In 1928, a biologist named Ditlef Rustad caught an unusual fish off the coast of Bouvet Island in the Antarctic. The “white crocodile fish,” as Rustad named it, had large eyes, a long toothed snout and diaphanous fins stretched across fans of slender quills. It was scaleless and eerily pale, as white as snow in [...]

Medea, the sensual and ravishing sorceress of Greek mythology, enters the royal chambers. Knife in hand, she commands the servants to bring her an old sheep. Plunging her knife into the animal, she bleeds it nearly dry and then casts the limp sheep into a bubbling cauldron.  Its feeble bleating is soon replaced by the [...]

Oil that cleans water. Pacemakers powered by our own blood. Drones that can spy on you in your backyard. Scientific American has chosen these and seven other innovations as the leading developments in 2012 that could ultimately change our world. The radical ideas are not pie-in-the-sky notions but practical breakthroughs that have been proved or [...]

More than 382,000 people with kidney disease in the U.S. are on dialysis, a painful procedure that can wreak havoc on blood vessels due to constant jabs from large needles. During dialysis, a patient’s blood is filtered out of their body and through a machine that performs the work normally done by the kidneys. Patients [...]

Hitchhiking on the surface of a boat hull can be a rough ride, but barnacles seem to do it with ease. How are they able to hang on so tightly? Researchers have been studying the composition of super-strong barnacle glue for years, and a new analysis of the cement reveals that it has many of [...]

Queen Victoria and many of her descendants carried what was once called "Royal disease"—now known as hemophilia, a blood clotting disorder. But it has remained unknown precisely what variety of the disease afflicted the family and how many deceased relatives may have had the inherited disease. Research published online today in Science sheds some light [...]

Back in 1991, fine artist Marc Quinn, (one of what’s now known as the Young British Artists) started the greatest self-portrait project of all time. Self (blood head) is a self portrait that has been cast and frozen, made out of 4.5 litres of Quinn’s own blood, reportedly extracted over a period of about 5 [...]