Monthly Archives: March 2018

In the latest peer-reviewed publication on the potential impacts of a border wall on plants and animals, conservation biologists, led by a pair of scientists from The University of Texas at Austin, say that border walls threaten to harm endangered Texas plants and animals and cause trouble for the region's growing ecotourism industry.

Groups of basking sharks ranging from as few as 30 to nearly 1,400 individual animals have been observed aggregating in waters from Nova Scotia to Long Island. While individual sightings are fairly common, seeing large groups is not.

Tears might not seem to have an odor. But studies have shown that proteins in tears do act as pheromonal cues. For example, the tear glands of male mice produce a protein that makes females more receptive to sex. Now researchers reporting in Current Biology on March 29 have found that rat tears contain proteins...

Using genetic engineering technology, a team of scientists has established a pig model of Huntington's disease (HD), an inherited neurodegenerative disease. The researchers anticipate that the pigs could be a practical way to test treatments for HD, which is caused by a gene encoding a toxic protein that causes brain cells to die.

Black plague killed between 30 to 50 percent of people worldwide. The cause, Yersinia pestis, is still around, but people are not dying of the plague. An even more devastating modern disease caused by the chytrid fungus wiped entire frog and salamander populations off the map. New results from work at the Smithsonian Tropical Research...

When tadpoles are but tadpoles, they're voracious eaters, chomping down all of the plant matter in their paths.