In the thick Ituri Rainforest of the Democratic Republic of Congo wanders a rarely seen okapi. It resembles a zebra, albeit with proportions that got slightly wonky somewhere down the line. Half its body is covered in rippling white stripes that can melt into its dim surroundings under the right lighting, while the rest of it is covered in dark, purplish fur, oily enough that water slides right off it.The little we do know about the okapi comes from a field study conducted in the 1980s using rad ...read more

As a scientist, lab work can sometimes get monotonous. But in 2017, while a Ph.D. student of paleobiology at the University of Bristol in the U.K., I heard a gleeful exclamation from across the room. Kirsty Penkman, head of the North East Amino Acid Racemization lab at the University of York, had just read the data printed off the chromatograms and was practically jumping up and down.The instrument had detected telltale signatures of ancient amino acids in eggshell. Amino acids are the building ...read more

At this point, there’s little doubt Neanderthals ate each other, even if the practice doesn't appear to have been widespread. Bones found in Belgium, France, Spain, and Croatia bear the clear signature of cannibalism — riddled with butchery marks and cracked open for marrow extraction, these remains were found strewn about with apparent disregard for proper funerals. But a deeper and more controversial question remains: Why?As French archaeologists Alban Defleur and Emmanuel Desclaux wrote i ...read more

Anyone who’s had a biology class probably remembers how important proteins are. Often referred to as the workhorses of the body, proteins exist in every single cell. What do they do? It’s probably fairer to ask: What don’t they do? They function as a building material within cells; they copy DNA, and they carry messages and oxygen to various parts of the body. In short, protein makes us us: Without it, the structure and function of our tissues and organs simply wouldn’t exist — and nei ...read more

The James Webb Space Telescope, or JWST for short, is one of the most advanced telescopes ever built. Planning for JWST began over 25 years ago, and construction efforts spanned over a decade. It was launched into space on Dec. 25, 2021, and within a month arrived at its final destination: 930,000 miles away from Earth. Its location in space allows it a relatively unobstructed view of the universe.The telescope design was a global effort, led by NASA, and intended to push the boundaries of astro ...read more

Why does a creature that hunts at night need eyes that weigh about twenty times its head? The question sounds like the set-up to a bad joke or a riddle from a sphinx. But it hooked biologist Anders Garm from the University of Copenhagen’s Department of Biology after his colleague Michael Bok at Lund University showed him a video of the Vanadis bristle worm.The Vanadis Worm: A Marvel of Marine BiologyVanadis bristle worms, also known as polychaetes, live on the Italian island of Ponza, just wes ...read more