Author Archives: agnieszka

Here’s another reason mad cow disease might keep you up at night. It turns out that there might be a small chance of contracting the human version, known as Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease (CJD), through routine surgery. Both mad cow and CJD … Continue reading →

Is there anything more annoying than having something stuck in your teeth? It looks like our oldest human ancestors may have been bothered by the exact same feeling. Paleontologists have been puzzled by the tiny grooves discovered on fossilized hominid … Continue reading →

The Voyager 1 space probe, launched in 1977, is now more than 8 billion miles from Earth, but whether it has actually left the outer limits of the solar system is still a matter of debate. In the Nov. 6 … Continue reading →

Roosters have a “sperm budget” and can be picky in allocating their limited resources, Tommaso Pizzari and his colleagues at the University of Leeds report in the Nov. 6 Nature. They have discovered that roosters give more sperm to a … Continue reading →

It appears that “Supermom” has a basis in fact. According to a study published in Physiology and Behavior, neuroscientist Craig Kinsley of the University of Richmond has found that motherhood makes females calmer when provoked and more courageous. Kinsley said … Continue reading →

Pterosaurs, the now-extinct flying reptiles that once dominated the skies (and bad caveman movies), may have been accomplished and agile aerial predators, report researchers in the Oct. 30 Nature. Lawrence Witmer of the University of Ohio and his colleagues ran … Continue reading →

Female wolf spiders, being of a practical nature, commonly eat their suitors. Eileen Hebets, a Cornell University researcher, has some advice for the males who’d like to better their chances of surviving a tryst: Perhaps an introduction might be in … Continue reading →

Are you a health-conscious do-gooder worried about giving out sugary treats this Halloween that may rot children’s teeth and weigh them down with unnecessary calories? Forget the boxes of raisins (a lame treat anyway), and hand out nonedible toys instead, … Continue reading →

Joining the ranks of animals like humans and monkeys, walruses have been found to be mostly right-handed. The walrus prefers using its right flipper over its left one when foraging underwater for food buried in mud on the sea bed. … Continue reading →

Do you think getting a head count of all the people living in the United States is hard? Try doing a census on everything that lives in the world’s oceans. The Census of Marine Life is a massive, billion-dollar, 10-year-long … Continue reading →