Category Archives: boston globe

Plants such as kudzu and animals such as zebra mussels, which can be harmless in their country of origin, can be a pest elsewhere, playing havoc with local wildlife and having huge economic costs. Two studies in the Feb. 6 … Continue reading →

Both of Mars’s polar ice caps consist mostly of frozen water, report Shane Byrne and Andrew Ingersoll of the California Institute of Technology in last week’s Science. It was long thought that the southern ice cap was made almost entirely … Continue reading →

Imagine kissing someone – not a peck on the cheek, but full lip-to-lip contact. How do you tilt your head? Chances are, it’ll be to the right. Researchers have known for a long time that embryos and infants show a … Continue reading →

A computer program has decided that women are better than men at baby talk. Designed by Gerald McRoberts of Lehigh University in Pennsylvania and Malcolm Slaney of IBM’s Almaden Research Center in California, the program listens to speech and analyzes … Continue reading →

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 →