Nature

Demodex are a family of eight-legged mites that live in the hair follicles and associated sebaceous or oil glands of many mammals. Two species are known in humans – Demodex folliculorum, which lives mainly in hair follicles on our faces (especially eyelashes and eyebrows), and Demodex brevis, which sets up home in the oil glands

Scientists have made a significant breakthrough in reconstructing the history of our planet. Sedimentary deposits from the permafrost of Greenland contained recoverable environmental DNA dating back to around 2 million years ago. That’s 1 million years older than the previous record – DNA from a wooly mammoth that roamed the Siberian tundra 1 million years

Charles Darwin believed evolution created “endless forms most beautiful“. It’s a nice sentiment but it doesn’t explain why evolution keeps making crabs. Scientists have long wondered whether there are limits to what evolution can do or if Darwin had the right idea. The truth may lie somewhere between the two. While there doesn’t seem to

The body of the last known living Tasmanian tiger was thought to be lost forever, but researchers have rediscovered the animal’s preserved pelt and skeleton in a museum cupboard in Tasmania. Striped like a tiger, with a somewhat dog-like body, the Tasmanian tiger – or thylacine (Thylacinus cynocephalus) – is in fact a large marsupial,

Like so many animals, the northern star coral (Astrangia poculata) spends its winter in a state of hibernation. Don’t let the downtime fool you, though. There’s a lot of house cleaning going on around those resting polyps. According to a new study led by a researchers from the University of California, Davis, the microbial communities

The Yellowstone supervolcano in northwest Wyoming isn’t just one of the most fascinating places on Earth, it’s potentially one of the most volatile, thanks to the reservoir of magma contained within. A new study by an international team of researchers has determined that there’s actually more magma under Yellowstone than was previously thought, adding important

Everyone has seen lightning and marveled at its power. But despite its frequency – about 8.6 million lightning strikes occur worldwide every day – why lightning proceeds in a series of steps from the thundercloud to the earth below has remained a mystery. There are a few textbooks on lightning, but none have explained how

There’s nothing quite like drinking with friends, and it turns out ants may agree as they have their own form of social drinking too. But instead of getting on the beers, ants’ drink of choice is a kind of nutrient-filled ‘milk’ that oozes out from their youngsters. The whole colony partakes, from the newest hatchlings

The amount of oxygen in the Earth’s atmosphere makes it a habitable planet. Twenty-one percent of the atmosphere consists of this life-giving element. But in the deep past – as far back as the Neoarchean era 2.8 to 2.5 billion years ago – this oxygen was almost absent. So, how did Earth’s atmosphere become oxygenated?

Newborns need to store vast amounts of new information quickly as they learn to navigate the world. Silent synapses – the immature connections between neurons that have no neurotransmitter activity yet – are thought to be the hardware that allow this rapid information storage to occur early in life. First discovered decades ago in newborn

For something as chaotic as the wind, meteorologists tend to have a pretty good grip on the kinds of circulating air patterns we might expect to see whipping up storms around the globe. One, it seems, has until now slipped under the radar. In an effort to better understand contrasts in ocean temperature in the

When it comes to singing, bats have most species beat tooth over claw. Sure, their tunes might not be on everybody’s top 20 list, but their cries span a tremendous frequency range of around 7 octaves from 1 to 120 kilohertz, rising well outside the range of human hearing. Thanks to a new study of

A study of 26 years’ worth of wolf behavioral data, and an analysis of the blood of 229 wolves, has shown that infection with the parasite Toxoplasma gondii makes wolves 46 times more likely to become a pack leader. The research shows that the effects of this parasite in the wild have been horrendously understudied

For the first time in decades, Hawaii’s Mauna Loa – the largest active volcano in the world – erupted, turning the sky red. The eruption began around 11:30 pm local time Sunday night (0930 UTC Monday morning) in Mauna Loa’s summit caldera, according to a United States Geological Survey statement. In a 7:20 am local

Some of Earth’s weirdest fungi, including types of lichen, mycorrhizal, and insect symbiotes, never quite seemed to fit in our current tree of life. But a new genetic analysis discovered that despite the extreme differences between these oddballs, they actually all belong together on an entirely new branch that parted ways with other fungi more

Scientists have found small pockets of seawater that have been trapped in rock for some 390 million years, a discovery that could significantly deepen our understanding of how oceans evolve and adapt to changing climate conditions. The tiny amounts of liquid represent waters once populated by great armored fishes, ammonoids, giant sea scorpions, and trilobites.

A newly discovered brain in a 525-million-year-old arthropod fossil looks to be the oldest found so far – and it may have settled an ongoing debate about how brains first evolved in these invertebrate animals. Spotted in a tiny, armored lobopodian known as Cardiodictyon catenulum, the surprise is that the brain survived at all and

EMBARGO Friday 25 November 1900 GMT | Saturday 26 November 0600 AEDT Our glorious little blue marble of a planet is filled with an astonishingly diverse array of lifeforms, but some are definitely more peculiar than others. This is particularly true of the octopus, an animal so strange that it regularly invites comparisons to aliens.

Sixty-six million years ago, an asteroid hit the Earth with the force of 10 billion atomic bombs and changed the course of evolution. The skies darkened and plants stopped photosynthesizing. The plants died, then the animals that fed on them. The food chain collapsed. Over 90 percent of all species vanished. When the dust settled,

At the end of October, a Mississippi resident made a rare discovery along the drought-stricken Mississippi River – a fossilized jawbone from an American lion that roamed the area roughly 11,000 years ago, according to McClatchy News. It’s only the fourth fossil of the ancient American lion found in Mississippi, according to the news outlet.

To be a sheep is to blindly follow the crowd. But is a sheep’s sheepiness really enough to make an entire flock walk around in a circle non-stop for days on end? That’s a mystery the internet has pondered for about a week now and solving it has proved more difficult than you’d expect. On

Researchers dug up two fossils belonging to ancient, flappy, and snouted arthropod relatives from what’s now a sheep field near Llandrindod Wells in Wales. At only 13 and 3 millimeters (about 0.5 and 0.1 inches), these minuscule fossils from the Ordovician period may not seem like much to look at, but their familiarity kept paleontologists

A team of scientists, led by researchers at Yale University, think they have finally figured out why land plants evolved such complex vascular systems – a mystery that has stood for roughly a century. When land plants first sprung into being roughly 500 million years ago, their vascular systems were extremely simple. The insides of

Scientists from the American Bird Conservancy have rediscovered a rare pheasant pigeon that has not been documented for nearly 140 years. Researchers installed camera traps on Fergusson Island, Papua New Guinea, with the results showing the rare black-naped pheasant-pigeon strutting in the images. According to the American Bird Conservancy, the pheasant-pigeon is “a large, ground-dwelling

Contrary to popular belief, it’s not possible for you to swallow your own tongue. If you’re a human, at least. It turns out toads actually do it on purpose every time they eat. “We know a lot about how frogs extend their tongues and how it sticks to their prey, but prior to this study,

Tardigrades are tiny, incredibly tough animals that can withstand a wide range of dangers, including many that would obliterate most other creatures known to science. Different tardigrade species have adapted to specific habitats all over the Earth, from mountains to oceans to ice sheets. Their resilience can also help them survive accidental adventures beyond the

A species of clam known only by the 28,000-year-old fossils it left behind has turned up alive and well on an American shoreline. The small, translucent bivalve, known as Cymatioa cooki, was recently discovered hiding in the rocky intertidal zone of southern California – a place carefully combed over by scientists for many, many years.

The sea turtles of Punta Chame, a peninsula of Panama that juts into the Pacific Ocean, face an existential threat similar to the rhino and pangolin: human superstition. The eggs of the protected olive ridley turtle, illegally harvested from the beach, are sold door to door in town for 75 cents to $1 each for

The Southern Ocean’s vast shelves of floating ice appear to hide sprawling blooms of phytoplankton, a discovery that could significantly change our understanding of Antarctica’s marine ecosystem and how it might be impacted by climate change. Key to phytoplankton growth is photosynthesis, and key to photosynthesis is sunlight – and so up to this point

The asteroid that pummeled Earth 66 million years ago transformed life on this watery planet, decimating the dinosaurs and bringing on a new era in biology. The asteroid also created a monstrous tsunami thousands of times bigger than any wave ever witnessed in humanity’s blip of existence, according to new research. The Chicxulub asteroid, as

Earth’s largest land predators are increasingly crossing paths with brown bears at higher latitudes, bringing hybrid ‘brolar bears’ into the Arctic. In 2006, a hunter in the Canadian Arctic shot a bear that didn’t look like the others. DNA testing would later confirm the animal was actually part grizzly, part polar bear. In the years

With so many species under threat due to human activity and climate change, it’s encouraging to hear about one population that’s doing very well for itself: a group of more than 22,000 oceanic manta rays (Mobula birostris) off the coast of Ecuador. That estimated population size is more than 10 times the numbers thought to

Australia’s Great Barrier Reef might never have come to be were it not for the formation of a vast island based mostly on sand. K’gari, also known as Fraser Island, has the honor of being the world’s largest sand island, covering around 640 square miles (nearly 1,700 square kilometers) just off the southeastern coast of

A new paper shows how the lifespan of the adult honeybee appears to have shrunk by nearly 50 percent in the past 50 years. The European Red List for Bees suggests nearly one in ten species of wild bees are facing extinction. Imagine how we would react if human lifespans halved. The equivalent would be

The first land plants to evolve penetrating root systems, around 400 million years ago, may very well have triggered a series of mass extinctions in the ocean. The expansion of plants onto terra firma was a big moment on Earth, completely restructuring the terrestrial biosphere. According to researchers from Indiana University–Purdue University Indianapolis (IUPUI) in

A group of scientists in Florida cut open a Burmese python to find an intact 5-foot (1.5 meter) alligator that had been swallowed whole. Rosie Moore, a geoscientist based in Florida, said in a November 1 Instagram post the euthanized python with a bulging stomach was turned over to a research lab for a necropsy,

Tracking down the oldest traces of life on Earth isn’t easy. Smoosh a bunch of microbes between layers of rock and let them ripen for billions of years; what you end up with is going to resemble rock more than an ancient life form. It takes a real eye to then distinguish one from the

The discovery of millions of fire ants in Kauai, Hawaii, marks the island’s most extensive infestation since the invasive species was first detected there in 1999, the news website SFGATE reported. The infestation poses a risk to pets, the agriculture industry, and residents and tourists visiting Hawaii’s fourth-largest island, according to SFGATE. “They’re changing the

Some fish keep a close eye on the depths below while swimming, new research shows, for much the same reason we pay attention to where we’re putting our feet. They aren’t taking steps, of course, but according to a new study, being biased to stimuli falling on the lower parts of the eye serves an

Typically solitary creatures, octopuses aren’t exactly neighborly when fellow cephalopods encroach on their personal space, even if it means turning just about anything in reach into a weapon. In a recently published study by a team of researchers in Australia, the US, and Canada, observations of wild octopuses casting shells and sand directly at other

Since the Cambrian explosion 538.8 million years ago – a time when many of the animal phyla we’re familiar with today were established – five major mass extinction events have whittled down the biodiversity of all creatures great and small. Researchers from the US have uncovered evidence of one occurring earlier, around 550 million years

Fertilizers may change the way flowers ‘look’ to bees and discourage them from pollinating, a study suggests. Flowers attract bees using small electric fields that bees can learn to recognize. The study, published in the peer-reviewed journal PNAS Nexus on Wednesday, found that the fertilizers change these electric fields and bees seem to find these

The most isolated vertebrates in the world are now so inbred that researchers worry they won’t be around for much longer. For over 10,000 years, a small population of pupfish has lived only in Nevada’s Devils Hole, a famous underground oasis tucked away in the desert borderlands of Death Valley National Park. The limited habitat

Before life on Earth exploded in diversity some 540 million years ago, the first primitive animal skeletons were already starting to form. Squishy-looking marine sponges from this time have been found in tubular thimble-like shapes, structured by hard, mineralized threads – specimens that are thought to be among the earliest assemblages of skeletal fossils. Yet

Evidence is mounting that insects experience pain in a similar way that we do. Now, a clear demonstration of play in bumble bees suggests pleasure may be part of the lived experience of these tiny animals too. “It goes to show, once more, that despite their little size and tiny brains, they are more than

Imagine you’re walking through a forest, and you roll over a log with your foot. Spreading out on its underside is something moist and yellow – a bit like something you may have sneezed out… if that something was banana-yellow and fanned itself out into elegant fractal branches. What you’d see is the plasmodium form

A spectacular and explosive volcanic eruption in January 2022 produced the highest plume of steam and ash in recorded history. The towering column that arose from Hunga Tonga-Hunga Ha’apai reached a tremendous altitude of 57 kilometers (35 miles) above sea level. That height makes it the first-ever volcanic eruption seen to have punched completely through

Along with the thousands of men, women, and children who have died since Russia invaded Ukraine in February, there have been hundreds of casualties in the Black Sea among the resident dolphin and porpoise populations. Scientists who study the region reported an “unusual increase” in strandings and bycatch – when animals are unintentionally caught by