Breathing is a rich experience for a group of unusual microbes that typically live deep beneath the sea.
A microbiologist has found that microscopic organisms known as extremophiles breathe in dissolved gold and out comes the stuff of gold rings, necklaces, and earrings. The finding may explain how some gold ore deposits formed.
In a clever twist of nature, the sea has eyes in its stars.
Scientists have discovered a species of brittle star whose outer skeleton is covered with crystalline lenses that appear to work collectively as an all-seeing eye.
Bugs don’t pay much attention to human-drawn battle lines.
That’s the lesson scientists learned when they went to Hawaii to look at what happens when farmers import specialized insects to combat invasive weeds and pests—a practice known as biocontrol.
Not all Atlantic bluefin tuna are homebodies, scientists have learned.
That means officials will have to rethink present management plans designed to prevent overfishing of the species, say the authors of a study that provides the best knowledge so far about the Atlantic bluefin’s migratory and spawning patterns.
Male lizards of a species known as southern water skinks, which live high in the mountains of southeastern Australia, better hope the threat of global warming is a farce. If Earth does warm up, they may find themselves left with no females to mate with, and the species pushed to extinction.
The concern arises because scientists have found that females of the lizard species Eulamprus tympanum control the sex of offspring by controlling their own adult body temperature.
The oracle of Delphi in Greece was the telephone psychic of ancient times: People came from all over Europe to call on the Pythia at Mount Parnassus to have their questions about the future answered. Her answers could determine when farmers planted their fields or when an empire declared war.
The Pythia, a role filled by different women from about 1400 B.C. to A.D. 381, was the medium through which the god Apollo spoke.
They are nature’s “water towers,” providing billions of gallons of fresh, clean, filtered water. They are home to thousands of indigenous peoples, and storehouses of biodiversity, at least 80 percent of which has not yet been catalogued.
Yet in as little as ten years’ time, biologists warn, the world’s cloud forests—evergreen mountain forests that are almost permanently shrouded in mist and clouds—may be all but gone.