Ten potentially new species, most of them frogs, have been reported living in a mountainous area near Colombia’s border with Panama, a remote diversity hotspot the discoverers are now calling a “Noah’s Ark.” Herpetologists from Conservation International in Colombia and ornithologists from the Ecotrópico Foundation led the discovery expedition into the Tacarcuna area of the Darien, with [...]
I silenced my Inner Rational Scientist here, and went for the cute factor. How could I resist? There actually is some science. It appears killer whale calves born to older mothers may be in better … um, flippers.
I wish I remembered which science conference that was. There was a small presentation room, with a handful of speakers who projected their slides onto a big screen, as usual. But hardly anyone was in the audience; the sessions in rooms down the hall were much more crowded. The title, something about quantifying nature’s value [...]
Doctors are sounding the alarm about a shortage of radioactive materials used to guide surgery and examine medical conditions like heart disease and cancer. The shortage is fallout from worldwide efforts to restrict the production of nuclear bombs. As more reactors are abandoned around the globe in anti-proliferation efforts, supplies for medical radionuclides are also drying up. But one [...]
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 [...]
