Biology

3D illustration of monkeypox virusIllustration: Kateryna Kon (Shutterstock)The New York City Health Department will begin offering the monkeypox vaccine preemptively to men who have sex with men and have had multiple recent partners. Appointments are available as soon as Friday.The agency made the announcement two days before Pride festivities kick off in the city. It had already been collaborating with NYC Health and Hospitals in offering the vaccine to those who were close contacts with someone suspected or confirmed to…

T. magnifica filaments next to a dime for scale.Gif: Tomas TymlA team of scientists discovered a macroscopic species of bacterium living in the waters off Guadeloupe in the Caribbean, shifting the scales of how big we thought bacteria could be. The newly discovered species is named Thiomargarita (sulfur pearl) magnifica, and it is so large that its single cells are visible to the naked eye.Besides its superlative size, T. magnifica shows signs of increased complexity in bacteria. Instead of its DNA just floating around in…

After Hunt’s unusual flight home, Shanidar Z made it safely to the University of Cambridge for digital scanning and will eventually be transferred back to northern Iraq to feature as the centerpiece of a new museum. The skeleton could be up to 90,000 years old, but its DNA will be used to further understanding of modern human history—by analyzing and statistically comparing the ancient DNA against the genomes of modern populations, “to demonstrate when different population groups parted company,” Hunt says.Once a…

Taconic Partners, one of New York’s largest private owners and managers of lab space serving pharmaceutical and biotech companies, is consolidating its life-sciences portfolio into a new subsidiary named Elevate Research Properties. Elevate will control three life-sciences laboratories currently under development by Taconic. Elevate also plans to spend more than $250 million to redevelop an office property that it owns with Nuveen Real Estate near several academic medical institutions, including Mount Sinai Hospital,…

Katharina Ribbeck’s lab collects mucus—the often-gooey substance present in places like the mouth, gut, reproductive tract, and intestines. While the slimy goop may not be pretty from the get-go, a purification process can brighten it up. “Once you remove particulates and microbes, it’s a beautiful, beautiful clear gel—like egg white,” says Ribbeck, a professor of bioengineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. “It’s really gorgeous.”Ribbeck cares about spit because she’s trying to deconstruct how glycans,…

Megalonyx, an extinct ground sloth.Illustration: Steve Brusatte / The Rise and Reign of MammalsDeep time is a headache. So many changes have happened in the cosmos, on our planet, and through evolution to create the world we know today. One of the most recent major changes, relatively speaking, was the K-Pg extinction, the mass death of the dinosaurs and many other creatures in the immediate aftermath of an asteroid impact 66 million years.01:57Rainn Wilson’s First Fandoms: Star Trek And D&DYesterday 4:32PMThe…

For DNA sequencing, this “is the year of the big shake-up,” says Michael Snyder, a systems biologist at Stanford University. Sequencing is crucial to fields from basic biology to virology to human evolution, and its importance keeps growing. Clinicians are clamoring to harness it for early detection of cancer and other diseases, and biologists are finding ever more ways to use genomics to study single cells. But for years, most sequencing has relied on machines from a single…

Since the dawn of genetics in the early 20th century, biologists have debated whether evolution is driven more by chance mutations or by the original diversity in the gene pool.   Having a lot of genetic options to choose from might make natural selection move a lot faster at the start, but do the genetic mutations that happen over time contribute more to species survival in the end?To attempt to resolve this long-standing argument once and for all, researchers at Michigan State University have tested the adaptive…

A mounted skeleton of the Buesching mastodon.Photo: Eric Bronson, Michigan PhotographyResearchers have detailed the life and grisly death of a male mastodon that died 13,200 years ago by scrutinizing the chemical composition of one of its tusks. The tusk revealed the mastodon grew up in the Great Lakes area and, later in life, made annual trips to a mating ground in northeastern Indiana—until it died there at age 34, after being stabbed in the face by another mastodon.Mastodons (Mammut americanum) were proboscideans that…

From the window of a passenger plane flying over the Amazon, the view is breathtaking. “It’s just miles across of river and river islands,” said Lukas Musher, a postdoctoral researcher at Drexel University’s Academy of Natural Sciences.The massive rivers below branch into a dense, treelike network that has continuously rearranged itself over hundreds of thousands of years, drawing new paths and erasing old ones. The rivers divide and subdivide the forest into spaces that are each an entire world for the innumerable…