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More than one in five of the world’s reptile species are threatened with extinction, researchers have determined in a new paper that marks the culmination of more than 20 years of slow-going research. On top of facing human-caused threats to their survival, the scaled creatures have fallen victim to bias in conservation priorities. Conservationists with limited resources have had to play catch-up in their efforts to assess threats to turtles, crocodiles, lizards, snakes, and tuatara (the last in an ancient lineage of…

In addition to being a magically empowered superhero, Steven Grant, the main character of Marvel’s Moon Knight series, is a man living with dissociative identity disorder, a condition in which someone’s personality and sense of self fragment in response to severe psychological trauma. Moon Knight’s only just begun to explain certain things about its hero, like why Steven — who’s clearly an American — loses significant chunks of time or why he’s putting on such an unconvincing accent while living in England. But all of…

Climate change is pushing mammals into new territory, increasing the number of opportunities for viruses to jump from species to species — including humans. By 2070, if global temperatures continue to rise as predicted, there could be a total of 15,000 new cross-species “viral sharing events,” according to new research published today in the journal Nature. Of the at least 10,000 virus species in mammals capable of infecting humans, most are still only circulating among animals in the wild. The worry is that more of…

Elinor Karlsson has never owned a dog. But ever since she was a graduate student, she’s been studying dog genetics. (They’re good models for studying genetic diseases in humans.) Part of that work involved collecting genetic and behavioral data on thousands of dogs. And all that data meant the research team could ask a question Karlsson had been wondering for years: does a dog’s breed really say anything about how that dog acts? “Everybody was assuming that breed was predictive of behavior in dogs,” said Karlsson, now…

New pictures from the Ingenuity helicopter offer a fresh perspective of the wreckage left behind when the Perseverance rover landed on Mars last year, NASA said on Wednesday. Launched in 2020, the Perseverance rover successfully landed on the Red Planet in 2021, with the mission of finding ancient signs of life on Mars. The rover carried the Ingenuity helicopter onboard — an experimental project that scientists on Earth hoped would be able to see sights that the rover couldn’t. Perseverance went through a grueling…