November 5, 2009
Walk through the rainforests of Ecuador and you might encounter a beautiful butterfly called Heliconius cydno. It's extremely varied in its colours. Even among one subspecies, H.cydno alithea, you can find individuals with white wingbands and those with yellow. Despite their different hues, they…
November 5, 2009
Telling the difference between a German and French speaker isn't difficult. But you may be more surprised to know that you could have a good stab at distinguishing between German and French babies based on their cries. The bawls of French newborns tend to have a rising melody, with higher…
November 4, 2009
Small earthquakes in unexpected locations are often a cause for concern. The worry is that these rumbles are harbingers of bigger quakes to come. But not always - a new study suggests that many of these tremors aren't warnings, but aftershocks. In particular, those that happen in the middle of…
November 4, 2009
When we think of memory aids, we consider repeating what we've learned, using clever mnemonics, or breaking information down into bite-size chunks. But one of the best memory aids we have available to us is something we all do on a daily basis - sleep. Studies have found that sleep enhances our…
November 3, 2009
A friend of mine recently got onto a train and found a group of four seats that were empty except for one woman who was sitting face down. She looked asleep and he looked forward to a quiet journey. As soon as he sat down, the woman lifted her head to reveal streaming, puffy eyes and started…
November 2, 2009
In 1898, railway workers in Tsavo, Kenya were terrorised by a pair of man-eating lions, who killed at least 28 people during a 10-month reign of terror. It ended in December when a British officer called Lt. Col. John H. Patterson killed both beasts. The man-eaters' notorious exploits have been…
November 1, 2009
We had numerous elephant sightings on our South Africa trip including a few family groups and a couple of lone males. Seeing them in documentaries or in zoos never quite captures just how big and impressive they are in the flesh, especially when they do things like beat up a tree. Note how this…
October 31, 2009
This article is reposted from the old Wordpress incarnation of Not Exactly Rocket Science.
When it comes to sex, it makes sense to stick to your own species. Even putting aside our own innate revulsion, inter-species liaisons are a bad idea because they mostly fail to produce any young. In the few…
October 30, 2009
Tiger snakes are a group of extremely venomous serpents found all over the southern half of Australia, and on many of its islands. Some were cut off from the mainland by rising sea levels more than 9,000 years ago, while others were inadvertently introduced by travelling humans and have been around…
October 29, 2009
The Northern short-tailed shrew is a small, energetic mammal that lives in central and eastern North America. The Mexican beaded lizard is a much larger reptile found in Mexico and Guatemala. These species are separated by a lot of a land and several million years of evolution, yet they share…
October 27, 2009
Many humans whinge about not getting oral sex often enough, but for most animals, it's completely non-existent. In fact, we know of only animal apart from humans to regularly engage in fellatio - the short-nosed fruit bat (Cynopterus sphinx).
The bat's sexual antics have only just been recorded…
October 27, 2009
In East Africa lives a species of spider that drinks mammalian blood. But fear not - Evarcha culicivora is an indirect vampire - it sates its thirst by preying on female mosquitoes that have previously fed on blood themselves.
Even though its habitat is full of non-biting midges called "lake…
October 26, 2009
The prospect of infections spreading from animals to humans has become all too real with the onset of the current swine flu pandemic, and the threat of a bird flu still looming. But infections can jump the other way too. Decades before the world's media were gripped with panic over bird flu, humans…
October 25, 2009
The most incredible eyes in the animal world can be found under the sea, on the head of the mantis shrimps. Each eye can move independently and can focus on object with three different areas, giving the mantis shrimp "trinocular vision". While we see in three colours, they see in twelve, and they…
October 24, 2009
What would an extreme close-up of your sandwich filling look like? What about your hair? The cluster of dust in the corner of your living room? The grain of pollen stuck to your coat? Scientists, of course, have ways of finding out, using electron microscopes to look at the tiniest of objects in…
October 24, 2009
Nature is rife with charlatans. Hundreds of animals have evolved to look like other species in order to fool predators into thinking they're more of a threat, or to sneak up on unsuspecting prey. In the Indo-Pacific lives a fish that does both and has the rare ability to switch between different…
October 23, 2009
There is a deep hole in a tree trunk and within is a tasty dollop of sweet, nutritious honey. It's a worthwhile prize for any animal skilled or clever enough to reach it, and chimpanzees certainly have both of these qualities. But the solutions they find aren't always the same - they depend on…
October 22, 2009
By directing the evolution of a worm, scientists have confirmed answers to the age-old question: "What is the point of having sex with someone else?" For most people, that would hardly be a tricky query but it's no reflection on the lives of evolutionary scientists that sex has been one of biology'…
October 21, 2009
Cast your mind back to June, when a stunning fossil animal called Darwinius (alternatively Ida or "The Link") was unveiled to the world to tremendous pomp and circumstance. Hyperbolic ads declared the day of Ida's discovery as the most important for 47 million years. A press release promised that…
October 20, 2009
In the forests of South Africa lurks an arachnophobe's nightmare - Nephila kowaci, the largest web-spinning spider in the world. The females of this newly discovered species have bodies that are 3-4 centimetres in length (1.5 inches) and legs that are each around 7.5cm long (3 inches).
This new…
October 20, 2009
This is the story of a Turkish boy, who became the first person to have a genetic disorder diagnosed by thoroughly sequencing his genome. He is known only through his medical case notes as GIT 264-1 but for the purposes of this tale, I'm going to call Baby T.
At a mere five months of age, Baby T…
October 19, 2009
From a young age, children learn about the sounds that animals make. But even without teaching aides like Old Macdonald's farm, it turns out that very young babies have an intuitive understanding of the noises that humans, and even monkeys, ought to make. Athena Vouloumanos from New York…
October 17, 2009
This article is reposted from the old Wordpress incarnation of Not Exactly Rocket Science.
Imagine you get a bad cold, but you decide to put on a brave face and go into work anyway. Instead of jokingly covering their mouths and making jibes about staying away from you, your colleagues act perfectly…
October 16, 2009
Our one and only sighting of the spotted hyena, an animal that is far more beautiful than its reputation might suggest. Hyenas are powerful predators too; as much if not more of their meat comes from their own kills as it does from scavenging.
I know this shot is blurry but I quite like it…
October 15, 2009
The placebo effect - the phenomenon where fake medicines sometimes work if a patient believes that they should - is a boon to quacks the world over. Why it happens is still a medical mystery but thanks to a new study, we have confirmation that the spine is involved.
Frank Eippert from the…
October 14, 2009
In the 1990s, Colombia reintegrated five left-wing guerrilla groups back into mainstream society after decades of conflict. Education was a big priority - many of the guerrillas had spent their entire lives fighting and were more familiar with the grasp of a gun than a pencil. Reintegration offered…
October 13, 2009
In the movie industry, special effects and computer-generated imagery are becoming better and more realistic. As they'd improve, you'd expect moviegoers to more readily accept virtual worlds and characters, but that's not always the case. It turns out that people are incredibly put off by images or…
October 12, 2009
In Latin America, there lives a unique spider called Bagheera kiplingi. It's a jumping spider and it shares the group's large, acute eyes and prodigious leaping ability. But it also has a trait that singles it out among all 40,000 species of spider - it's mostly vegetarian.
Virtually all spiders…
October 12, 2009
If you've ever put a pair of headphones in your pocket, you'll know how difficult it is to keep a long cord in a bundle without getting it hopelessly tangled and knotted. You'll also start to appreciate the monumental challenge that our cells face when packaging our DNA. At 2 metres in length, the…
October 10, 2009
The white rhinoceros - the planet's second largest land mammal. Even though it's the most common of the five existing speceis of rhino, there are still just over 17,000 left in the wild. For comparison, more than five times as many humans pack into Wembley Arena when there's a match on. With that…
