Category: 5. Biology

This article was originally featured on Undark. Nearly 2 million people, most of them Black or Latino men, are locked up in the United States. In October 2021, the National Institute of Justice, the research arm of the U.S. Department of Justice, published a report arguing that correctional officials should examine the biology of imprisoned…

Serotonin and dopamine are often called the “feel good” or “happy” hormones for their role in boosting moods. There is even a “love hormone”produced in the hypothalamus called oxytocin. For decades, research has pointed to oxytocin receptors as a pathway essential to developing social behaviors like romantic relationships and attachments in mammals like humans and…

Cats are weird. You’ll buy the best toys on the market, and they’ll respond by spending all their time playing in the shipping box. They’ll also randomly get short bursts of energy that have them bouncing up and down the walls, and it always seems to happen at 3 a.m. And when playing with other…

Seaweed is way more than just a slimy plant that feels gross to swim through. It can truly do it all. It’s one of the most abundant plants on the planet, a dietary staple for millions around the world, soaks up carbon, could be used to replace plastics, and is even a more eco-friendly cow…

The Arctic Circle hasn’t always been so, well, arctic. About 52 million years ago, during the early Eocene Epoch, it was still mostly dark for half the year like it is today, but it was quite a bit warmer, more humid. The Arctic of years past had a boreal forest ecosystem similar to what is…

When you think of an amphibian, the first thing to jump to mind is probably a springy frog or a salamander or maybe a giant cane toad. But some newly found fossils of a lesser known amphibian order called caecilians—limbless, worm-like critters that live and burrow underground—could fill in some big evolutionary gaps in how…

This article was originally featured on Undark. “This is one of the least smelly carcasses,” said Todd Katzner, peering over his lab manager’s shoulder as she sliced a bit of flesh from a dead pigeon lying on a steel lab table. The specimens that arrive at this facility in Boise, Idaho, are often long dead,…

Human teenagers aren’t exactly known for their restraint. An incompletely developed region of the brain called the ventromedial prefrontal cortex (vmPFC), which acts a bit like a parking break, can make adolescents more likely to engage in risky behaviors including reckless driving, substance abuse, and risky sexual behavior. It turns out, the same can be…

This article is from Hakai Magazine, an online publication about science and society in coastal ecosystems. Read more stories like this at hakaimagazine.com. The two landmasses that make up the bulk of New Zealand–the North Island and the South Island–are less than 25 kilometers apart but couldn’t be more different. The North Island hosts the country’s largest…

With the gruesome debut of shroom zombies in HBO’s The Last of Us, it’s been a big week for killer fungi—and even the real-life oyster mushroom is getting in on the fun. These briny fungi go well on salads and burgers, but before we can eat the mushrooms, they eat nematodes. The microscopic roundworms, one…