Bees that land on short, wide flowers can fly away with an upset stomach. Common eastern bumblebees (Bombus impatiens) are more likely to catch a diarrhea-inducing gut parasite from purple coneflowers, black-eyed Susans and other similarly shaped flora than other flowers, researchers report in the July Ecology. Because parasites and diseases contribute to bee decline, […]
As a journalist covering COVID-19, I’ve had a front-row seat to the pandemic. I’ve been overwhelmed with despair over the death and suffering. I’ve been numb, trying to keep up with the deluge of COVID-19 studies. One balm has been the understanding of colleagues who also report on COVID-19. I found solace too in Virology, […]
Modern mammals are known for their big brains. But new analyses of mammal skulls from creatures that lived shortly after the dinosaur mass extinction show that those brains weren’t always a foregone conclusion. For at least 10 million years after the dinosaurs disappeared, mammals got a lot brawnier but not brainier, researchers report in the […]
Researchers have finally deciphered a complete human genetic instruction book from cover to cover. The completion of the human genome has been announced a couple of times in the past, but those were actually incomplete drafts. “We really mean it this time,” says Evan Eichler, a human geneticist and Howard Hughes Medical Institute investigator at […]
It doesn’t have to be this way. The world already has the know-how and tools to dramatically reduce emissions from fossil fuels — but we need to use those tools immediately if we hope to forestall the worst impacts of climate change. That’s the message of the third and final installment of the massive sixth […]
A chance alignment may have revealed a star from the universe’s first billion years. If confirmed, this star would be the most distant one ever seen, obliterating the previous record (SN: 7/11/17). Light from the star traveled for about 12.9 billion years on its journey toward Earth, about 4 billion years longer than the former […]
Leeches suck. Most people try to avoid them. But in the summer of 2016, park rangers in China’s Ailaoshan Nature Reserve went hunting for the little blood gluttons. For months, the rangers searched through the reserve’s evergreen forest, gathering tens of thousands of leeches by hand and sometimes plucking the slimy parasites from the rangers’ […]
Western banded geckos don’t look like they’d win in a fight. Yet this unassuming predator dines on venomous scorpions, and a field study published in the March Biological Journal of the Linnean Society shows how the lizards take down such perilous prey. Geckos bite the scorpion and thrash their heads and upper bodies back and […]
With soils rich for cultivation, most land in the Midwestern United States has been converted from tallgrass prairie to agricultural fields. Less than 0.1 percent of the original prairie remains. This shift over the last 160 years has resulted in staggering — and unsustainable — soil erosion rates for the region, researchers report in the […]
Recurring climate changes may have orchestrated where Homo species lived over the last 2 million years and how humankind evolved. Ups and downs in temperature, rainfall and plant growth promoted ancient hominid migrations within and out of Africa that fostered an ability to survive in unfamiliar environments, say climate physicist and oceanographer Axel Timmermann and […]