A spurge hawk-moth caterpillar. (Credit: Chekaramit/Shutterstock)
It’s a twist of fate that wouldn’t feel out of place in a horror movie: A platoon of caterpillars, young and hungry, descend on a defenseless tomato plant to feast, but as they begin to eat something goes terribly wrong. The leaves no longer satisfy, and they turn on each other in a cannibalistic frenzy — feeding wildly until just one, sated and content, remains.
You can read it as a Carrie-like ...read more
Image: Flickr/Mark Strobl
Although the best-known mummies are the cloth-wrapped Egyptian variety so often seen in horror movies, many kinds of mummies have been found all over the world. And it’s not only the human bodies that have been preserved during the process of mummification–often human parasites are, too! Scientists can use the presence of parasites on and in mummies to track the history of their association. Here, scientists report finding head and pubic lice on mummi ...read more
This post is part of our Divers’ series. We encourage readers to continue the conversation by adding their own comments, question or concerns on our Facebook page. You’ll find links to other posts at the end of this story.
Two years ago I rang in the New Year by scuba diving with giant manta rays off the coast of Hawaii’s Big Island. It was a bucket list experience I will never forget and one that introduced me to a new form of citizen science.
That evening, after en ...read more
The GOES-16 weather satellite eyed Tropical Depression Four in the central Atlantic Ocean on Thursday afternoon, July 6, 2017, as it raced ahead of a huge blob of brownish dust streaming off the Sahara in Africa. (Source: CIRA/RAMMB/NOAA)
It may have a humdrum name, but since Tropical Depression Four formed in the central Atlantic Ocean on Wednesday evening, it has certainly distinguished itself.
It is a “small, tenacious depression” that “has continued to hold its own,&rdquo ...read more
A praying mantis making a meal of a ruby-throated hummingbird. (Credit: “What’s That Bug?”/Randy Anderson)
Poor hummingbirds. The fragile, fleet-winged birds often don’t make it past their first year of life as they are tasty snacks for cats, large-mouth bass, snakes, lizards…you get the idea. Now, perhaps surprisingly, we can add praying mantises to that macabre list.
A new paper reviewing the avian death-literature finds that praying mantises are enth ...read more
(Credit: Shutterstock)
As a kid, Mouad Mkamel played with pet snakes, vipers and scorpions. As a Ph.D. student at University King Hassan II of Casablanca, Mkamel is now breeding scorpions and milking their venom using a robot he designed.
At $7,000 to $8,000 per gram, scorpion venom is one of the most expensive liquids in the world. Mkamel believes scorpion venom has the potential to “create a new generation of medicine,” estimating that there are about five million unstudied compo ...read more
A strange new paper reports “abnormal” brain activity in 10 patients with electrohypersensitivity (EHS) – a controversial condition allegedly triggered by electromagnetic fields from devices such as phones and power-lines.
But the methods used in this study were very odd.
According to the authors, Gunnar Heuser and Sylvia A. Heuser, the ten patients all suffered from symptoms such as
Headaches, impairment of cognitive function, tremors, weakness, and others. Multi-system comp ...read more
This animation consists of false-color images of the Russian coast and adjoining East Siberian Sea acquired by NASA’s Aqua satellite. On June 18, the offshore waters were choked with sea ice. By July 6, 2017, a lot of it had broken up. In the false-color scheme, land is green, black is indicative of open water, and ice is a light turquoise. The darker blue prominent in the June 18th image probably is indicative of melting snow and ice that’s causing liq ...read more
Mount Sharp on Mars, as imaged by the Curiosity rover. (Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/MSSS)
Life on Mars … does it exist? Depending on when you last checked in with news about the Red Planet, you could probably be convinced either way. As we discover more and more about the composition and planetary dynamics of Mars, there has been cause for both elation and disappointment regarding the likelihood that organic life could manage to eke out a living on the planet.
The pendulum swung back towar ...read more
An artist’s impression of Proxima b. (Credit: ESO)
Proxima Centauri b may not be alone out there.
The 2016 announcement of Proxima Centauri b was a watershed moment in exoplanet research. Not only had researchers found a potentially habitable Earth-mass planet, but it was at the nearest star to Earth. This means it could be one of the easiest systems to study using future telescopes.
But researchers are now looking into some promising signals suggesting there are more planets lurkin ...read more
