Justin Schmidt, a researcher from the Southwestern Biological Institute, was in a tree in Costa Rica in 1987. He was trying to climb closer to a black wasp nest hanging in the limbs of the tree to gather a few specimens for research, and he was shimmying over a branch that hung perilously over a…
Rod McCullom is a scientific writer based in Chicago who writes for Undark’s “Convictions” section. Undark, Scientific American, Nature, The Atlantic, and The Nation, among other journals, have published his work. This piece first appeared in Undark.The images are graphic and upsetting: Jahmel Leach, 16, lies on a hospital bed with a swollen face and…
In a frenzy of self-consciousness, the stethoscope was born in 1816. To avoid pressing his ear against a patient’s large chest, René Theophile Hyacinthe Laennec used a rolled-up sheet of paper on which to listen to an unwell woman’s Heart.Laennec pioneered the method of listening to sounds produced by internal organs (also known as auscultation),…
Until life-saving vaccinations are widely accessible, it will be challenging to bring the COVID-19 epidemic to a halt. That is a reality with which the world is increasingly confronted.However, vaccination for most of the world’s population remains a long way off for the time being, as scientists debate how to scale up vaccine manufacturing and…
Mosquito eggs planted in the Florida Keys are expected to hatch tens of thousands of genetically engineered mosquitoes this week, marking the first time such insects have been released in the wild in the United States . The eggs were provided in late April by Oxitec, a biotechnology company, as part of a federally permitted…
You’re still stressed if you’re reading this. Never fear: we’ve combed through the facts to find out what psychology has to say about discovering zen—and keeping it through adversity. Do you want to give meditation a shot? Improve your bathing habits? How do you stop fear in its tracks? Calm Month has begun. Mother Nature…
Lars Schmitz is a Scripps College associate professor of biology. Jonah Choiniere is a University of the Witwatersrand professor of dinosaur paleontology, and Roger Benson is a University of Oxford professor of Palaeobiology. This article first appeared on Conversation. Barn owls, bats, leopards, and various other species rely on their acute senses to survive and…
It’s food dogma: calories in, calories out. If you count more calories than you expend, you will gain weight; if you consume fewer calories, you will lose weight. Keeping track of it has never been simpler where you are with this calorie balance. Hundreds of diet-tracking applications, ranging from MyFitnessPal to Livestrong, provide dietary specifics…
Per year, the plant mating season impacts a more significant number of people. Spring is the exciting time of year when flowers bloom, trees leaf, and billions of pollen grains take off in the hopes of fertilizing another crop. However, all of these tiny plant sperms end up in our mouths, triggering an allergic response…
A Google AI offshoot has created an artificial intelligence (AI) network. DeepMind has taken a giant step forward in solving one of biology’s most challenging problems: identifying a protein’s three-dimensional structure from its amino-acid sequence. DeepMind’s software, dubbed AlphaFold, outperformed more than 100 other teams in the CASP (Critical Assessment of Structural Prediction) competition, short…