April 21, 2009
Nocturnal animals face an obvious challenge: collecting enough light to see clearly in the dark. We know about many of their tricks. They have bigger eyes and wider pupils. They have a reflective layer behind their retina called the tapetum, which reflects any light that passes through back onto it…
April 20, 2009
Studying the way an animal moves by looking at its ears might seem like a poorly thought-out strategy. After all, short of watching it directly, most biologists would choose to look at more obvious traits like tracks, or limb bones.
But while an animal's limbs may drive it forward, its inner ear…
April 19, 2009
A large study weighs up the existing evidence on the impact of GM crops on local insect life, providing some much-needed scientific rigour to the GM debate.
In Europe, the 'GM debate' about the merits and dangers of genetically-modified (GM) crops is a particularly heated one. There is a sense of…
April 17, 2009
Antarctica normally conjures images of white and blue, but the frozen continent can sometimes bear more unexpected colours. Take the Taylor Glacier - when geologist Griffith Taylor first explored it a century ago, he found a bizarre reddish stain that seemed to spill waterfall-like from the glacier…
April 16, 2009
In American high schools, black students typically perform worse than their white peers, which can damage their self-esteem and their future prospects. Studies have found that the fear of living up to this underachieving stereotype can cause so much stress that a child's performance suffers. Their…
April 15, 2009
Autumn is a time of incredible beauty, when the world becomes painted in the red, orange and yelllow palette of falling leaves. But there may be a deeper purpose to these colours, and the red ones in particular. In the eyes of some scientists, they aren't just decay made pretty - they are a tree's…
April 14, 2009
On November 1st, 1700, an entire dynasty of kings came to a crashing end with the death of Charles II of Spain. Charles had neither a pleasant life nor a successful reign. He was physically disabled, mentally retarded and disfigured. A large tongue made his speech difficult to understand, he was…
April 14, 2009
Learning a new language as an adult is no easy task but infants can readily learn two languages without obvious difficulties. Despite being faced with two different vocabularies and sets of grammar, babies pick up both languages at the same speeds as those who learn just one. Far from becoming…
April 13, 2009
Our teeth are a mystery. The set we grow during late childhood stays with us throughout our lives, biting and chewing thousands of times a day. They can withstand forces of up to 1,000 newtons and yet, the material that coats them - enamel - is little tougher than glass. How does this…
April 12, 2009
Sponges are among the most primitive of all animals. They are immobile, and live by filtering detritus from the water. They have no brains or, for that matter, any neurons, organs or even tissues. If you were looking for the evolutionary origins of animal intelligence, you couldn't really pick a…
April 10, 2009
We get a lot of information from watching other people. We read reviews, we follow links to recommended websites and we listen when our friends vouch for strangers. The opinions of strangers may even be a better guide to the things that make us happy than our own predictions. But humans aren't the…
April 8, 2009
In which, having largely stayed out of it, I wade into the ongoing rivalry between bloggers and more mainstream forms of science writing...
The latest round in this seemingly endless debate was a review by New Scientist of Open Lab 2008, an anthology of the best science blogging from the last year…
April 8, 2009
Many men think of little else besides sex and meat, but male chimpanzees will sometimes exchange one for the other. Chimps are mostly vegetarian but they will occasionally supplement their diet by hunting other animals, especially monkeys. Males do most of the hunting, but they don't eat their…
April 7, 2009
Some people go out of their way to help their peers, while others are more selfish. Some lend their trust easily, while others are more suspicious and distrustful. Some dive headlong into risky ventures; others shun risk like visiting in-laws. There's every reason to believe that these differences…
April 6, 2009
What happens when you remember a good deed, or think of yourself as a stand-up citizen? You might think that your shining self-image would reinforce the value of selflessness and make you more likely to behave morally in the future. But a new study disagrees.
Through three psychological…
April 5, 2009
For humans, our culture is a massive part of our identity, from the way we dress, speak and cook, to the social norms that govern how we interact with our peers. Our culture stems from our ability to pick up new behaviours through imitation, and we are so innately good at this that we often take…
April 3, 2009
Say the word 'statistician' and most people might think of an intelligent but reclusive person, probably working in a darkened room and almost certainly wearing glasses. But a new study shows that a monkey in front of a monitor can make a reasonably good statistician too.
Tianming Yang and…
April 2, 2009
In a laboratory at Aberystwyth University, Wales, a scientist called Adam is doing some experiments. He is trying to find the genes responsible for producing some important enzymes in yeast, and he is going about it in a very familiar way. Based on existing knowledge, Adam is coming up with new…
April 1, 2009
I win! Fame! Glory! People fanning me with palm-fronds! Muhahahaha! Kneel before Zod!... Ahem. Regains composure...
Bora Zivkovic of A Blog Around the Clock fame has graciously awarded the first Blog Post of the Month award from everyONE - the new blog from the open-access journal PLoS ONE - to…
April 1, 2009
Humans aren't the only species that have had to deal with the issue of slavery. Some species of ants also abduct the young of others, forcing them into labouring for their new masters. These slave-making ants, like Protomagnathus americanus conduct violent raids on the nests of other species,…
March 31, 2009
Classical ballet is one of the more conservative of art forms. Dancers express emotion and character through the same vocabulary of postures that was originally set in 1760, and often with entire choreographies that have been handed down for centuries.
But even amid this rigorous cascade of…
March 30, 2009
For all appearances, this looks like the skull of any human child. But there are two very special things about it. The first is that its owner was clearly deformed; its asymmetrical skull is a sign of a medical condition called craniosynostosis that's associated with mental retardation. The second…
March 30, 2009
For any animal, it pays to be able to spot other animals in order to find mates and companions and to avoid predators. Fortunately, many animals move in a distinct way, combining great flexibility with the constraints of a rigid skeleton - that sets them apart from inanimate objects like speeding…
March 29, 2009
Anyone who has played video games for too long is probably familiar with the sore, tired and dry eyes that accompany extended bouts of shooting things with rocket launchers. So it might come as a surprise that playing games could actually improve a key aspect of our eyesight.
Renjie Li from the…
March 28, 2009
Animals have distinct personalities and temperaments, but why would evolution favour these over more flexible and adaptible mindsets? New game theory models show that animal personalities are a natural progression from the choices they make over how to live and reproduce.
Any pet owner, wildlife…
March 27, 2009
Termite colonies are families - millions of individual workers all descended from one king and one queen. But the colony itself tends to outlast this initial royal couple. When they die, new kings and queens rise to take their place. These secondary royals are a common feature of some families of…
March 26, 2009
Apropos of nothing, a whinge: my name has no u in it. It rhymes with "song" not "sung" and "long" but not "lung".
I'm fairly used to people adding in the errant u but for some reason, this has been annoying me of late. Seriously, there are only four letters, six if you count the first name too. It…
March 26, 2009
On the 3rd of October, 2006, Nicolas Makris watched a quarter of a billion fish gather in the same place. They were Atlantic herring, one of the most abundant fishes in the ocean and one prone to gathering in massive schools. This was the first time that anyone had watched the full scope of the…
March 25, 2009
We're used to thinking of neglect as a lack of appropriate care, but to a neuroscientist, it has a very different meaning. "Spatial neglect" is a neurological condition caused by damage to one half of the brain (usually the right), where patients find it difficult to pay attention to one half of…
March 24, 2009
Be it in sports or comedy, they say that timing is everything. In evolution, it's no different. Many of the innovations that have separated us from other apes may have arisen not through creating new genetic material, but by subtly shifting how the existing lot is used.
Take our brains, for…
