There’s a food fight in your guts. Not the Tater-Tot-chucking, spoonful-of-mashed potato-flinging, melee-in-the-cafeteria type of food fight. Rather, your intestines are the site of an ancient and complex war between your own cells and trillions of bacteria—a war over what happens to your food as it moves through your body. Some of the bacteria form [...]

Editor’s Note: William Gilly, a professor of cell and developmental biology and marine and organismal biology at Stanford University, is traveling with a group of students on board the Don José in the Sea of Cortez. They will monitor and track Humboldt squid and sperm whales in their watery habitats. This is the group’s eighth [...]

Why, oh why, would I order a plastic fork, costing $89 (on-sale), 5 months before its scheduled release? Because it promises to help me control my eating speed, which, I am now convinced, is indeed critical to controlling obesity and diabetes.

With a juicy insect dinner perched on a leaf above the water, what is a hungry little archer fish down below to do? Knock it down with a super-powered, super-precise jet of water that packs six times the power the fish could generate with its own muscles, according to new findings published online October 24 [...]

About a century ago, a new craze gripped the country’s health conscious: mastication. Chewing each bite of food precisely 32 times would help people control how much food they consumed—turning them from gluttons to epicureans—according to the early 20th-century dietician Horace Fletcher. Among his many ardent adherents the tactic became known as "Fletcherizing." And Fletcher, [...]

Deep in the Silurian seas, some 420 million years ago, a strange structure had just emerged in the bodies of many new vertebrates. Some fish began developing a defined upper and lower jaw that allowed them to devour large and hard-shelled organisms. Today more than 99 percent of vertebrates have these handy eating apparati. But [...]

From time to time, politicians and other rulers-of-men like to categorize the natural world not according to biology, but rather for convenience or monetary gain. Take, for example, the tomato. The progenitor of ketchup is a seed-bearing structure that grows from the flowering part of a plant. It is, by definition, a fruit. In 1893, [...]

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about wildlife conservation psychology, especially in light of last month’s TEDxDeExtinction event. How do we convince human animals that other animals are worth protecting? Modern, ethical zoos have long made claims about the effectiveness of zoo visits and their in-house educational programs on learning outcomes and on conservation attitudes. [...]

The Giant Anteater, Myrmecophaga tridactyla, only eats ants and termites, as its name suggests. Since the giant anteater and its evolutionary ancestors have been feasting on ants and termites for nearly 60 million years, a researcher named Kent Redford hypothesized that, over time, ants and termites may have evolved various defenses to avoid predation. In [...]

Stories of pepper spray have been all over the news lately. On Fox News, Megyn Kelly wondered what all the fuss about this “food product” was, and while pepper spray is no vegetable, the compound that makes pepper spray into a weapon at 2-5.3 million Scoville units, is indeed the same compound that many humans [...]

My grandmother was born in Sobrance, in what was then called Czechoslovakia on November 5, 1930. She grew up in ten kilometers away, in a small town called Nagy-Muzsaly. Her father’s family were landowners, something that was very rare for Jewish families at the time, and they used that land to produce wine. My grandmother’s [...]

It’s amazing how much you can learn about an animal’s mind by a simply watching it. Video 1: Gratuitous video of octopuses never hurt anyone. Maybe this will sate the Pharyngulites.