For animals, inheriting more than the usual two copies of DNA is usually a very bad thing. It can happen when two sperm fertilize one egg, or when sexual cell division errs, leaving a sperm or an egg with double the approved payload. But for animal embryos, the result is usually the same: death. This [...]

… and thank you to the late, great Carl Woese, for my post about both — Archaea Are More Wonderful Than You Know — was a finalist in the Best Biology Post category in this year’s ScienceSeeker Blog Awards. If you are interested in learning more about Woese and Archaea, I encourage you to listen [...]

One of the most astonishing secrets in biology is this: every plant you see makes two different plants from the same genome. And, scientists recently reported, a single gene from an ancient, powerful lineage can make the difference. How can such a truth be so little known? In most land plants, including conifers and flowering [...]

Sea cucumbers aren’t all boring, trundling bags. Some of them swim — and glow. Though I opted to focus on creatures found at greater depths in my last post, one of the creatures observed by the Deepsea Challenger expedition in the New Britain Trench at a relatively shallow 1000 meters was just such a swimming [...]

The deepest, darkest, scariest place on the maps I loved pondering as a child was a crescent-shaped canyon in the western Pacific Ocean. It was called the Mariana Trench, and at the very, very bottom was the lowest point on Earth’s surface, the Challenger Deep. Its floor was seven terrifying miles down. What was down [...]

When an avalanche tears down a mountain, a revealing, if inadvertant, botanical experiment is sometimes begun. Though trees in the path of the angry snow are often ripped from their roots and deposited unceremoniously downhill, occasionally, overturned trees hold fast. Some roots of these partially upturned trees break and die of exposure. But some remain [...]

Anglerfish and comedy always seemed like a natural pairing. But it took internet humorist Ze Frank to bring the two together in one delicious dish. The natural history documentary parody series “True Facts About …” by Frank has become a minor youtube sensation. I’d seen one of his works before “True Facts About Land Snails” [...]

It’s no longer any secret that our skin and various mucusy surfaces are microbial zoos. So are our homes. What is less well known is what the individual species in those zoos look like and are doing. An early attempt to combat this ignorance has been cooked up by project frequent Sci Am guest blogger [...]

Last month, I was lucky enough to be asked by fellow Sci Am blogger Carin Bondar to compose and record a short spot about my first February nematode post (Nematode Roundworms Own This Place) for our new Sci Am feature Best of the Blogs. It challenging and somewhat scary work to condense it all down [...]

It’s often said that we know less about the bottom of our own ocean than we do about the surface of Mars. The governments of the world, and our government in particular, seem presently much less than enthusiastic about exploring the oceans of our own planet than in exploring other planets (ocean research seems to [...]