They seem so sweet and innocent but these squirrels are also opportunistic killers. We think of squirrels as adorably harmless creatures, admiring their bushy tails and twitchy little noses and the way they cram their cheeks with nuts or seeds to bring back to their nests for later. But the rodents turn out to be […]
December 18, 2024 | animal behavior, animals, Biology, Ecology, omnivores, predator/prey, Science | No comments
So, the ultimate goal of the USDA is to eliminate cattle as a reservoir. When the Agency announced it was planning for this program, it noted that there were two candidate vaccines in trials. Until those are validated, it plans to use the standard playbook for handling emerging infections: contact tracing and isolation. And it […]
December 6, 2024 | Biology, bird flu, Flu virus, H5N1, Health, Infectious disease, medicine, Science | No comments
Lizards are ancient creatures. They were around before the dinosaurs and persisted long after dinosaurs went extinct. We’ve now found they are 35 million years older than we thought they were. Cryptovaranoides microlanius was a tiny lizard that skittered around what is now southern England during the late Triassic, around 205 million years ago. It […]
December 6, 2024 | Biology, fossils, lizards, paleontology, reptiles, Science | No comments
Some of the most bizarre lifeforms on Earth lurk in the deeper realms of the ocean. There was so little known about one of these creatures that it took 20 years just to figure out what exactly it was. Things only got weirder from there. The organism’s distinctive, glowing presence was observed by multiple deep-sea […]
December 2, 2024 | Biology, marine biology, phylogenetic, Science, Weird | No comments
What’s needed, Birch argues, when faced with such staggering uncertainty about the sentience stature of other beings, is a precautionary framework that outlines best practices for decision-making regarding their care. And in The Edge of Sentience, he provides exactly that, in meticulous, orderly detail. Over more than 300 pages, he outlines three fundamental framework principles […]
November 30, 2024 | Biology, consciousness, ethics, neurobiology, Science, sentience | No comments
“In simple terms, we use genetic tools that allow us to inject mice with a drug that artificially makes astrocytes express some other gene or protein of interest when they become active,” says Wookbong Kwon, a biotechnologist at Baylor College and co-author of the study. Those proteins of interest were mainly fluorescent proteins that make […]
November 23, 2024 | astrocytes, Biology, memory, neurobiology, neurons, Neuroscience, Science | No comments