Though they may look ugly to us, naked mole-rats never want for friendship. The hairless rodents live in large colonies under the earth, inhabiting byzantine warrens under the soil of their native East Africa. They send foraging parties out through the dirt in search of the tree roots and tubers that sustain them, and when it comes time to rest, they gather together in a massive pile to sleep. Their isolation offers security, but being cut off from the surface poses its own dangers. Even ...read more

In most biology textbooks, there’s a clear separation between the three domains of cellular organisms – Bacteria, Archaea, and Eukaryotes – and viruses. This fault line is also typically accepted as the divider between life and non-life: since viruses rely on host machinery to enact metabolic transformations and to replicate, they are not self-sufficient, and generally not considered living entities. But several discoveries of giant viruses over the last decade have blurred th ...read more

Public engagement is critical to address the challenges of climate change, a complex issue with environmental, social, political and economic ramifications. Common forms of public engagement include public events such as science festivals or café informal settings for experts to share their knowledge with the community. Or public policy forums where community members voice concerns to government representatives and other decision makers. While useful, these approaches to public engagemen ...read more

A new, nearby exoplanet could be just the boilerplate needed to find out if life could exist in untold numbers of star systems. The planet, LHS 1140b, is 39 light years away. It orbits a small M-dwarf star every 24 days. The planet itself is 1.4 times larger and 6.6 times more massive than Earth, and the principal investigators of the study published today in Nature believe it to be rocky. Standout Super-Earth Our list of exoplanets is long — nearly 3,500 strong, with new planets com ...read more

Two vibrant bundles of string, over 10,000 feet high in the Peruvian Andes, may hold clues for deciphering the ancient code of the Inca civilization. Kept as heirlooms by the community of San Juan de Collata, the strings are khipus, devices of twisted and tied cords once used by indigenous Andeans for record keeping. Anthropologists have long debated whether khipus were simply memory aids — akin to rosary beads — or a three-dimensional writing system. The latter seems more poss ...read more

We human beings are quite fond of our brains. They are one of our largest and most complex organs, weighing in at nearly three pounds (2% of our bodies!). Each contains upwards of 90 billion neurons responsible for controlling our gangly, almost hairless primate bodies as well as processing and storing a lifetime's worth of events, facts and figures. So we protect our brains as best we can, from hats that battle temperature extremes to helmets that buffer even the most brutish blo ...read more

The man-eaters of Tsavo, two lions that killed railroad workers in Kenya more than a century ago, have inspired legends, movies and a lot of research papers trying to explain what drove the big cats to prey on humans (a rare menu choice for Panthera leo). A study out today finds that, in one crucial way, the infamous killers were a lot like — surprise — zoo animals. For years, the true story of the man-eaters of Tsavo has been embellished and exaggerated, most recently in the 1 ...read more

The home planet just experienced its second warmest March on record, according to an analysis released by NASA last week. The agency's temperature records go all the way back to 1880 From the analysis: Last month was 1.12 degrees Celsius warmer than the mean March temperature from 1951-1980. The two top March temperature anomalies have occurred during the past two years. Here's how the year so far compares with the seasonal cycle for every year since 1880: It's still early in the ...read more

A peptide secreted by a species of Indian frog can destroy variants of the influenza virus. Frogs, with little defensive weaponry to rely on, have armed themselves with a chemical arsenal that gets leached out through their skins. In some frogs, this takes the form of deadly poisons; in others, the chemicals have been known to possess psychoactive properties. Hydrophylax bahuvistara, a species of fungoid frog found in India, secretes a substance that protects against viruses. Re ...read more