Though peak season for sharks is over, some individuals still linger near the coast. Calm waters near the Cape Cod coast recently erupted in a display of predatory violence as a great white shark tore into a seal, and an onlooker on a boat captured the attack on video. PeakContinue Reading
Fossils of the world’s largest ammonites can be found on either side of the Atlantic. About 80 million years ago, human-size sea creatures with tentacle-like arms and coiled shells up to 6 feet (1.8 meters) wide glided through the Atlantic Ocean, a new study reveals. These creatures were the world’sContinue Reading
The tropical fungus made it to sea for two big reasons. Scientists have finally found the cause of a mysterious brain-invading tropical fungus outbreak that killed more than 40 dolphins and porpoises in the Pacific Northwest: humans. Between 1997 and 2016, scientists found 42 dead dolphins in the Salish SeaContinue Reading
An angel shark has never been filmed in this part of the world before. A young shark glides to the ocean floor, slaps the sandy ground with its head and disappears in a cloud of dust. A pause. A small fish swims by. And then… SNAP! The fish doesn’t knowContinue Reading
It was nearly 30 feet long. About 90 million years ago, a gigantic apex predator — a meat-eating dinosaur with serrated shark-like teeth — prowled what is now Uzbekistan, according to a new study of the behemoth’s jawbone. The 26-foot-long (8 meters) beast weighed 2,200 pounds (1,000 kilograms), making itContinue Reading
Ordinary human dilemmas are tougher to solve than the most difficult problems of physics and mathematics\ As a boy, I was a rock hound, and I learned how to identify minerals with the Mohs hardness test, named after the mineralogist who invented it. You take a known specimen, like quartz,Continue Reading
When Decio Eizirik began treating patients with type 1 diabetes in the 1980s, he was pretty sure about what was behind the disease: an immune system gone haywire. People with the illness lacked insulin, a crucial hormone, because beta cells in the pancreas—the body’s insulin factories—were being attacked and destroyedContinue Reading
Self-targeting antibodies attack part of the immune system that plays a key role in fighting infection Antibodies that turn against elements of our own immune defences are a key driver of severe illness and death following SARS-CoV-2 infection in some people, according to a large international study. These rogue antibodies,Continue Reading
Spend any time around a baby and you’re likely to hear some babbling. Now, new research shows baby bats can do it too. A paper published on Thursday in the latest issue of the journal Science finds similarities between the babbling of human infants and the babbling of the greaterContinue Reading
To get an idea of why scientists would want to study daddy longlegs, try playing a game of “One of these things is not like the others” the next time you see one. “If you watch a daddy longlegs move, it will effectively walk on just three pairs of itsContinue Reading