Every summer, the same folk wisdom resurfaces: triangular head, bad; round head, fine. Vertical pupils, run; round pupils, relax. It's tidy advice and it's dangerously unreliable. Herpetologists have been trying to kill this myth for decades, because acting on it... Continue Reading →
Jumping spiders rapidly move their eyes and twitch during rest, suggesting they have visual dreams, never before observed in arachnids. An international team of researchers studied the retinal movements of baby jumping spiders as they slept and found they coincided... Continue Reading →
Johns Hopkins University researchers discovered precisely how spiders build webs by using night vision and artificial intelligence to track and record every movement of all eight legs as spiders worked in the dark. Their creation of a web-building playbook or... Continue Reading →
An evolutionary biologist from the University of Bonn brought a new octopus species to light from depths of more than 4,000 meters in the North Pacific Ocean. The sensational discovery made waves in the media a few years ago. Researchers... Continue Reading →
Octopuses have captured the human imagination for centuries, inspiring sagas of sea monsters from Scandinavian kraken legends to TV's "Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea" and, most recently, Netflix's less-threatening "My Octopus Teacher." With their eight suction-cup covered tentacles,... Continue Reading →
A University of Saskatchewan (USask) research team has uncovered how bats can carry the Middle East respiratory syndrome (MERS) coronavirus without getting sick -- research that could shed light on how coronaviruses make the jump to humans and other animals.... Continue Reading →
An international team of evolutionary biologists and paleontologists have reconstructed the evolution of the avian brain using a massive dataset of brain volumes from dinosaurs, extinct birds like Archaeopteryx and the Great Auk, and modern birds. The study, published online in the... Continue Reading →
Researchers at Tel Aviv University (TAU) have discovered a non-oxygen breathing animal. The unexpected finding changes one of science's assumptions about the animal world. A study on the finding was published on February 25 in the Proceedings of the National Academy... Continue Reading →
The type of salamander called axolotl, with its frilly gills and widely spaced eyes, looks like an alien and has other-worldly powers of regeneration. Lose a limb, part of the heart or even a large portion of its brain? No... Continue Reading →