Catastrophic ice avalanches may have blasted down kilometers of polar ice craters of Mars at speeds of up to 80 meters per second on at least two occasions.
According to new research, these massive ice avalanches, also called fast running glacier surges, might solve a mystery about strange features on the Red Planet.
During the last centuries of China’s Shang dynasty, which lasted from 1600 B.C. to 1050 B.C., ritual sacrifice was a well-oiled cultural phenomenon, rich and varied in its manifestations. Rulers and elites sacrificed animals and humans to appease spirits or the ancestors. Just as humans met their ends, dogs were often right beside them.
Now a study in Archaeological Research in Asia, published in March, shows that people from the Shang dynasty relied heavily on sacrificial puppies to accompany them in death. “Although superficially it seems like a horrific thing to kill a puppy and put it into a tomb, it’s actually a window into the complex world of Shang human-animal relations,” says Roderick Campbell, an archaeologist at New York University and one of the co-authors of the study.
Walk, don’t run, on the martian moon Phobos. A new study finds that traveling faster than about 5 kilometers per hour on some regions of the Red Planet’s largest satellite could shoot you straight off into space.
Phobos (pictured) is an odd duck among our solar system’s moons. It’s tiny (a fraction of a percent the size of our own moon) and is shaped like a potato; that weird shape draws gravity to different places, depending on where you are.
Despite their name, Arabian babblers never kiss and tell.
In an act often thought unique to humans, these birds go out of their way to hide from other birds during their (admittedly brief) sexual encounters, according to new research.
“The dominant male and female take so much effort to conceal their communication and the mating itself,” says Yitzchak Ben-Mocha, a graduate student at the Max Planck Institute for Ornithology and the lead author of a study published recently in Evolution and Human Behavior. “They sneak away, copulate, and come back.”
An extremely rare cricket with female sex organs but male wings and behaviour is giving biologists insights into sexual behaviour.
Gynandromorphs, creatures that possess both male and female characteristics, are extremely rare. They sometimes appear in butterflies, other bugs and even in birds – occasionally the individuals are literally split right down the middle.
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Where do you get your genes?
The obvious answer is from your parents, whose egg and sperm fused to create the unique combination of genetic material that makes you, you. But surprising new research throws a wrench into that well-known story: It turns out that large quantities of genetic material found in humans actually jumped from other species sometime in the past, and this process may be a major driver of evolution in animals from platypuses to humans.
According to the researchers, the idea that a significant amount of DNA transfers horizontally, rather than vertically, could change our understanding of how humans and other animals came to be. “It shows that this foreign DNA that could have come from anywhere could somehow end up in us and start changing things,” says Atma Ivancevic, a post-doctoral researcher in bioinformatics at the University of Adelaide in Australia and the lead author of a study recently published in Genome Biology.
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A good conversation should proceed like a tennis match: players each take turns responding, knowing instinctively when to speak and when to listen. This kind of lively banter is often considered uniquely human, a trait that separates us from the rest of the animal kingdom. But in fact, sophisticated, back-and-forth conversations are happening all around us.
They might occur in a low, barely audible rumble felt through the pads of giant elephants’ feet, or the singsong chatter of skylarks. They might involve the delicate hand gestures of chimpanzees, or whale songs that travel thousands of miles through lonely oceans. In some cases they exist only in the brief bioluminescent flashes between frisky fireflies in the dark.
Zoos looking to breed cheetahs in captivity are trying to get over a serious matchmaking roadblock. But giving bachelorettes a scented array of male urine might help improve breeding efforts.
“There’s so much information that passes through urine. It makes sense that it’s a conduit for [the cheetahs] to be able to make a choice on what would be a good mate,” says Regina Mossotti, director of animal care at the Endangered Wolf Center in Saint Louis, Missouri, and the lead author of a study published in June in Zoo Biology. Mossotti says her research is the first to show large carnivores can detect how genetically related an individual is to them based on the scent of its pee. The things she and her team learned could improve captive breeding programs and help to conserve the speedy felines.
CRITICALLY ENDANGERED EELS hyped up on cocaine could have trouble making a 3,700-mile trip to mate and reproduce—new research warns.
And while societies have long grappled with ways to cope with the use of illicit drugs, less understood are the downstream effects these drugs might have on other species after they enter the aquatic environment through wastewater.
So, in the name of research, scientists pushed cocaine on European eels in labs for 50 days in a row, in an effort to monitor the effects of the experience on the fish.
Frogs and toads jump, swim, climb, and even glide. But four strange species of amphibians have evolved a decidedly unfroglike characteristic: a preference for walking. Now, scientists have discovered how they do it.
The Senegal running frog, the bumblebee toad, the red-banded rubber frog, and the tiger-legged monkey frog don’t walk like dogs or other four-legged beasts. Instead, they crawl low to the ground like a cat creeping up on prey.
Joshua Rapp Learn 