Biology News

Sep 26, 2017 by News Staff

The Gram-negative bacterium Vibrio cholerae (causative agent of cholera) is armed with a nano-speargun, which it uses to combat unwelcome competitors. University of Basel Professor Marek Basler and his colleagues from Switzerland and Germany have now gained insights into the construction, mode of action and recycling of this bacterial weapon. The structure of T6SS during contraction. Image credit: University of Basel, Biozentrum. Vibrio cholerae’s...

Sep 26, 2017 by News Staff

A team of spider experts and students from the University of Vermont has discovered and described 15 new species of the spider genus Spintharus from the...

Sep 25, 2017 by News Staff

A team of researchers at the University of Exeter, UK, studied how Trinidadian guppies (Poecilia reticulata) behaved in various situations and found complex...

Sep 21, 2017 by News Staff

Cassiopea jellyfish, a genus of true jellyfish found throughout the tropics in shallow ocean waters and mudflats, exhibit reversible behavioral quiescence...

Sep 20, 2017 by News Staff

Exceptionally large individuals of Beelzebufo ampinga, an extinct species of frog that lived in Madagascar during the Late Cretaceous epoch, about 68 million...

Sep 19, 2017 by News Staff

A research team led by Boston University scientists has identified a new type of lung cell that is implicated in the body’s immune defense against pneumonia-causing...

Sep 18, 2017 by News Staff

Two bird species that look the same, but have songs so different they can’t recognize each other, should be considered distinct species, according to...

Sep 13, 2017 by News Staff

A team of researchers at New York University has found that the nucleus of a human cell exhibits subtle, but measurable, fast shape fluctuations, and that...

Sep 12, 2017 by News Staff

Australian magpies ‘dunk’ their food in water before eating, a process that appears to be watched and ‘copied’ by their offspring, say University...

Sep 5, 2017 by News Staff

Olfaction (sense of smell) is a key factor in long-distance oceanic navigation in birds, according to a new University of Oxford-led study. Cory’s shearwaters...

Aug 30, 2017 by News Staff

A team of researchers in the UK created a series of puzzles baited with food, and found smooth-coated otters (Lutrogale perspicillata) watched and copied...

Aug 28, 2017 by News Staff

A new survey of DNA fragments circulating in human blood suggests the bacteria and viruses living within us are vastly more diverse than previously known....

Aug 28, 2017 by Natali Anderson

Herpetologists are claiming they have discovered a new species of purple frog living in the Western Ghats, India. The Bhupathy’s purple frog (Nasikabatrachus...

Aug 24, 2017 by News Staff

Chimpanzees (Pan troglodytes) can understand the popular game in which ‘paper’ beats ‘rock,’ ‘rock’ beats ‘scissors,’ and ‘scissors’...

Aug 14, 2017 by News Staff

A newly discovered species of fruit bat — previously nicknamed ‘Yoda bat’ — has an official name: the happy tube-nosed fruit bat (Nyctimene...

Aug 4, 2017 by News Staff

In a new study published in the journal PLoS ONE, a team of U.S. researchers examined the diets of three different dolphin species (the common bottlenose...

Aug 2, 2017 by News Staff

An international team of researchers at the eFLOWER project has reconstructed what the Earth’s ancestral angiosperm flowers might have looked like. 3D...

Jul 31, 2017 by News Staff

A team of scientists from Northwestern University, the Field Museum of Natural History and Phoenix Zoo has discovered and described a distinctive new subspecies...

Jul 28, 2017 by News Staff

An international team of arachnologists has discovered and described three new species of Neotropical ‘club-tailed’ scorpions: Ischnotelson peruassu...

Jul 28, 2017 by News Staff

According to new research published in the journal eLife, the dragonfly brain can perform visual tasks that were previously associated only with mammals. Wiederman...