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11. In 1868, Charles Darwin was the first to document a collection of physical and behavioral traits seen in domestic animals, particularly mammals, but not their wild relatives. 12. It wasn’t until 2014, however, that researchers offered a single explanation for the phenomenon of floppy ears, smaller teeth, tameness and other “domestication syndrome” traits: a mild deficit in neural crest cells.13 In vertebrate embryos, neural crest cells (NCCs) form along the dorsal side, or ...read more

(Credit: John Carnemolla/Shutterstock) If you want to get something done in an African wild dog pack, you’ve got to be ready to sneeze. The animals seem to make group decisions based on a system of explosive exhalations — “sneezes” — that determine if they get up and go on the hunt. If the dogs reach a quorum of sorts, they all fall in line — no “bless you’s” necessary. Sneeze If You’re With Me Researchers from Swansea University and ...read more

Closeup look at Hurricane Irma’s eye, acquired by the GOES-16 weather satellite. (Source: RAMMB/CIRA) As I’m writing this on Wednesday morning, the eye of Hurricane Irma — a “potentially catastrophic” Category 5 storm – has passed over the islands of Barbuda, Saint Barthelemy and Saint Martin, and was shortly headed for the Virgin Islands. I shudder to think what has been happening on the ground with the storm’s maximum sustained win ...read more

Photo: flickr/Kevin Dooley There are many ways to cope with being blind, from using a cane to adopting a seeing-eye dog. But some blind people have gone a step further and developed the skill of using mouth clicks to echolocate, in the same way that bats navigate in the dark. Here, a group of engineers studied exactly how these ‘human bats’ — or ‘bat men’, if you will — echolocate. They found that the clicks are very short (~3 milliseconds) and the freq ...read more

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Zika virus (green) preferentially targets the stem cells (red) in a human glioblastoma. (Credit: Zhu et al., 2017) Zika has largely faded from the news cycle as efforts to control the disease have taken hold and the number of new cases has dropped. Now, it’s back, not as a pending epidemic, but as a potential treatment for brain cancer. Researchers from the Washington University School of Medicine and the University of California, Santa Barbara have conducted preliminary tests with the v ...read more

The Grasburg Mine in Indonesia. The pit itself is 4-km and sits near the top of Pancake Jaya. Small glaciers can be seen to the right of the mine. NASA Earth Observatory. Who owns the land beneath your feet? That might seem like a simple question, but what about the stuff beneath the surface? The rocks and minerals … and resources? Who owns those items of potential value and who gets the profits if that resource is exploited? These questions have existed for centuries and are still being ...read more

Smoke from the fires appears to have blown all the way across North America and more than half way across the Atlantic Smoke and heat from raging wildfires in Idaho and Montana are seen in this animation of satellite images acquired on Sept. 3, 2017. (Source: RAMMB/CIRA) As of this afternoon, 77 large fires are burning across 1.4 million acres in eight western U.S. states. That’s an area more than three times the size of Houston. The burning is part of a long-term trend of incr ...read more