ancient and new.   First discovered in China more than a decade ago, in one of the

When scientists ran DNA analysis on a sediment core taken from the floor of the Arctic ocean back in 2010, they found something surprising. A previously unknown organism belonging to the strange domain of microbes called Archaea appeared to have genomic characteristics associated with a totally different domain – Eukaryota.   They named their discovery

Scientists have reported on another devastating biological disaster, caused by a patch of abnormally warm water in the Pacific Ocean known as ‘the Blob’. This concentrated marine heatwave lingered in the northeast Pacific between 2013 and 2016, and researchers now think it was largely responsible for the death of almost a million common murres (Uria aalge),

A decomposing body might gross people out, but for many creatures, it’s a bounty, including smaller creatures not widely known for their human flesh-eating habits. Case in point: a new study details how feral cats were caught on camera at a decomposition research facility in Colorado, slipping over the fence to munch on human corpses.  

Pop a bacterium in a petri dish on an agar nutrient medium and it will go about its business, growing in its own special way. Escherichia coli grows pretty slowly but steadily in clumps. Acinetobacter baylyi, on the other hand, moves fast, spreading out in all directions until it covers the entire petri dish in

The passage of time holds few changes for the Ginkgo biloba tree, commonly known as the maidenhair. For tens of millions of years and through mass extinctions, this “botanical oddity” has stood unwavering, an ever-fixed “living fossil”, as the world ages around it.   The species is practically immortal – and that’s not an exaggeration.

Tardigrades are tough little critters. When conditions get nasty, they can dry out, reconfigure their bodies and enter suspended animation – called dessication – for years. You can throw virtually anything at them: frozen temperatures, zero oxygen, high pressures, the vacuum of space, cosmic radiation, and even being boiled.   But new research has shown

Swimming through petroleum-infested waters is not exactly good for a dolphin’s health, and if that dolphin is pregnant, the ramifications are even more dire. Following the Deepwater Horizon oil spill in 2011, successful pregnancies in bottlenose dolphins (Tursiops truncatus) plummeted, mainly from reproductive failures such as foetal mortality, distress and pneumonia, all of which are

In the centre of the South Pacific, there’s a place as far away from land as anyone on Earth could ever hope to get. The ocean is different there. These distant waters lie at the heart of the South Pacific Gyre, the centre of which holds the ‘oceanic pole of inaccessibility’: the ocean’s remotest extreme,

According to Charles Darwin, helping others just doesn’t make sense. Yet we’ve seemingly seen altruism time and again in the animal kingdom: in primates, in canines, in cetaceans, pinnipeds, even vampire bats. Now, for the first time, it’s been demonstrated in birds.   The kind bird is one of the titans of avian intelligence, the African

A few simple genetic changes is all it takes to prolong a worm’s life span by 500 percent, a new study has found. That’s much longer than we ever expected, and scientists working the problem think results such as these might help us to understand our own ageing process a little better.   That’s because

We can only guess at the kind of day one iguana-like lizard was having 100 million years ago in what is now Myanmar. All we have to go on is its tiny back leg and some slime mould it shook loose, perhaps in an effort to escape death by tree sap.   The fossilised remnants

Adorable cephalopods have been made even more adorable with tiny 3D glasses. But scientists weren’t trying to get the cuttlefish to enjoy Jaws 3-D; rather, the stereoscopic red-and-blue eyewear is designed to help us understand how the animals’ 3D vision works.   And, it turns out, even though the eyes of cuttlefish (Sepia officinalis) are

Under the cover of night, two large leopard slugs begin to court, circling each other, before climbing single-file up a tree or onto a rock. They lower themselves on a mucus rope, while entwining their bodies in a strictly anti-clockwise fashion.   Both slugs then push out and entwine two overly-sized penises from openings on

Scientists have discovered a unique form of cell messaging occurring in the human brain that’s not been seen before. Excitingly, the discovery hints that our brains might be even more powerful units of computation than we realised.   Researchers from institutes in Germany and Greece uncovered a mechanism in the brain’s outer cortical cells that

For three decades, paleontologists the world over have been split over a provocative finding: did a dwarf species of Tyrannosaurus rex really once exist? In 1988, paleontologist Robert Bakker and his colleagues at the Cleveland (Ohio) Museum of Natural History reclassified a specimen first discovered in 1942 and displayed at the museum.   It was,

Robert Raven does not love spiders. They make his skin crawl and give him cold sweats. They have chased him out of his tent. They have kept him awake at night by lurking on his bedroom wall. Sometimes, when he’s very tired, he can’t even bear thinking about or looking at spiders.   This might

Five years ago, on a remote island in Wales, University of Oxford scientist Annette L. Fayet spied a puffin doing something she had never seen before. The bird, floating on the seawater beneath a cliff, held a stick in its beak.   It began to scratch its back with the stick – the puffin, as

There’s no denying that keeping livestock has deeply benefited humanity over the millennia. But, while sheep and cows may have adapted well to farm life, there’s one animal humans like to eat that would fare poorly in farms.   Octopuses, scientists have argued in a May 2019 essay, should never be farmed – not just

In 2015, David Hole was prospecting in Maryborough Regional Park near Melbourne, Australia. Armed with a metal detector, he discovered something out of the ordinary – a very heavy, reddish rock resting in some yellow clay.   He took it home and tried everything to open it, sure that there was a gold nugget inside

He was not born in a manger, and there were no wise men, nor frankincense or myrrh. But the masses are still flocking to see him. Meet the Potter Park Zoo’s Christmas Eve miracle, a black rhino calf born at 5:40 am on 24 December in Lansing, Michigan.   “It’s a boy!” the zoo wrote

Skywatchers from Saudi Arabia and Oman to India and Singapore were treated to a rare ‘ring of fire’ solar eclipse Thursday. Annular eclipses occur when the Moon is not close enough to the Earth to completely obscure the Sun, leaving a thin ring of the solar disc visible.   While these types of eclipses occur

In the pitch black waters 759 meters (2,500 feet) below the surface of the Gulf of Mexico, a thin, undulating arm emerges from the gloom. Suddenly, it splits, and what was a lone, curious appendage is a writhing bouquet of tentacles until, finally, an honest-to-God giant squid blooms from the darkness and attacks.   Then,

If you live in Europe, Asia, Australia or Africa, you could be in for a treat – you might be in the path of the last solar eclipse of 2019. On December 26, places such as India, Singapore, the Philippines, Saudi Arabia, and some parts of Australia will be treated to a ‘ring of fire’

When scientists at the Dalian Natural History Museum in China copped a load of a fossil unearthed in the Lower Cretaceous Yixian Formation, they couldn’t believe their eyes. The eight-legged beastie looked like nothing anyone had seen before. Exceptionally preserved.   They described it as a new spider, publishing their analysis in the journal Acta

By listening to the muffled sound of our planet’s groaning guts, geologists have revealed that Earth’s core could be coated in a thick layer of metallic dust; a scene dismissed in the past as implausible by many researchers.   Contradictions between seismic data and existing models of our planet’s molten insides have been hard to

A slice of the world’s oldest fossilised forest has been found cemented into the ground at an abandoned quarry in Cairo, New York. Discovered by chance in 2009, these extremely rare webs of fossilised roots, some of which are nearly 11 metres (36 ft) wide, mark the spot where some of the first woody trees

When it comes to numbers, some things are innate, like our ability to judge how many items we see. This ability is present even in newborn babies, who can tell the difference between the same and different amounts of objects, but it’s not just a human skill.   Such sensitivity to numbers that doesn’t involve

Chimpanzees in West Africa have a song, and it goes like this – hoot loudly, and then throw a rock at a tree. Maybe twice. And then saunter away. Whatever it is our primate cousins are trying to do, we honestly have no idea. But a close look at their choice of instruments just might

Even on land, crocodiles are no fish out of water. While these reptiles might look lazy and slow sunning on the bank, they can easily pick up speed when necessary, and a scary number can gallop or bound like a horse or a dog.   Bounding is when an animal’s forelimbs hit the ground at

Our planet is restless, and its poles are wandering. Of course, the geographic north pole is in the same place it always was, but its magnetic counterpart – indicated by the N on any compass – is roaming towards Siberia at record-breaking speeds that scientists don’t fully comprehend.   It’s worth stating that while the

Even before the Chicxulub asteroid hit Earth 66 million years ago, dinosaurs and other life forms were dealing with toxic mercury levels, a new study suggests. The fresh evidence serves up even more contention in a “long-running and bitter” debate over how the dinosaurs died all those years ago. While some scientists blame their demise

Antarctica’s ice sheet is the largest single mass of ice found anywhere on Earth, but what lies beneath is still largely a mystery. Today, half the Antarctic ice sheet is more than 5 kilometres (3 miles) from any bed topography measurement, and major data gaps exist in several parts of this frigid continent.   Now,

When giant pandas are born, they are not giant. In fact, they are almost comically small compared to their mums. Now, new research on baby panda skeletons has revealed that in almost any other mammal, the developmental stage of panda cubs when they’re born would be considered premature.   In short, giant panda bears are

Walking through a wintry broadleaf forest in the cold morning light, you might be lucky enough to spot a fleeting enigma called “hair ice”. At first, it might look as though the rotten branch of a tree has grown a shiny white toupee, or perhaps a delicious bunch of cotton candy.   But when you

Data from a network of newly installed weather stations atop Mount Everest shows that the mountain experiences some of the most intense sunlight on the planet. As alpine mountaineers are all too aware, the sun can be brutally fierce atop snow-capped peaks.   Preliminary data from the weather stations on Mount Everest suggests this effect

Both toothed and baleen (filter-feeding) whales are among the largest animals ever to exist. Blue whales, which measure up to 100 feet (30 meters) long and can weigh over 150 tons, are the largest animals in the history of life on Earth.   Although whales have existed on this planet for some 50 million years,

After an influx of dark and stormy weather, residents in California’s Bay Area awoke to find their local beach awash with what appeared to be hundreds and hundreds of pulsating pink penises.   “I had no idea what they might be… it went on for two miles,” resident David Ford told Vice. “I walked for

In the Death Valley desert in California, the dry lake of Racetrack Playa is renowned for being home to a wonderful peculiarity. Here, large and heavy rocks known as ‘sailing stones’ regularly cruise across the ground, leaving long tracks behind them.   Such sailing stone tracks (or at least one like them) have now turned

A new species of extinct penguin has been discovered. It’s helping us bridge the gap between modern penguins and their counterparts from the Paleocene epoch – the 10-million-year period following dinosaur extinction.   The world’s oldest known penguins existed only a few million years after the mass-extinction event that wiped out the dinosaurs – except