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Magazine
In the Sept. 29 SN: Tomorrow’s burger, inside three big physics experiments, enterovirus outbreak patterns, Jupiter’s wacky magnetism, crop pests like it warm, firefly flashing methods and more.
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It's Alive
Robot fish shows how the deepest vertebrate in the sea takes the pressure
01/03/2018 - 07:00 Animals, Biophysics, PhysiologyIt’s like having “an elephant stand on your thumb.”
That’s how deep-sea physiologist and ecologist Mackenzie Gerringer describes the pressure squeezing down on the deepest known living fish, some 8 kilometers down. What may help these small, pale Mariana snailfish survive elephantine squashing, says Gerringer of the University of Washington’s Friday Harbor Labs, is a body bulked up,...
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News
Specialized protein helps these ground squirrels resist the cold
12/19/2017 - 12:07 Animals, Genetics, PhysiologyThe hardy souls who manage to push shorts season into December might feel some kinship with the thirteen-lined ground squirrel.
The critter hibernates all winter, but even when awake, it’s less sensitive to cold than its nonhibernating relatives, a new study finds. That cold tolerance is linked to changes in a specific cold-sensing protein in the sensory nerve cells of the ground...
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News
Narwhals react to certain dangers in a really strange way
12/07/2017 - 14:41 Animals, Oceans, PhysiologyView the video
When escaping from humans, narwhals don’t just freeze or flee. They do both.
These deep-diving marine mammals have similar physiological responses to those of an animal frozen in fear: Their heart rate, breathing and metabolism slow, mimicking a “deer in the headlights” reaction. But narwhals (Monodon monoceros) take this freeze response to extremes. The animals...
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News
Rough lessons can lessen the pull of human scent on a mosquito
11/27/2017 - 10:00 Animals, PhysiologyDENVER – After unpleasant lessons in the lab, mosquitoes can learn some restraint in their zest for pursuing the scent of human skin.
The test, a kind of aversion therapy for mosquitoes to see if they can associate smells with bad experiences, was reported at the annual Entomological Society of America meeting.
“Mosquitoes have this very challenging task of finding food that’s...
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News
Alzheimer’s protein can travel from blood to build up in the brain
11/06/2017 - 06:00 Neuroscience, PhysiologyAn Alzheimer’s-related protein can move from the blood to the brain and accumulate there, experiments on mice show for the first time.
The results, published online October 31 in Molecular Psychiatry, suggest that the protein amyloid-beta outside the brain may contribute to the Alzheimer’s disease inside it, says Mathias Jucker, a neurobiologist at the University of Tübingen in Germany....
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Say What?
This sea slug makes its prey do half the food catching
Kleptopredation\klep-toe-preh-day-shun \ n.10/31/2017 - 20:05 Animals, PhysiologyA food-gathering strategy of eating an organism and the meal it just ate.
A wily sea slug has a way to get two meals in one: It gobbles up smaller predators that have recently gulped in their own prey.
“Kleptopredation” is the term Trevor Willis of the University of Portsmouth in England and his colleagues propose for this kind of food...
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Feature
Scary as they are, few vampires have a backbone
10/30/2017 - 16:00 Animals, Physiology, EvolutionHalloween horror aside, vampires are really pretty spineless.
Most have no backbone at all. By one count, some 14,000 kinds of arthropods, including ticks and mosquitoes, are blood feeders. Yet very few vertebrates are clear-cut, all-blood specialists: just some fishes and three bats. Why hasn’t evolution produced more vertebrate vampires?
The question intrigues herpetologist Harry...
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Feature
Being a vampire can be brutal. Here’s how bloodsuckers get by.
10/18/2017 - 12:00 Animals, PhysiologyJennifer Zaspel can’t explain why she stuck her thumb in the vial with the moth. Just an after-dark, out-in-the-woods zing of curiosity.
She was catching moths on a July night in the Russian Far East and had just eased a Calyptra, with brownish forewings like a dried leaf, into a plastic collecting vial. Of the 17 or so largely tropical Calyptra species, eight were known vampires. Males...
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News
Cracking the body clock code wins trio a Nobel Prize
10/02/2017 - 17:22 Physiology, Genetics, CellsDiscoveries about the molecular ups and downs of fruit flies’ daily lives have won Jeffrey C. Hall, Michael Rosbash and Michael W. Young the Nobel Prize in physiology or medicine.
These three Americans were honored October 2 by the Nobel Assembly at the Karolinska Institute in Stockholm for their work in discovering important gears in the circadian clocks of animals. The trio will...
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Science Ticker
Body clock mechanics wins U.S. trio the Nobel Prize in physiology or medicine
10/02/2017 - 06:41 Physiology, BiomedicineDiscoveries about the clocklike ups and downs of daily life have won Jeffery C. Hall, Michael Rosbash and Michael W. Young the Nobel Prize in physiology or medicine.
Circadian rhythms are daily cycles of hormones, gene activity and other biological processes that govern sleep, body temperature and metabolism. When thrown out of whack, there can be serious health consequences, including...