The same chemical that helps turn people and lab mice into crack addicts may also cause locusts to swarm. A team of researchers from the UK and Australia has discovered that serotonin seems to trigger the swarms of desert locusts, devastating crop pests that span a fifth of the globe. Serotonin has been found in [...]
The comment arrived on Day 2 of my 100-day effort, and I now regret getting so angry that I deleted it. My friend, posing as an anonymous reader, quoted my own line: “The scientific process is robust; its only weakness is human error,” and wrote: “Yikes, what if we humans erred right at the beginning, [...]
People living in arid climates have taken great pains to adapt, by re-using their wash water and collecting rainfall for secondary purposes, like gardening. The practice, tuned to a fine art in places like Arizona, is widely accepted as a conservation strategy — alleviating the need to irrigate with drinking water — and a way [...]
On my way to becoming a science writer, I earned a master’s degree in biology. My thesis was a genetics project, and I conducted my experiments among a group of dedicated future geneticists led by an already accomplished — indeed, famous — one. Each week, we would gather for lab meetings, where we gave reports [...]
Global warming has the potential to dramatically expand the oceans’ so-called dead zones, oxygen-poor areas that fish avoid and where less mobile organisms like clams and crabs can’t survive. Most dead zones are located where rivers empty into the ocean, dumping agricultural fertilizers and other pollutants. A new study by a team of Danish researchers, released [...]
