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 [...]

Blogger’s note: I’m still away from the blog for a few weeks. In the meantime, here is another post from the Artful Amoeba archive. It originally appeared on October 4, 2010. I recently read a delightful leaflet on water bears which gave me a whole new appreciate for their anatomy (some of them have armored [...]

Amanita mushrooms — like all creatures — rot, but most of them can’t rot other things. The fact that they don’t rot other things is not news to biologists, who have long known that many, if not most, fungi have become professional partners with trees, plants, or algae. The fact that they can’t rot other [...]

What happens when squirrels invade the tundra? Well, in one case, they got chubby, fluffy, flappy-tailed, and occasionally kinda cranky, sorta like a hydrophobic alpine beaver. Here in the Rockies, they’re called yellow-bellied marmots. Until recently, I’d rarely seen one and had never heard one call. They seemed to maintain a strict code of silence [...]

It’s about time to get back to your regularly scheduled blogging. But before we leave the Southern Hemisphere entirely, let’s have one last Best of the Rest Post. It’s an assortment of stuff that didn’t fit elsewhere in my austral detour, but is nonetheless cool. I don’t know if this is the legendary New Zealand [...]

Ernst Haeckel had spent an unhappy year practicing medicine when his parents finally consented to pay for a year of scientific study and travel in Italy. It was 1859, and he was 25. He had discovered a passion for biology and a talent for art during his college years, but his parents had pushed for [...]

In 1977, scientists and the world were shocked to discover the first deep-sea hydrothermal vent community at the Galapagos Rift in the eastern Pacific (see a great story on this at NPR here). At this site, chimneys spewing black, superheated and chemically supersaturated water towered over fields of blood-red tube worms encased in white sheaths, [...]

Last week as I sat in a beach-side open-air restaurant in southwest Florida, I started coughing. Hard. I couldn’t stop, and I apologized repeatedly. Yet I hadn’t felt sick before, and the suddenness of the coughing was very weird. Our waitress came by as I was expressing my bewilderment. She said, “Oh, it’s the red [...]

Hidden away in calm, sheltered coastal waters is a remarkable little animal: a tiny transparent sheet of cells called a placozoan. Though composed of only a few thousand cells and no more than 25 micrometers thick (a bacterium is about 1 micromter thick), it’s an animal — the simplest we know of.
And hidden inside them, scientists found recently, may be a clue to the Cambrian Explosion

For years, ripples at the surface of the Dead Sea hinted there was something mysterious going on beneath its salt-laden waters. But in a lake where accidentally swallowing the water while diving could lead to near-instant asphyxiation, no one was in a hurry to find out what it might be. This year, some intrepid divers [...]

Magicians need to resort to trick props to pull a rabbit out of a hat. But we pulled DNA out of a banana with nothing more than a few household ingredients during a Scientific American Google Hangout on December 20. (See Scientific American Goes Bananas on December 20. No artifice or foolery was involved: just [...]

Editor’s note: Join the Hangout by visiting Scientific American’s Google Plus page at 1 p.m. Eastern on Thursday. That’s right. Using ordinary household items and a humble piece of fruit, we’re going to perform a seemingly magical feat of science while you watch on a Google Science Fair Hangout on December 20 at 1 p.m. [...]

Can you explain science with seven everyday items? We’re looking for some creative minds to say how a part of the human body works, or how a process occurs in the body, in two minutes or less. No fancy equipment is needed—a smartphone camera will do. Winners will be featured on the Scientific American web [...]

Who will win the first $50,000 Science in Action prize, sponsored by Scientific American? This award, offered as part of the 2012 Google Science Fair, will recognize a student project that addresses a social, environmental, ethical, health or welfare issue to make a practical difference to the lives of a group or community, and that [...]

“As any adult knows, there’s one thing that any kid can do better than any grown up: ask questions. In fact, many studies have actually shown how kids are born scientists. If you don’t believe me, watch a baby first accidentally knock something off her high chair and onto the floor. She’ll look at it [...]

Here’s a Belizean bug that doesn’t look like much: I’m serious. In the field the insect looked like so little I thought it merely debris in a disorganized spider’s web. I didn’t see the faint outline of a young assassin bug until the debris shuddered, ever so slightly. The dramatic contrast of the above image [...]

I was entranced by this image when it appeared today in my facebook stream: Captured by the talented Malaysian photographer Liew Wk, the photo shows a developmental asymmetry in size between the anterior median eyes of this Asian jumping spider. I do not know what caused this imbalance. Perhaps each side is a molt out of sync, [...]

Baba Brinkman “The Rap Guide to Evolution: Revised” Lit Fuse Records, 2011 This is an album that is, in its way, one long argument (in 14 tracks) that the theory of evolution is a useful lens through which to make sense of our world and our lives. In making this argument, Brinkman also plays with [...]

The other day I was looking for a movie I could watch with instant streaming that featured Josh Kornbluth* and I came upon Strange Culture. Strange Culture is a documentary about the arrest of artist and SUNY-Buffalo professor of art history Steve Kurtz on charges of bioterrorism, mail fraud, and wire fraud in 2004 after [...]

Editor’s Note: Journalist and crew member Kathryn Eident and scientist Jeremy Jacquot are traveling on board the RV Atlantis on a monthlong voyage to sample and study nitrogen fixation in the eastern tropical Pacific Ocean, among other research projects. This is the third blog post detailing this ongoing voyage of discovery for Scientific American.com. The [...]

These days, science funding is like a cage fight—utterly brutal. It’s even harder to compete for funding when you work on microscopic nematode worms that live at the bottom of the ocean. As an undergraduate at King’s College London, I watched with great sadness as the university abolished departments—first chemistry, then biological sciences. At the [...]

What is life? Simple question, thousands of years of human intellectual torture trying to answer it. The truth is that ‘life’ really does seem to defy easy definition. We can say that it’s a natural phenomenon – yes, OK. Actually it might be better thought of as a number of deeply connected natural phenomenae, OK, [...]

On the heels of #SciAmChem day I thought I’d pull a post from the Life, Unbounded archives that could use a little airing and has a chemical slant. It’s all about the isotopic favoritism that organisms, or at least some of them, display. I’ve not heard more about the particular, and surprising, heavy isotope preference [...]

The chicken pesto pasta on your plate is more than just tasty fuel to keep you going. The dish has carbohydrates, fats and proteins to be sure, but it also contains other nutrients and chemicals that send subtle cues and instructions to your cells. More and more researchers are arguing that to better grasp how [...]

Sample a hurricane’s air from a plane high in the stratosphere and, in addition to the expected water and grit, you’ll find an abundance of microbes. Swept up from land and sea by the tropical cyclone’s power, the skyborne bacteria persist in the atmosphere for days—and some may even thrive there. A new survey of [...]

Lance Armstrong’s confession to Oprah Winfrey earlier this week that he’s been a drug cheat throughout his illustrious career was a mixed blessing for the sports world. On one hand, key questions have been answered and a perpetrator has been caught. We now know that cycling’s preeminent athlete over the past two decades managed to [...]

At least 1 in 4000 infants is born without a corpus callosum. This powerful body of connective white matter serves as the primary bridge between the brain’s hemispheres, allowing us to rapidly integrate complex information. “It’s a hidden disability,” says University of California Institute of Technology psychologist Lynn Paul. Many born without this structure go [...]

Anyone who’s been to the beach on a hot day knows the feeling of scorching sand underfoot. But do beetles that cross the sunny savanna or dwell in the desert feel it, too? Biologists have found that not only do dung beetles—which famously feed on feces rolled across the sand until it becomes a smooth [...]

As the life sciences become more global and collaborative, researchers have become more productive—and their work potentially more dangerous. White House officials in the past year delayed publication of two scientific papers out of concern for safety and security. In an interview for our October 2012 report on the state of the world’s science, Paul [...]

Two-part barbed penises, a physical struggle and 20 minutes of penetration. That’s how some sea slugs do it. But the real shocker is that, for one species at least, those in the female role seem to engage in these bizarre, violent sexual encounters more often than might be biologically necessary. Nothing about sea-slug sex sounds [...]

Late last year, Harvard University chemists and materials scientists introduced a robot whose rubbery appendages fly—or, more accurately, crawl—in the face of conventional automatons. These invertebrate-inspired albino bots relied on elastic polymers and pneumatic pumps to imitate the movements of worms, squid and starfish. Now these squishy quadrupeds can be pumped with a variety of [...]

Last May, a University of Alabama graduate student was the first person to collect an oblong rock snail in over 70 years. The species, Leptoxis compacta, hadn’t been observed since 1933 and was declared extinct in 2000. Nathan Whelan, the biology PhD candidate who made the discovery, is glad that his research has a positive [...]

Spaceflight is hard on the body, but, even so, a new study has found that the tiny nematode (or roundworm) Caenorhabditis elegans appears to age more slowly in space than on the ground. Whether the same is true of human tissue remains to be seen, although many genes in the millimeter-long worm have analogues in [...]

Almost as fast as you can say “go-go-gadget arm,” an octopus can stretch its arm more than twice its normal length—without the help of any cyborg attachments. What’s more, according to new research, female common octopuses (Octopus vulgaris) are able to stretch their arms even more than the males—on average, three times resting length. This [...]

Of all the amazing octopus species out there, the mimic octopus, Thaumoctopus mimicus, is perhaps the most bewildering. While most known octopuses are able to change color and shape for camouflage, mimic octopuses can also impersonate other animals to deter would-be predators. They can contort their bodies and long, striped arms to look—and swim—like other [...]

Without genetic change we’d be nowhere—well perhaps just unicellular blobs kicking around in ponds. Alterations in DNA, such as point mutations, duplications, rearrangements and insertions from microbial neighbors, have helped humans and our deep-time ancestors climb out of the swamps and, in our case at least, start swimming in backyard pools. But these basic tools [...]

Wonder and amazement at the natural world inspire many blog posts, projects, and even careers in science, but it’s rare that you’ll see wonder break through the soul-crushing passive voice of the scientific literature. It wasn’t always this way, of course. In Wonders and the Order of Nature, 1150-1750, historians of science Lorraine Daston and [...]

Almost five years ago to the day, Neil Shubin’s first book (and my first foray into illustrating popular non-fiction), Your Inner Fish: A Journey into the 3.5-Billion-Year History of the Human Body debuted. It was by all accounts hugely successful, far exceeding the publisher’s sales expectations in the first few months and going into multiple [...]

Have you ever tried to draw what you see in your dreams? Sometimes even the act of describing a dream in words makes it evaporate, as though imposing the order of grammar and syntax is too much for its fragile structure to bear. Tiffany Bozic does not paint her dreams, per se, but she does [...]

Artist Mike Libby of Insect Lab Studio creates these one-of-a-kind sculptures using insects and antique pocket watch parts. Playing upon our perception of insects as somewhat robotic, Libby “lifts the hood” so we can see what really makes these bugs tick. Insect Lab Studios Mike P. Libby Portfolio (including a series – miniature satellites, full [...]

“What famous painting does this remind you of?” I was sitting in the offices of Spongelab Interactive about a month ago speaking with  Jeremy Friedberg, molecular genetics and biotechnology professor, now science education game-guru, and we were discussing the interactive opening image of History of Biology, an expansive mystery game. The image in question, above, contains [...]

My photography skills – if I can call them that – are pretty atrocious. While on a break in Wales recently, I managed to photograph a sequence in which a Herring gull Larus argentatus (one of our most frequently encountered gulls) swallowed a Common sea star Asterias rubens. Yeah, that’s right, get into the habit [...]

There’s a short rumination in this week’s Nature in which Dean Keith Simonton, a psychologist from the University of California, Davis asks a question that often surfaces: Is the age of scientific genius over? Will we see another Einstein, Darwin or Newton or is the idea of the lone genius assiduously scribbling at his desk [...]

Last year’s Nobel Prize for physics was awarded to Saul Perlmutter, Brian Schmidt and Adam Riess for their discovery of an accelerating universe, a finding leading to the startling postulate that 75% of our universe contains a hitherto unknown entity called dark energy. This is an important discovery which is predated by brilliant minds and an exciting [...]