Category: Biology/Evolution
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Closed Borders Will Not Keep Out More Infectious Forms of COVID
Border closing efforts serve as a distractions. We need to focus on known methods of disease control — vaccination, masks and social distancing. Read the rest at USA Today.
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Nature’s Cruellest One-Night Stand: Sexual Cannibalism in Spiders
ANIMAL mating can be a cruel and unusual process. Male bedbugs inseminate females by piercing their bellies and depositing sperm inside their paramours’ body cavities. Male chimpanzees and lions kill the suckling infants of females before mating with them, as this brings those females more rapidly into oestrus. Male dolphins routinely engage in rape. Nor…
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Hormesis: Is the ‘Low-Dose Effect’ Real?
Though hormesis sounds like something a homeopath would invent, there is actually plenty of evidence that this effect exists.
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Red-Colored Microbes Decorate Flamingo Feathers
A harmonious symbiosis between bird and bug.
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Shroud of Turin DNA Comes from All over World
The Shroud of Turin remains shrouded in mystery.
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The Primordial Soup Was Edible
The Miller-Urey gunk can support life.
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Sex Would Be Simpler if We Were Bonobos
Communication works.
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Simple Robots Evolve to Become Cooperative
Robots that were programmed only with basic primal instincts and genetic mechanisms, over time and in the presence of selective pressure, evolved to cooperate.
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The Oyster’s Gem: As the Pearl Turns
A pearl forms in response to tissue damage. But how?
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Protecting Coffee Crops: Beetles and Bugs
THE coffee-berry borer is a pesky beetle. It is thought to destroy $500m-worth of unpicked coffee beans a year, thus diminishing the incomes of some 20m farmers. The borer spends most of its life as a larva, buried inside a coffee berry, feeding on the beans within. To do so, it has to defy the…