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Sexual cannibalism is a remarkably common mating habit among insects and arachnids — perhaps most famously, black widow spiders and preying mantises devour males after mating with them. There are a number of competing theories about why such a seemingly harmful trait would evolve. And now we've discovered one spider who evolved a way to escape sexual cannibalism, though not without sacrifice. The male Nephilengys malabarensis saves his head by detaching another part of his anatomy — the penis. Well, actually it's a palp, not a penis, but I digress. More »
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With a swarming locust consuming its own bodyweight in food every day, the many-tonne swarms can utterly destroy a farmer's livelihood. But why is it that they seem to target farms that already aren't doing well? More »
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Proving once again they deserve the title "most metal of all living animals", Boa constrictors know when to stop squeezing around their prey — because they can feel their victim's heart stop. The constricting method of subduing prey is a relatively costly one in terms of energy, so it behooves snakes to know as soon as possible when to stop. More »
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Researchers at the University of Texas Health Science Center at Houston have proved that brains are better at learning at certain periods than others, thanks to analyzing the brains of sea snails. More »
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Stress makes many of us miserable — but it can also kill you. Besides just causing horrible anxiety and depression, the physiological basis for stress has also been linked to diseases as varied as obesity, postpartum depression, Cushing's syndrome, epilepsy, and osteoporosis. But what if we could just turn your brain's stress response off? More »
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Science has confirmed that wasps are nature's biggest trolls, adapting to deal with aggressive ants by taunting them. More »
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Plants use photosynthesis to turn sunlight into energy every single day. This ability appeared to be completely unknown in the animal kingdom, leaving the living solar battery that is Superman as the only animal to ever harness the sun's rays for power. But now we've discovered that a type of hornet is doing its own homegrown photosynthesis, absorbing sunlight and turning it into useful energy. It's the first animal we've ever discovered that possesses this ability...and we might be able to harness our own version of it for alternative energy. More »
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Many members of the earwig insect family have two penises, but you'd never know it from observing their sex lives. Most earwigs are exclusively "right-penised", which raises an important question: why bother having two penises if you only use one? More »
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Xenicibis xympithecus is an extinct flightless ibis from Jamaica that had an incredibly rare adaptation — it used its wings as clubs. More »
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Due to advancements in satellite tracking, the incredible migratory routes of the leatherback turtle have finally been mapped in detail — including a straight 7,563km (4,699 mile) trip from Africa to South America. More »
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A tiny sea snail known as the clusterwink snail has one of the strangest abilities in the animal kingdom. The snail can create a ghostly green light, then use its shell to scatter the light beam all over its shell. More »
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Human scientists are still trying to figure out how to turn cloaking devices into a reality, but the pint-sized Hawaiian bobtail squid long ago learned how to channel its inner Klingon. See its natural cloaking device in action inside. More »
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White ibises have experienced a huge drop in their reproductive rate, and mercury contamination was a prime suspect. But nobody expected pollution to alter the birds' sexual preference, as the male ibises were actually nesting with each other. More »
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Nearly a mile underground, there's an entire ecosystem carving out a rather alien existence in the deepest layer of Earth's crust. These bacteria are totally unlike their brethren nearer the surface, and there might be even stranger bacteria further down. More »
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A species of bush cricket is in possession of nature's most ridiculously over-sized testicles - these balls are 14% of the bug's body mass. The crickets need all that extra sperm storage just to ensure they'll have offspring. More »
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Humans aren't the only organisms that possess taboos about inbreeding, although for plants it's not cultural, it's genetic. in order to keep plants from producing weaker offspring, they have evolved many genes to ensure they don't mate with themselves. More »
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We all know how important carbon and oxygen are in the development of life on Earth. But millions of years ago, there wouldn't have been enough oxygen for animals to exist. What changed? More »
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LEDs are, on small scales, the cheapest, most reliable, and most technologically powerful light sources out there. But their true potential is finally being unleashed. A new generation of LEDs can go anywhere - even into your body. More »
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The platypus is Earth's weirdest creature - famously, 19th century biologists thought it was a hoax when first shown one - and its venom is a hodgepodge too, containing toxins borrowed from snakes, spiders, and even starfish. More »
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This ersatz lung, no bigger than a multivitamin, could represent a new pharmaceutical testing method. More »
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The embryos of a male and female twin can sometimes fuse into a single fetus with both male and female sexual organs. Now an imaginative biologist has figured out how this could lead to conceiving a son without a father. More »
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A newly discovered penguin fossil reveals a bird twice as big as an Emperor penguin and with colors radically different from the familiar black and white features all modern penguins share...but this Water King was already the perfect swimming bird. More »
]]> http://io9.com/index.php?op=postcommentfeed&postId=5652308&view=rss&microfeed=true Research published in the Journal of Experimental Biology has shown that flying fish are every bit as good at gliding as birds. The fish are able glide for more than 40 seconds, covering distances of 400 meters at near 70 km/h. So how do you test how good these fish are at gliding? Dry them, stuff them, mount them on a six-axis sensor, and stick them in a wind tunnel. At least, that's what Haecheon Choi and Hyungmin Park of Seoul National University did. They found that the fish were extremely aerodynamic, and by adjusting their fins, angle, and distance from the water, they were able to glide extremely well, and then collapse their fins for swimming. Flying snakes and squirrels were sadly ignored in the experiments. More »
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All species on the road to extinction reach a critical moment when their overall chances of survival drop to zero. We might be able to identify when this moment approaches, allowing us to save species on the brink of extinction. More »
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The origin of life on Earth poses a basic paradox: basic biochemicals like nucleotides and catalysts like proteins need each other to exist, but one must have come first. We may now have an answer, thanks to the transition metals. More »
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Biology faces a basic paradox - life requires DNA to function, yet DNA evolved after life emerged. Now a study of modern bacteria has revealed what DNA's progenitor might be. More »
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It's one of the most basic problems facing the study of sexual reproduction: sperm are just too tiny, too numerous, and too similar-looking to be studied individually. But that's changing — thanks to glow in the dark sperm. More »
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Drakozoon was a blob-like creature that lived in the oceans during the Silurian Period, some 425 million years ago. It was known from only a single fossil - until researchers sliced and diced their specimen to create this 3D model. More »
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Any part of the genome that doesn't contain genes is called "junk DNA", repeated bits of instructions that were thought to serve no purpose. But now we've discovered that junk DNA is actually vital to the survival of the genes. More »
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The sex genes are some of the fastest-changing throughout animal genomes. But one particular sex gene is so perfectly evolved that it hasn't changed in 600 million years: the sperm gene. More »
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As humans implant mechanical devices into their bodies - starting with relatively simple devices like pacemakers - computer viruses become just as dangerous as their biological equivalent. One man made himself a guinea pig to test this potential threat. More »
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Mycobacterium vaccae bacteria are already known to decrease anxiety, but it might have even more dramatic properties. Recent studies on mice suggest the bacteria, commonly found in the soils of people's gardens, also increases intelligence and the ability to learn. More »
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The microscopic world of the single, living cell mirrors our own in so many ways: cells are essentially autonomous, sentient and ingenious. In the lives of single cells we can perceive the roots of our own intelligence. More »
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Just because plants are at the bottom of the food chain doesn't mean they're helpless. Scientists have discovered that plants have evolved multiple lines of defense against their predators, giving them a surprising amount of control of their surrounding ecosystem. More »
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To anyone who doubts modern science still pursues essential lines of inquiry into the most pressing questions of our time, we present this resounding rebuttal. Two fearless truth seekers used lasers to figure out why fruit fly penises look weird. More »
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Scientists have discovered that bees use more than their stingers to defeat potential attackers. Apparently, they're perfectly prepared to mummify enemies who can't be stung. More »
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Antibiotic-resistant staph bugs are a terrifying prospect: a potentially deadly skin infection that resists most traditional treatments. But now, researchers think they've found a weapon against MRSA: hitting it with low-temperature plasma. More »
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A group of Amazonian ants have evolved an extremely unusual social system: They are all female and reproduce via cloning. Though their sexual organs have virtually disappeared, they have also gained some extraordinary abilities. More »
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This adorable little ant can be trusted to carry quite a lot on its back in the interest of the common good. In that way, it's surprisingly similar to the cells of your immune system, as researchers from MIT and Harvard revealed earlier this month. They've found a way to hook synthetic patches to the surface of B and T cells — and to control the movements of those cells with magnetic fields. Armed with these so-called "backpacks," lymphocytes can now identify growing tumors and infections, as well as personally (or cellularly?) deliver treatments to ailing cells. This could be the first crest of a wave of revolutionary new school supplies in the world of tissue engineering. More »
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This week, scientists at Caltech released the first ever multi-input, "plug-and-play" synthetic RNA devices. You may have heard of Boolean logic gates in computer science, but now synthetic biologists are taking them one step further, creating organic computer programs that control the activity inside your cells. Maung Nyan Win and Christina D. Smolke have formed and tested in vivo one such system — and they say it's ready to work in mammals. More »
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