Everyone Was Wrong About Why Cats Purr
Feline researchers have long believed that purring is produced by voluntary muscle contractions, but a new report indicates that this vibration in the larynx of cats may be explained by …
biology
These Plants Change Color When Exposed to a Pesticide
The signal doesn’t necessarily have to be a visible color change—the team has also experimented with temperature. A second receptor pathway in these engineered plants responds to diazinon, an insecticide …
Why Antidepressants Take So Long to Work
Clinical depression is considered one of the most treatable mood disorders, but neither the condition nor the drugs used against it are fully understood. First-line SSRI treatments (selective serotonin reuptake …
New Trials Aim to Restore Hearing in Deaf Children—With Gene Therapy
While the Novartis trial was happening, Lustig and others were working on ways to restore hearing in genetic forms of hearing loss. In 2019, Lustig and his collaborators showed that …
People of African ancestry are poorly represented in genetic studies. A new effort would change that
Scientists are setting out to collect genetic material from 500,000 people of African ancestry to create what they believe will be the world’s largest database of genomic information from the …
Chum Salmon Are Spawning the Arctic. It’s an Ominous Sign
By laying eggs in the rivers, the chum salmon might actually help native fishes by providing food for them. These frigid Arctic waters aren’t particularly productive, biologically speaking, meaning there …
Why Scientists Are Bugging the Rainforest
Bioacoustics can’t fully replace ecology fieldwork, but can provide reams of data that would be extremely expensive to collect by merely sending scientists to remote areas for long stretches of …
These Gene-Edited Chickens Were Made to Resist Bird Flu
The gene edit also helped limit the spread of the virus. Four ordinary chickens were placed in the same incubator with the gene-edited birds that had already been exposed to …
Magnetic Minerals May Have Given Life Its Molecular Asymmetry
Naaman and his team discovered that chiral molecules filter electrons based on the direction of their spin. Electrons with one spin orientation will move more efficiently across a chiral molecule …
A Groundbreaking Human Brain Cell Atlas Just Dropped
Today, an international team of researchers shared an extraordinarily detailed atlas of human brain cells, mapping its staggering diversity of neurons. The atlas was published as part of a massive …