Biology

Rendering of a reclining Psittacosaurus, with insert showing the umbilical scar.Illustration: Jagged Fang DesignsForget dinosaurs engaged in vicious combat. Put aside terrifying fangs and claws. Scientists have discovered a softer side to dinosaurs: the reptilian equivalent of a belly button.For the first time ever, scientists have identified an umbilical scar on a non-avian dinosaur. The paper announcing this find is published in BMC Biology, and it’s yet another exciting discovery from a particularly rare and…

A presumed-extinct giant tortoise of the Galápagos Islands was found alive in 2019, and a new DNA study confirms the female tortoise is the same species as an animal collected over a century ago. “Fernanda,” as she’s called, is the only living Fernandina Island tortoise (Chelonoidis phantastica) known and just the second member of the species ever recorded.The Galápagos Archipelago—the cradle and testing ground for Darwin’s theory of natural selection—is bedazzled with giant tortoises, some of which have gone extinct…

A polar bear in Hudson Bay in 2007.Photo: PAUL J. RICHARDS/AFP (Getty Images)Researchers have extracted DNA from a 115,000-year-old polar bear jawbone and used it to analyze the genetic relationship between these Arctic predators and their brown bear cousins (grizzlies included). They found that polar bears intermixed with brown bears quite a bit over the millennia.Polar bear fossils are rare, and many of those that are found are relatively young. But scientists got lucky just over a decade ago, when a…

Often in computational biologyPCA on 1000 genomes genetic variation (left), PCA on microbial abundance HMP data (right). Image by authorThis is the twenty forth article from my column Mathematical Statistics and Machine Learning for Life Sciences, where I discuss in plain language some interesting analytical methods from Computational Biology and Life Sciences. Principal Component Analysis (PCA) is widely used in computational biology, in particular, population genetics, microbial ecology, and single cell analysis for…

“We didn't see any indication of their drinking coming back to baseline, so we think that maybe this epigenetic editing will produce a long-lasting effect,” Pandey says. “I think a lot more work needs to be done in terms of how this can be translated into humans for a therapy, but I have high hopes.”To test that the Arc gene was truly responsible for this outcome, the researchers also designed a Crispr injection meant to decrease its expression. They tested it in rats that weren’t exposed to alcohol in adolescence.…

Photo: Sean Gallup (Getty Images)A California judge ruled this week that bees can now be legally defined as “fish” under a state conservation law, but they’re still biologically bees (obviously).The decision comes from California’s Third District Court of Appeal, whichruled on Tuesday that the California Endangered Species Act can protect bees. In 2020, the Sacramento County Superior Court ruled that the California Fish and Game Commission could not list invertebrates (like bees) under the California Endangered Species…

Schoenoplectus americanus, or the chairmaker’s bulrush, is a common wetland plant in the Americas, and it has an existential problem. It has chosen to live in a place where it is always at risk of being drowned. Like all plants, the bulrush requires oxygen to produce energy. One solution is obvious: Send shoots skyward like straws to suck down oxygen to the roots. But the bulrush also employs a more unusual strategy: raising the ground on which it grows. The plant builds its roots near the surface, where they trap the…

Stewart says public interest in spiders and scorpions has exploded as people realize they are actually low-maintenance pets that don't need walking three times a day and can be kept in apartments or small homes without a backyard. “They're fascinating creatures, and they're beautiful,” says Stewart, who has been collecting them for the past 20 years.That said, he agrees that international spider trading can be a problem, because unethical collectors can decimate wild populations. “We don't just like tarantulas because…

IN DECEMBER 2009, a submarine plunged 2,000 meters into the Gulf of California and emerged clutching a whole new branch of life. The deep-sea craft hadn’t uncovered a new species of fish, or some hitherto unknown crustacean, but something much more profound. In one of the most alien environments on Earth, the submarine had found a group of microbes utterly distinct from all other life. In animal terms, it was like stumbling across mollusks or insects for the first time. Not just one new species but a whole swath of life…

By washing through the brain, neuromodulators “allow you to govern the excitability of a large region of the brain more or less in the same way or at the same time,” said Eve Marder, a neuroscientist at Brandeis University widely recognized for her pioneering studies on neuromodulators in the late 1980s. “You’re basically creating either a local brain wash or more extended brain wash that is changing the state of a lot of networks simultaneously.”The powerful effects of neuromodulators mean that abnormal levels of these…