It seems somewhat eccentric if not a little absurd to suggest that a planet is a living thing. Earth has life on it, but it’s not a biological organism. Any theory or argument which concludes that the…
Our series, Animals in Research, profiles the top organisms used for science experimentation. Here, we look at Caenorhabditis elegans – a roundworm. When you think of a worm, what do you see? For some…
What is a male? What is a female? If you were to conduct a survey, most people would probably have little difficulty expressing some fundamental differences. After all, we learn to tell boys apart from…
Sex without seed. Seed without sex. It’s been said that the greatest gift of science to humankind would be achieving those two goals. Effective contraceptives such as the pill have pretty much nailed the…
The belief that nervous shock can cause you to go grey overnight (medically termed canities subita) is one of those tales which could nearly be true. There are certainly cases in medical literature of…
How did you get to work today? I walked to the station, caught a train, then walked to a bus stop and hopped on the 891 express. All this time, while I was travelling, I moved in space – in fact a lot…
For taxonomists, days often start – and sometimes end – with the question: what’s that? Whether you’re an entomologist, staring at a new species of riffle bug from a rainforest stream, or a paleontologist…
You’d be hard pressed to find many people who hold ants in high regard. That might be due to their destructive behaviour towards lawns, their ability to infest your house in no time at all, or a willingness…
We humans use our large brains to make and store maps of our environment; maps we then use everyday for getting around and for recalling where we’ve been. But we are nothing special – many other animals…
The planet is home to anywhere between two million and 50 million undiscovered species, many of which are at threat from rampant habitat destruction, according to a report by an international team of researchers…
Welcome to Peer Review, a series in which we ask leading academics to review books written by people working in the same field. Here Rob Brooks, Professor of Evolutionary Ecology at the University of New…
Colour is an extraordinary motivator. We sensibly caution against waving a red rag to a bull to avoid provocation – worthy but curious advice, since bulls cannot distinguish red from other colours. We…
There’s something degenerate in every male (no, seriously). We members of the facial-hair-bearing sex carry, among the 23 pairs of chromosomes in every one of our cells, an odd pair of sex-chromosomes…