Uncategorized
- Animals
The shocking electric eel!
Electric eels are fascinating animals. Their powerful zaps can act like a radar system, trick fish into revealing their location and then freeze their prey’s movements.
- Chemistry
Identifying ancient trees from their amber
A Swedish teen’s analyses of a sample of amber may have uncovered a previously unknown type of ancient tree.
- Plants
New species of terrifying tomato appears to bleed
A new species of Australian bush tomato bleeds when injured and turns bony in old age.
- Health & Medicine
Heat sickness
Scientists worry that increasing temperatures could combine with air pollution to up rates of illness and premature death — perhaps dramatically.
- Animals
Eating toxic algae makes plankton speedy swimmers
After slurping up harmful algae, copepods swim fast and straight — making them easy prey for hungry predators.
- Life
Scientists Say: Endocytosis
Small molecules can go into a cell through receptors or even just dissolve into it. But something big? That requires endocytosis.
- Archaeology
Hunter-gatherers roamed Florida 14,500 years ago
Tools and bones from a submerged site in Florida show that Stone Age people lived in North America earlier than was once thought.
- Health & Medicine
Teen offers technology that could help brain surgeons
It can reproduce plastic models of the precise faulty vessels that need fixing. Now doctors can see them, hold them and practice on them long before they pick up a scalpel.
- Brain
Mapping word meanings in the brain
A detailed new map shows that people comprehend words by using regions across the brain, not just in one dedicated language center.
- Animals
Common plant could help fight Zika virus
A teen discovered that extracts from leaves of the San Francisco plant (Codiaeum variegatum) kill larvae of the mosquito that helps spread the Zika and dengue fever viruses.
- Earth
How ancient African fish feed today’s Amazon
Many of the world’s lushest tropical forests would starve if winds didn’t bring them nutrient-rich dust from across an ocean.
- Animals
Snot may be key to dolphins’ tracking of prey
Dolphins produce clicking noises that bounce off of prey, like sonar, showing where they are. Mucus in the animals’ nasal passages may make that ‘sonar’ work.
