Think back to health class and picture a sperm. It's got a smooth rounded head, with a long skinny tail at the end, right? As it turns out, the sperm from different species of animals have different shapes -- and, as a new study in the Journal of Mammalogy shows, those shapes can be used...
Not too big, not too small: Tree frogs choose pools that are just right
Frogs that raise their young in tiny pools of water that collect on plant leaves must make a delicate trade-off between the risk of drying out and the risk of being eaten, according to a study publishing December 5 in the open-access journal PLOS ONE by Mirco Solé from the Universidade Estadual de Santa Cruz...
Soft tissue shows Jurassic ichthyosaur was warm-blooded, had blubber and camouflage
An ancient, dolphin-like marine reptile resembles its distant relative in more than appearance, according to an international team of researchers that includes scientists from North Carolina State University and Sweden's Lund University. Molecular and microstructural analysis of a Stenopterygius ichthyosaur from the Jurassic (180 million years ago) reveals that these animals were most likely warm-blooded,...
New butterfly named for pioneering 17th-century entomologist Maria Sibylla Merian
More than two centuries before initiatives to increase the number of women in STEM fields, 52-year-old Maria Sibylla Merian sailed across the Atlantic on a largely self-funded scientific expedition to document the animals and plants of Dutch Suriname.
Born in Germany in 1647, Merian was a professional artist and naturalist whose close observations and illustrations were...
Enhancing our vision of the past
An international group of scientists led by researchers from the University of Bristol have advanced our understanding of how ancient animals saw the world by combining the study of fossils and genetics.
Ancestors of insects and crustaceans that lived more than 500 million years ago in the Cambrian period were some of the earliest active predators,...
How the brain hears and fears
How is it that a sound can send a chill down your spine? By observing individual brain cells of mice, scientists at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory (CSHL) are understanding how a sound can incite fear.
Investigator Bo Li focuses on a part of the mouse brain called the amygdala where sights, sounds, and other stimuli take...