As far as housing goes, an egg is a pretty good place for a frog embryo. It offers physical protection and it keeps its inhabitant from drying out. But like many homes with great curb appeal, eggs aren’t always the ideal dwelling. For some frog eggs, being packed in a gelatinous mass, or “clutch,” can limit the supply of oxygen. Eggs can be swept away by floods or killed by fungal pathogens, and they make a nice lunch for predators like snakes and wasps. Faced with such peril, it might seem t...

Imagine if your sex was determined not at birth, but by the amount of food available in the early stages of your life. That if you had access to a wider range of choices you'd increase the chance of becoming one gender over the other. And that if you were well fed and ate when the slightest hunger struck, your likelihood of becoming female would increase. While not a possibility for humans, this does appear to be the case for a particular species of fish that is – and has been – imperiling...

Plants, like other organisms, are facing multiple mechanical constraints generated both in their tissues and by the surrounding environments. They need to sense and adapt to these forces throughout their lifetimes. To do so, different mechanisms devoted to force transduction have emerged. Here we focus on fascinating proteins: the mechanosensitive (MS) channels. Mechanosensing in plants has been described for centuries but the molecular identification of MS channels occurred only recently All o...

It has long been suspected that spiders are one of the most important groups of predators of insects. Zoologists at the University of Basel and Lund University in Sweden have now shown just how true this is – spiders kill astronomical numbers of insects on a global scale. The scientific journal The Science of Nature has published the results. With more than 45,000 species and a population density of up to 1,000 individuals per square meter, spiders are one of the world’s most species-rich a...

Even though it is hotter than the surface of the Sun, the crystallized iron core of the Earth remains solid. A new study from KTH Royal Institute of Technology may finally settle a longstanding debate over how that’s possible, as well as why seismic waves travel at higher speeds between the planet’s poles than through the equator. Spinning within Earth’s molten core is a crystal ball – actually a mass formation of almost pure crystallized iron – nearly the size of the moon. Unde...

Pulling strings to obtain food is an experiment often used to test the intelligence of apes and birds, but it is the first time this technique has been discovered in an insect. Moreover the cultural spread of such a technique from a single informed individual has also been described for the first time in an invertebrate animal. The results, published in PLOS Biology,  show that rare innovator bees were able to solve the problem of pulling the string to reach a sugar water reward by themsel...

Advance in biomedical imaging: The Biocenter of the University of Würzburg in close collaboration with the University of Copenhagen has developed an alternative approach to fluorescent tagging of proteins. The new probes are practicable and compatible with high-resolution microscopic procedures. Fluorescence microscopy visualizes the molecular elements of cells. Proteins of nerve cells, for instance, can be labelled using probes which are subsequently excited with light to fluoresce. In the e...

A research team at the University of Tokyo has assessed the connection between slow earthquakes and huge megathrust earthquakes that occur at plate boundaries shared by the two types of quakes. The team has evaluated three functions that slow earthquakes may serve in relation to giant quakes by reviewing aggregate studies in the nascent research area of slow earthquakes. Careful and precise monitoring of slow earthquakes, characterized by the slow slip behavior of geological faults compared to t...

A popular belief that there is a higher number of births around the full moon has been shown to be true for dairy cows by a group of University of Tokyo researchers. Previous studies have found conflicting evidence on the moon cycle affecting the timing of human births and many researchers remain unconvinced that the moon influences human births. Associate Professor Tomohiro Yonezawa of the Graduate School of Agriculture and Life Sciences explains that the results may have varied because “...

Variation in butterfly eggs is driven by female promiscuity Butterfly micropyles The eggs of some butterfly and moth species vary to give females control over the paternity of their offspring, according to new research published today. The new study reveals for the first time that the number and location of micropyles (small openings in the outer surface of a female insect’s eggs which allow sperm to enter) are driven by a degree of female promiscuity. The researchers behind the study, ba...