SciSuggest

Most animals that carry chemical weapons make their own. Venomous spiders produce their toxins in dedicated glands. Poison dart frogs synthesize compounds in their skin. But a group of snakes in Asia has taken a strikingly different approach: they simply steal their defenses from the animals they eat. The rednecked keelback (Rhabdophis subminiatus), a slender, modestly-sized snake found across Indonesia, does not produce a single molecule of its own toxin.

In most animals, reproduction requires two parents — a male and a female — each contributing half their genetic material through sex cells called gametes. However, in self-fertilization, or selfing, both sex cells come from the same individual. It is still a form of sexual reproduction, but uniparental — meaning a single organism produces both the egg and the sperm that fuse to create offspring.

Every living species on Earth reproduces with a purpose. For most animals, that purpose is sex, which is not just biologically convenient but evolutionarily essential. When two individuals mate, their genetic material shuffles together, separating bad mutations from good ones, allowing natural selection to act on each gene independently.

Over the last hundred years, the human skull has gotten rounder, broader at the jaw, and more distinctly different between men and women. The comparison of the Japanese skulls from the early 1900s with those of people who died in the 2020s found measurable changes in cranial shape across a single century.

Around 5,000 years ago, dogs living alongside Neolithic farming communities in what is now eastern France had brains nearly half the size of the wolves sharing their landscape — a reduction more dramatic than the gap seen between modern wolves and dogs today. The study, published in Royal Society Open Science, used CT scanning to reconstruct endocranial volumes across 185 modern and 22 prehistoric wolves and dogs, spanning a timeline from roughly 35,000 years ago to the present.

More than 400 million years ago, long before the first forests covered the land and long before jaws had even evolved, a small armored fish was living a fast-paced life. A new study of fossils of Protaspis, a jawless fish that inhabited warm, shallow waters in what is now Wyoming during the Early Devonian period, has upended a long-held assumption in paleontology that the earliest vertebrates were slow-growing, long-lived creatures, researchers report in a preprint published in bioRxiv.

H5N1 bird flu viruses that have been circulating in U.S. dairy cattle have evolved some new mutations that help them attach more easily to cow cells, researchers report in a preprint published in BioRxiv. In the study, they say, they identified two genetic mutations in the viral surface protein that exploit a type of molecule uniquely abundant in cattle tissues, one that neither humans nor birds possess.

When insect pests begin chewing on a tomato leaf, the plant pulls essential nutrients out of that very leaf, relocating it to the roots — out of the insect’s reach. The result is a leaf that is less nutritious, less palatable, and ultimately less capable of supporting the pests’ growth and survival. “We demonstrated that upon S. littoralis [cotton leafworm] attack, tomato plants removed sodium from the feeding site by relocating [..] from the leaf to the root,” the researchers write in the paper.

When you walk into any garden, you will find two fundamentally different kinds of many-legged animals: those with antennae — insects, crustaceans, millipedes — and those with claws at the front of their heads. That second group, the chelicerates, gave the world its spiders, scorpions, horseshoe crabs, and mites. Now, a 500-million-year-old fossil from the Utah desert has revealed just how ancient those claws really are.

Wireless earbuds are everywhere, but they have always been limited to sound. A new prototype from researchers at the University of Washington aims to change that — by embedding tiny cameras into a pair of earbuds and connecting them to an AI system capable of answering questions about the visual world. The system, called VueBuds, is the first camera-integrated wireless earbuds designed for real-time visual intelligence.