CAMBRIDGE, Mass. (AP) — It's a robot unlike any other: inspired by the world's fastest land animal, controlled by video game technology and packing nifty sensors — including one used to maneuver drones, satellites and ballistic missiles.
Sound-emitting tags fitted to fish to track their survival may, paradoxically, be alerting predator seals to their whereabouts, said scientists Wednesday who warned of a "dinner bell" effect.
A mild manner and a fondness for fatty treats like fish or meat scraps may have helped cats evolve into the tame yet independent-minded pets they are today, researchers said Monday.
Polar bears, whales, sharks and gazelles were among 31 new species granted new protection status by the UN conservation body, following six days of "intense" talks by leading conservationists.
A "bizarre" groundhog-like creature lived in the kingdom of the dinosaurs some 66 million years ago, according to a study Wednesday that rewrites the story of mammals.
Imagine you're a field biologist who studies penguins. You go all the way to Antarctica. You finally get up close to a noisy, smelly colony of the birds. But once they see you, they start to freak out. Some retreat with their eggs, and in the process, they encroach on their neighbors' turf. Now the penguins are fighting. The social order of the colony is disrupted. You've tarnished the data you were trying to collect about penguin behavior.
A 248-million-year-old fossil of an ancient reptile found in China is the oldest known member of a well-known group of marine reptiles, and may have lived both on land and in the sea. The specimen is a primitive type of ichthyopterygian, a group related to ichthyosaurs, which are large marine reptiles that dominated the world's oceans after the Permian-Triassic extinction. In that event, which occurred 252 million years ago, up to 96 percent of marine animals and 70 percent of land animals went extinct. "This new animal is a link between the terrestrial ancestor and the ichthyosaurs fully adapted to a life in the sea," said Da-yong Jiang, a geologist at Peking University in China and leader of the study published today (Nov. 5) in the journal Nature.
NEW YORK (AP) — During the dinosaur age most mammals were puny, generally weighing less than a pound. Now a bizarre fossil skull from Madagascar has revealed a comparative giant, one that clocked in at maybe 20 pounds.
The vast jungles of the Amazon rainforest harbor tribes mostly isolated from the outside world, whose way of life, largely unchanged for millennia, is now increasingly threatened by intrusions from modern civilization. The Amazon is the largest and most diverse rainforest in the world— about 10 percent of all known species on Earth dwell there. One way to collect this data involves flying over their villages, but such overflights are both expensive and invasive, and could instill fear among these indigenous peoples. Instead, scientists investigated whether satellite imaging could monitor uncontacted tribes.
Plans to build a fish farm along a popular stretch of South African coast prompted concerns Monday that it could entice sharks, endangering tourists and Iron Man triathletes.
Europe has an estimated 421 million fewer birds than three decades ago, and current treatment of the environment is unsustainable for many common species, a study released on Monday said.
In a photo contest that honors all things small, it's tough to beat a shot of a rotifer: A view into the mouth of one of the tiniest animals on the planet won the top prize in this year's Nikon Small World competition. Rotifers rank among tardigrades as the smallest creatures in the animal kingdom. The winning photo, captured by Rogelio Moreno, a programmer and self-taught microscopist from Panama, shows the open mouth of a rotifer surrounded by a heart-shaped corona, or a crown of cilia that sweep water into its maw. Moreno watched the rotifer for hours, waiting for the right opportunity to snap a shot of the constantly moving creature at the moment it opened its mouth, according to Nikon.
People infected with Ebola vary greatly in how severe their symptoms are. Now, a new study in mice suggests that genetics plays a role in how each body reacts to the same Ebola virus. To study the relationship between genes and the virus, researchers used a group of mice that were bred to have high genetic diversity, as opposed to the typical laboratory mice, which are produced by many generations of inbreeding and are therefore extremely similar. Normally, classic lab mice don't develop the symptoms of Ebola that are seen in people, even though the animals do die from a lethal dose of the virus.
A newly described fungal disease is killing salamanders and newts in Europe and could soon land on U.S. The disease invades the skin of salamanders and newts, and is related to another fungus that has been wiping out frog and other amphibian populations around the world. "If it gets here, it's going to be really bad," said Karen Lips, a biologist at the University of Maryland who participated in the new research. That's because the United States is home to the world hotspot of salamander diversity: More species of salamander live in the southern Appalachian Mountains than anywhere else on the planet, according to the North Carolina-based Highlands Biological Station.
