What a bee! Lost to the science since 1981, the world’s largest bee (Megachile pluto) has been rediscovered on an island in Indonesia.
Its non-scientific name is Wallace’s giant bee, named for British entomologist Alfred Russel Wallace, co-discoverer of the theory of evolution by natural selection … and giant it is! With a 2.5 inch wingspan, this beast of a bee towers over its more familiar brethren. The female is pictured here — males of the species are smaller, someth ...read more
(Inside Science) -- Lemons are known for their face-puckering sour taste. Now scientists have uncovered the mysterious genes behind this acidity, new findings that could help farmers breed sweeter oranges, lemons, limes, grapefruit and other citrus fruit.
The oldest known reference to citruses dates back to roughly 2200 B.C., when tributes of mandarins and pomelos wrapped in ornamental silks were presented to the imperial court of Yu the Great in China. More citruses are now ...read more
(Inside Science) -- According to Senior U.S. District Judge Jed Rakoff, at the Southern District of New York, "Forensic science continues to be routinely admitted by the courts, both state and federal, even though considerable doubts have now been raised as to whether forensic science really is science at all, and whether it is reliable and valid.”
As part of the National Commission on Forensic Science, Rakoff contributed to a 2016 report noting some serious flaws in the way the justice s ...read more
In January 2016, Cathryn Townsend set out to live among “the loveless people.” So named by anthropologist Colin Turnbull, the Ik are a tribe of some 11,600 hunter-gatherers and subsistence farmers living in an arid and harsh mountainous region of Uganda.
Turnbull studied the Ik in the 1960s and famously characterized them as “inhospitable and generally mean” in his book The Mountain People. He documented how young children were abandoned to starve and how people would sn ...read more
Few things in life are as unpredictable as natural disasters. Many times, they strike with little-to-no warning and even if there is advanced knowledge of an impending disaster, people are rarely fully prepared to deal with the event or potential consequences. As population rises and metropolitan areas grow, the risk associated with a massive natural disaster rise with them and that's something that has investors worried. Last week, Warren Buffett discusses his concerns about how the economi ...read more
A red-tailed guenon in the Bwindi Impenetrable Forest region of Uganda nibbles on a jam-covered rope. It’s sweet treat with purpose — the rope will later be collected, the saliva left behind analyzed. This clever, non-invasive sampling technique was developed a few years ago by researchers at the University of California, Davis.
Data from these samples helps scientists track the emergence of zoononic diseases — pathogens in wildlife that could spread to humans. Before the jam ...read more
The Journal of Health Psychology has just published an extraordinary pair of papers that call for a new inquiry into a 30-year old case of probable scientific fraud.
According to Anthony J. Pelosi, author of the main paper, the case was "one of the worst scientific scandals of all time" and yet has never been formally investigated. The journal's editor, David F. Marks, agrees and, in an editorial, also calls for the retraction or correction of up to 61 papers.
The scandal in question is on ...read more
What a difference a year makes.
After a shocking dearth of snow last year, the Sierra Nevada mountains of California and Nevada truly have been getting plastered, helping to build up the snowpack that millions of people depend on for water.
Other parts of the western United States have also benefited from a bounty of precipitation that has eased drought conditions. But does this herald a change in long-term fortunes in the region? Read on to the end for insights a ...read more
(Inside Science) -- In 2012 and 2013, Bill Bateman, a zoologist based in Perth, Australia, began to notice something interesting about how animals were navigating the bush: When mining companies created small paths through the previously tangled environment to install seismic lines, animals started preferentially using those trails to move from one place to another.
And animal ingenuity wasn’t confined to walking on beaten paths.
“The more we looked, the more evidence there was t ...read more
Scientists keep prying into the sex lives of Neanderthals. In the past decade, they’ve revealed that Neanderthals got busy with both Homo sapiens and Denisovans, another lineage of now-extinct humans.
But there’s more: Mounting evidence suggests Neanderthals also had a habit of inbreeding, or conceiving with close relatives. Several studies have now reported this based on genetic patterns and bone abnormalities thought to result from intra-family flings.
First, let’s review t ...read more
