Ed Yong
No One Is Prepared for Hagfish Slime
It expands by 10,000 times in a fraction of a second, it’s 100,000 times softer than Jell-O, and it fends off sharks and Priuses alike.
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Science Photo Library A Tissue Sample From 1966 Held Traces of Early HIV
To understand the virus’s history, a team worked to reconstruct its genome from a time before anyone knew the virus existed.
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Sheila Patek One Giant Leap for Maggotkind
Even the squishy can make great bounds.
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Juhari Muhade / Getty A New Clue to How Life Originated
A long-standing mystery about early cells has a solution—and it’s a rather magical one.
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Kim Kyung Hoon, Reuters Some Fish Are Still Full of Mercury, for a Worrying Reason
Emissions of mercury have declined, but levels in fish could still increase thanks to overfishing and a changing climate.
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Eric Gay / AP The Rank Hypocrisy of Trump’s Ebola Tweets
Five years ago, the doctor Kent Brantly was evacuated back to the U.S. after being infected with Ebola—against the wishes of the man who is now president.
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Jules Clark / Getty Thousands of Years Ago, a Dog Gave Rise to an Immortal Entity
The story of CTVT—a contagious cancer that spreads from dog to dog—gets weirder all the time.
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Kevin Langergraber / Ngogo Chimpanzee Project A Scientist Witnessed Poachers Killing a Chimp
When Kevin Langergraber heard a scream in the rain forest, he ran to see what was happening.
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Whitetherock Photo / Shutterstock Why the Placental Microbiome Should Be a Cautionary Tale
A new study suggests that evidence for microbes found on placentas was the result of lab contamination.
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Sebastian Leuzinger The Stump That Didn’t Die
Through underground connections with its neighbors, it somehow stays alive. What does that say about the concept of a tree, or the future of forests?
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Ralph Orlowski / Reuters The Human Brain Project Hasn’t Lived Up to Its Promise
Ten years ago, a neuroscientist said that within a decade he could simulate a human brain. Spoiler: It didn’t happen.
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Goran Tomasevic / Reuters The WHO Finally Sounds Its Loudest Alarm Over Ebola in the Congo
The ongoing outbreak is the second worst in history and has proved to be unusually difficult to contain.
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Howard Yanes / Reuters The Disturbing Sound of a Human Voice
Hearing people talk can terrify even top predators such as mountain lions, with consequences that ripple through entire ecosystems.
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Goran Tomasevic / Reuters A Groundbreaking Study Is Good News for Cats—And People
Researchers studying the cat-poop parasite, Toxoplasma gondii, made a breakthrough that will spare a lot of felines from research.
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Katerina Harvati / Eberhard Karls University of Tübingen The Story of Humans and Neanderthals in Europe Is Being Rewritten
A 210,000-year-old skull is the oldest Homo sapiens fossil found outside Africa.
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Irena Schulz Not a Human, but a Dancer
What Snowball the parrot’s spontaneous moves teach us about ourselves
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Reuters Why Waves of Seaweed Have Been Smothering Caribbean Beaches
Since 2011, blooms of Sargassum have wreaked havoc on tropical shores. A new study explains why this is likely a new normal.
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Alexis Rosenfeld / Getty Images For Smart Animals, Octopuses Are Very Weird
A new hypothesis suggests that their vaunted intelligence and short-lived, solitary nature are all linked to a fourth trait.
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Reuters North Atlantic Right Whales Are Dying in Horrific Ways
Six individuals—more than 1 percent of the population—were found dead just this month, the latest entries in a troubling pattern.
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John Cuneo The Last of Its Kind
The biologist David Sischo has a tragic assignment: keeping vigil over a species’ sole survivor, then marking its extinction in real time.
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Michael Fiala / Reuters Monarch Butterflies Reared in Captivity Lack a Crucial Ability
A scientist hoped commercially raised butterflies would be identical to their wild counterparts, but found their navigation abilities varied.
