Iron Chompers
There aren’t many scenarios in which getting a good look at a bunch of Komodo dragon teeth ends well. The massive lizard’s mouth holds 60 serrated teeth, each up to…
Tiny Babies Who Can Smell Their Mother Recognize Faces Better
Babies experience a torrent of sensory information from the moment they are born. Knowing nothing about the world, they must learn to sort this deluge into categories of things—especially faces.…
Cave Fish Adolescence Means Sprouting Taste Buds in Weird Places
In eastern Mexico’s underground caverns and streams, a blind fish undergoes a peculiar adolescence: as it approaches maturity, taste buds begin to sprout under its chin and on top of…
Earthquakes May Forge Large Gold Nuggets
Solid gold bars stacked in bank vaults, plating on the summer’s Olympic medals, or even your own pieces of gold jewelry could owe their existence to earthquakes. The stress and…
Enlisting Microbes to Break Down ‘Forever Chemicals’
Scientists had previously demonstrated that a microbe called Acidimicrobium sp. strain A6 could break down carbon-fluorine bonds and completely degrade two of the most ubiquitous perfluoroalkyls. This microbe grows slowly,…
Birds Practice Singing in Their Sleep
Scientists had previously observed sleeping birds making movements that resembled lip-syncing. In earlier work, Mindlin and his colleagues implanted electrodes in two Zebra Finches; for a recent study in Chaos, they did the…
Space Shuttle
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Autism is Not a Disease – review
Despite some shortcomings, Jodie Hare’s book is an invaluable introduction to neurodiversity as a liberatory movement writes Beauty Dhlamini