Category Archives: News & Archives

Study uncovers genetic switches that control process of whole-body regeneration

When it comes to regeneration, some animals are capable of amazing feats -- if you cut the leg off a salamander, it will grow back. When threatened, some geckos drop their tails as a distraction, and regrow them later. Other animals take the process even further. Planarian worms, jellyfish, and sea anemones can actually regenerate…

With single gene insertion, blind mice regain sight

It was surprisingly simple. University of California, Berkeley, scientists inserted a gene for a green-light receptor into the eyes of blind mice and, a month later, they were navigating around obstacles as easily as mice with no vision problems. They were able to see motion, brightness changes over a thousandfold range and fine detail on…

Where have all the butterflies gone? Monarch butterflies all but vanish in Idaho and the West

Something catastrophically wrong happened in 2018 to monarch butterflies. Idaho wildlife biologist Ross Winton spent years working with monarch butterflies. With the help of volunteers, he would carefully put a tiny tag the size of a paper hole punch on about 30 to 50 of the iconic insects each summer in the Magic Valley. Then…

Reforestation Drones Can Plant 100K Trees In An Hour

Sure, it’ll be great when a drone can drop off your Amazon Prime goodies or 7-Eleven snacks just minutes after you order them… but it’ll be even better when they help regrow millions of trees. That’s what U.K.-based BioCarbon Engineering has set out to do. The company has been developing a high-tech system that uses drones…

North America’s most endangered bird faces a new threat: feuding wildlife managers

North America’s most endangered bird, the grasshopper sparrow that inhabits Central Florida’s shrinking prairie, is facing a new threat: a feud among wildlife managers and scientists. In a letter to researchers last month, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service said it planned to shut down a Palm Beach County breeding program, the larger of only…

Susceptibility to Mental Illness May Have Helped Humans Adapt over the Millennia

Nearly one in five Americans currently suffers from a mental illness, and roughly half of us will be diagnosed with one at some point in our lives. Yet, these occurrences may have nothing to do with a genetic flaw or a traumatic event. Randolph Nesse, a professor of life sciences at Arizona State University, attributes…

Neanderthals walked upright just like the humans of today

Neanderthals are often depicted as having straight spines and poor posture. However, these prehistoric humans were more similar to us than many assume. University of Zurich researchers have shown that Neanderthals walked upright just like modern humans -- thanks to a virtual reconstruction of the pelvis and spine of a very well-preserved Neanderthal skeleton found…

The viceroy butterfly is a mimic, modeling its orange-and-black colors after the queen butterfly, a bug that tastes so disgusting predators have learned not to eat it or anything that looks like it, including viceroys. The apparent dependence of mimics on their models made biologists wonder if the fates of the two species are forever…

Continued sea-level rise on East and Gulf coasts detailed

Researchers at William & Mary's Virginia Institute of Marine Science have issued the first annual update of their sea level "report cards," marking 50 years of water-level observations from 1969 through 2018. These web-based charts -- available online at https://www.vims.edu/research/products/slrc/index.php -- project sea level out to the year 2050 based on an ongoing analysis of tide-gauge records…

Massive restoration of world’s forests would cancel out a decade of CO2 emissions, analysis suggests

Replenishing the world’s forests on a grand scale would suck enough carbon dioxide from the atmosphere to cancel out a decade of human emissions, according to an ambitious new study. Scientists have established there is room for an additional 1.2 trillion trees to grow in parks, woods and abandoned land across the planet. If such a goal were…