Science Clips

How do spiders survive the winter?

Nature

If someone tells you to picture a spider in your mind, chances are you’ll think of a big hairy one, like a tarantula, crawling across a desert rock.

But the truth is, spiders don’t just live in warm places. Worldwide, there are over 40,000 species of spiders and they’re found living on every continent of the world except Antarctica. That means that they can survive in a wide range of climates.

What’s Worse: Unwanted Mutations or Unwanted Humans?

Biology

After a fatal series of errors and malfunctions in the early morning of April 26, 1986, the core of the Chernobyl nuclear facility melted down and then exploded, killing 31 workers at the plant. The accident spewed massive amounts of radioactive material into the surrounding area, forcing a mass evacuation of the nearby villages. Many wild animals died from the direct toxicity of the radiation and almost 1,000 acres of the Red Forest—named for the unusual color its trees turned after the disaster—died within months. The most radioactive human settlements were bulldozed and buried.

Checkpoints and fences were quickly put up around the vast contaminated region, stretching between northern Ukraine and southern Belarus. This became the exclusion zone, a region that has remained closed to most human activity for the past 28 years.

Yet the area is far from a barren wasteland.

11 New Animal Discoveries

Nature

Purring monkeys, glue-spitting worms and vegetarian piranhas were just a few of the species discovered in 2013, and the door is open for uncovering more amazing new animals in the year ahead. 

There are 8.7 million species on earth (not counting bacteria), and surprisingly 86 percent of all land species and 91 percent of all ocean species have yet to be discovered by science.

“It’s really extraordinary. We know so little about the true biodiversity on our planet,” said Melanie Stiassny, curator of the American Natural History’s Department of Ichthyology, who has spent her career studying fish diversity. “A lot of people think that Darwin completed documenting the species but in fact, there has been a renaissance in the study of species discovery, in part because of the biodiversity crisis. How can we know what we are losing if we don’t know what was there?”

Why Do Turkeys Have a Flap of Skin Hanging From Their Face?

Nature

Often spotted foraging for food among nut-bearing trees, along roadsides, or in backyards, wild turkeys are some of the most easily identifiable birds that are native only to Canada, the United States, and Mexico.

“They [just] happened to evolve only in North America,” says Mary Jo Casalena, a wild turkey biologist with the Pennsylvania Game Commission.

Birds Help Protect Costa Rica Coffee Farms

Birds

The next time you sip a cup of Costa Rican coffee, take a moment to thank the yellow warbler.

A new Stanford study, published in Ecology Letters, shows this bird is one of five species that help protect Costa Rica’s coffee crop by eating the loathed berry borer beetle that has now invaded almost every major coffee producing country. Coffee is one of the world’s most important and economically profitable crops, currently grown and cultivated in more than 50 countries.

The study revealed that birds are capable of cutting borer beetle infestations by almost half. 

Born of Meteor Dust, Unusual Clouds Appear in the Night Sky

Earth Science

If you look to the darkening sky after the end of a long summer day, you might see tendril-like clouds with a blueish tinge that hang at the edge of space. They appear when conditions are right, generally at latitudes close to the North or South Poles, and only when the Sun is invisible, over the horizon. 

The discovery of “noctilucent,” or “night-shining,” clouds is credited to T.W. Backhouse, who, like many other people, took up sky-watching following the cataclysmic eruption of Indonesia’s Mount Krakatoa in 1883. The volcano spurt ash high into the atmosphere, creating spectacular sunsets worldwide. Backhouse, enthralled, kept watching the sky after those sunsets and noticed peculiar clouds shining iridescently. 

Here’s Why You Get Sick of Your Favorite Song

Neuroscience

It happens all the time. A new album comes out, you listen to it, and before you know it, you have a new favorite song. So you play it again. And again. And again. It’s on loop for days: in the car, at home. Maybe you even hum it to yourself while you work.

But then, all of the sudden, it changes. You get sick of that same song you once loved.

So why does this happen? We asked Elizabeth Hellmuth Margulis, author of “On Repeat: How Music Plays the Mind” and director of the Music Cognition Lab at the University of Arkansas, for the answer.

People banded together to find the world's loneliest frog true love — and it might have just worked.

Nature

Perhaps the story of Romeo and Juliet doesn’t have to end in tragedy after all. At least not for the frogs who go by the same names as those famous star-crossed lovers.  

Still, avoiding a tragic ending for these special frogs hasn’t been easy. The species almost went extinct forever.

Romeo is a Sehuencas water frog (Telmatobius yuracare), an aquatic species unique to the cloud forests of Bolivia, that for the last decade, was known as the “world’s loneliest frog.”

Watch: Rare Trio of Bald Eagles Raise Eaglets Together on the Mississippi River

Birds

They say it takes a village to raise a child — but in a nest along the Mississippi River, three bald eagles have decided that it takes a trio to raise newly hatched downy eaglets.

Not only did all three eagles — two “dads” and a “mom” — work together to build the nest and incubate the eggs, but they are also taking turns keeping the three eaglets warm, hunting for their food, and protecting them from any potential threats.

In fact, this trio has been together at the Upper Mississippi River National Wildlife Refuge since the fall of 2017. 

Who Are the Super Moms of the Animal Kingdom?

Nature

When you think of a “great” mom, certain qualities like patience, dedication and love likely come to mind. After all, those are the qualities that, as humans, we value in our own mothers. But humans aren’t the only “super moms” on this planet. In the animal kingdom, many moms show great levels of dedication, attentiveness, and even selflessness while caring for their young.

“Maternal care has evolved repeatedly across different species,” says Dr. Ben Dantzer, assistant Professor of Psychology and Ecology and Evolutionary Biology at the University of Michigan. “The reason it would evolve is simply that there is this period of time when offspring are highly vulnerable, so anything to increase the chances of offspring surviving is going to be favored.” After all, that’s how to ensure the survival of your species as a whole.

Small Wonder: A Look at the World’s Smallest Mollusk Museum

Biology

With gooey, boneless bodies covered in slime, long arms covered in suckers, and beautiful shells, mollusks are some of the strangest creatures on the planet. The mollusk group includes such diverse critters as the oyster, snail, and octopus — making it the perfect subject for the world’s smallest museum.

“Every time you’ve seen an alien in a movie, it’s probably been based on a mollusk,” says Amanda Schochet, co-founder of MICRO, the nonprofit organization that designed and built the the Smallest Mollusk Museum. “They’re slimy, they’re tentacled… they’re about as different from us as we could possibly imagine. Though if you go back to the origin story, we came from the same little blob a long time ago.”

And that’s exactly where the Smallest Museum begins its story: the evolution of mollusks over the last 650 million years.

Strange Eyeless Fish Creates Its Own Sonar Signals to “See”

Biology

Deep in some pitch-black, underwater caves in Mexico, there lives a peculiar little pinkish-white fish. Only about four inches long, this albino has taste buds on the outside of its lower jaw, sleeps very little, and, most interestingly, has no eyes. 

This blind fish (Astyanax mexicanus) evolved relatively recently from a surface fish that does have eyes and lives in the nearby river systems. At some point between a half a million and five millions years ago, some surface fish got caught in underground caves due to dramatic geological events. “Suddenly surface fish were taken underground in large numbers,” explains William Richard Jeffrey, an evolutionary developmental biologist and professor at the University of Maryland. “Those that could survive underground did, and they produced the cavefish we see now.”

What It’s Like Living in a City Full of Moose

Nature

When California native Cathy Sandeen first came to the University of Alaska, Anchorage to interview for her job as chancellor, she was given a great introduction to the city:

“I’m walking around one of the facilities and there goes a moose, just trotting on by,” Sandeen says. “It was as if it was put there by central casting to entice me to Alaska.”

Then she also noticed something else: A police car was following behind the moose very slowly.

“That’s when the facilities person that was showing me around explained that moose are very dangerous. People walking around campus or coming out of buildings have to be careful. You don’t want to run into a moose inadvertently.”

That’s why the University has moose alerts (and bear alerts!) to warn students and faculty when wildlife wanders onto campus — which happens pretty regularly.

Scientists Capture Rare Photos of the World’s Most Endangered Rhino

Endangered Species

It was a late afternoon in Indonesia’s Ujung Kulon National Park when Dr. Robin Moore, a conservation biologist and photographer with Global Wildlife Conservation, and his colleague heard a loud crash to their right.

There was no doubt in their mind what they had just heard.

It was the elusive, rare Javan Rhino — a species so endangered that there are only 68 individuals remaining in the world, and all of them live in the jungle of this one National Park. In fact, this rhino is the most endangered of the five species of rhino found anywhere in the world.

Dr. Laser’s Lab: Inside the World’s Oldest Museum of Holograms

Physics

Entering Holographic Studios, New York City’s underground laser laboratory, is not unlike walking into a mad scientist’s lair.

“Have you ever seen ‘Silence of the Lambs’?,” asked Dr. Laser, the founder of Holographic Studios, which opened in 1979 and is considered the world’s longest operating gallery of holography. Laughing, he turned on his heels and disappeared into the dark room, his white lab coat all that could be seen through the blackness.

This was hardly the first joke that Dr. Laser — whose real name is Jason Sapan — had made since our tour of the gallery started — and it wouldn’t be his last. In fact, that’s part of the appeal.

6 ways America’s national parks have dramatically impacted the history of science over the last century

Nature

From the founding of the first park — Yellowstone — to today, the park service has protected and preserved large swaths of wilderness, from shorelines to mountain ranges, as well as myriad of historic sites and monuments. And today, the park system expands across 84 million acres, covering 412 sites.  

Over the last century, these parks are, and have always been, vital to science by providing living laboratories for research in some of the most intact natural landscapes in the world. In addition, because these natural sites have been managed and studied for nearly a century, there is a huge wealth of archival scientific data available to researchers working in the parks today.

To find out more about the role that national parks have played in the history of science, Business Insider spoke to Timothy Watkins, a climate change science and education coordinator at the National Park Service who is working with the US Geological Survey to draw attention to the scientific value of parks. Here are just a few national sites that have been instrumental.

When wolves were reintroduced in Yellowstone, some unexpected species benefitted.

Biology

On a quiet hike in Yellowstone National Park, some lucky visitors might get to hear an amazing sound: the howl of a gray wolf.

They might even get to spot one of these beautiful animals darting across the landscape. In fact, today, the chances of seeing a wolf in some parts of this park — such as Lamar Valley — are so good that some people come just to wolf-watch.

But for most of the 20th century, it was impossible to view these animals at all inside the park.

Why Are Pigeons So Good at Surviving in Cities?

Biology

Take a walk in almost any urban city in the world, and you’re likely to encounter a pigeon — or 10. They zoom down streets between high rise buildings; they coo at you as you enter doorways; and they waddle down the pavement in front of you, almost in your way . They’re never too far from your feet as you munch on a snack in the park, always ready to scoop up your crumbs when you aren’t looking; and never far from spilled trash outside a restaurant. If you live in an urban apartment, you might even spot a pair building a nest on your air conditioner or fire escape.