Author Archives: agnieszka

Sperm cells act like heat-seeking missiles when it comes to locating an unfertilized egg, according to a paper published in the February Nature Medicine. The egg tends to lie in a spot around 2 degrees Celsius warmer than the place … Continue reading →

As if it’s not scary enough that sharks can smell a drop of blood in an Olympic-sized swimming pool, or that they can sense the electric field given off by a hidden prey’s heartbeat; it seems they can also detect … Continue reading →

Six thousand years ago, neolithic Brits might have enjoyed sips of milk with their steaming haunches of meat. Researchers from England’s University of Bristol report in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences that they have discovered milk-fat residue … Continue reading →

Forget the shadow, male groundhogs are looking for love when they emerge from their burrows in early February. Stamatis Zervanos, a biologist at Penn State Berks-Lehigh Valley College, studied 32 free-ranging groundhogs over four hibernation seasons. He found that male … Continue reading →

It’s not “Beam me up, Scotty,” just yet, but teleportation has taken another step forward. Scientists from the University of Geneva in Switzerland and the University of Aarhus in Denmark have taken particles of light, destroyed them, and reconstituted them … Continue reading →

In what would at first glance appear to be a completely useless experiment, researchers have created a duck-billed quail and a quail-billed duck. Jill Helms and Richard Schneider of the University of California at San Francisco successfully transplanted neural crest … Continue reading →

When was the last time a Hubble Space Telescope image made you hungry? Located some 6,500 light-years away in the constellation Sagittarius, the celestial object called Gomez’s Hamburger (in honor of its discoverer, Arturo Gomez) is a sunlike star nearing … Continue reading →

Stick insects, famed for their extraordinary ability to look just like, well, sticks, are now famous for something altogether different. They are the first creatures known to have re-evolved the ability to fly. Michael Whiting and his colleagues at Brigham … Continue reading →