It was nearly 30 feet long. About 90 million years ago, a gigantic apex predator — a meat-eating dinosaur with serrated shark-like teeth — prowled what is now Uzbekistan, according to a new study of the behemoth’s jawbone. The 26-foot-long (8 meters) beast weighed 2,200 pounds (1,000 kilograms), making itContinue Reading
Climate change is not only a human problem; animals have to adapt to it as well. Some “warm-blooded” animals are shapeshifting and getting larger beaks, legs, and ears to better regulate their body temperatures as the planet gets hotter. Bird researcher Sara Ryding of Deakin University in Australia describes theseContinue Reading
Ordinary human dilemmas are tougher to solve than the most difficult problems of physics and mathematics\ As a boy, I was a rock hound, and I learned how to identify minerals with the Mohs hardness test, named after the mineralogist who invented it. You take a known specimen, like quartz,Continue Reading
When Decio Eizirik began treating patients with type 1 diabetes in the 1980s, he was pretty sure about what was behind the disease: an immune system gone haywire. People with the illness lacked insulin, a crucial hormone, because beta cells in the pancreas—the body’s insulin factories—were being attacked and destroyedContinue Reading
Self-targeting antibodies attack part of the immune system that plays a key role in fighting infection Antibodies that turn against elements of our own immune defences are a key driver of severe illness and death following SARS-CoV-2 infection in some people, according to a large international study. These rogue antibodies,Continue Reading
Spend any time around a baby and you’re likely to hear some babbling. Now, new research shows baby bats can do it too. A paper published on Thursday in the latest issue of the journal Science finds similarities between the babbling of human infants and the babbling of the greaterContinue Reading
Spend any time around a baby and you’re likely to hear some babbling. Now, new research shows baby bats can do it too. A paper published on Thursday in the latest issue of the journal Science finds similarities between the babbling of human infants and the babbling of the greaterContinue Reading
To get an idea of why scientists would want to study daddy longlegs, try playing a game of “One of these things is not like the others” the next time you see one. “If you watch a daddy longlegs move, it will effectively walk on just three pairs of itsContinue Reading
Is this a step in the right direction in funding medical research? I believe so. Nigeria is currently one of the countries with the lowest health research funding in the world. It contributes 0.22% of its GDP to research. Despite the plethora of health issues in the country, and theContinue Reading
The aim is to carry out research that actively involves children, so they are not only positioned as the object of research. This approach is called “child participatory research”. Significant participation of children is necessary because their needs and potentials will be adequately met if adults listen to their voicesContinue Reading