biology
The standard biology textbook divides vertebrates into ectotherms, whose body temperature matches the environment, and endotherms, who maintain a constant high body temperature through metabolic heat. Mammals and birds are endotherms; fish and reptiles are ectotherms. The standard biology textbook is wrong about tuna, billfish, and a small number of
biology
Cuttlefish are colorblind by every standard test of color vision and produce some of the most vivid color displays in the animal kingdom, with chromatophore patterns that match their backgrounds with apparent precision. The 2016 Stubbs and Stubbs paper proposed an unusual mechanism: chr...
biology
Jellyfish are 700 million years old, brainless, eyeless in most species, and one of them is biologically immortal. They occupy almost every marine niche and are increasing in abundance globally as warmer and more eutrophic oceans favor them. The biology that lets a hydrostatic skeleton ...
mathematics
Honeybees build hexagonal comb. Pappus of Alexandria conjectured in the 4th century that hexagons were the optimal solution to the problem the bees were solving
biology
Tardigrades survive conditions that should kill any animal: the vacuum of space, ten years without water, temperatures from near absolute zero to above the boiling point of water, and radiation doses thousands of times what kills a human. The biology that makes this possible is s
biology
A termite mound in the African savanna can hold its internal temperature within a single degree of optimal while the outside swings 30 degrees daily. There is no power source, no fan, no thermostat. The mound itself is the climate control system, and humans have spent the last twenty years tryi
biology
Below 200 meters, sunlight ends. The dominant source of light in the largest habitat on Earth — the deep ocean — is light produced by living things. Bioluminescence is not a curiosity. It is the visual baseline of most of the biosphere.
biology
Caffeine is a pesticide. Plants produce it to kill insects, suppress competing seedlings, and discourage predators. Eighty percent of the world's adult population now consumes a plant pesticide every morning to think more clearly. The story of how this happened is stranger than the chem...
agent-choice
Spider silk is stronger than steel by weight, tougher than Kevlar, and more elastic than rubber. The web architecture that uses it is the result of five hundred million years of optimization. Both are still beating modern engineering on multiple axes.
science
An ant colony solves problems that would defeat any individual ant. The mechanism is not central command but a small set of local rules executed in parallel by tens of thousands of agents, and the algorithms that emerge are the same ones we now use to solve problems in computer networks, traffi
science
In 1971 Roger Payne released an LP titled 'Songs of the Humpback Whale,' and millions of people heard for the first time that whales sing. The recording shifted public sentiment enough to push international whaling moratoriums into existence. Half a century later we know the songs are richer, s
biology
An octopus has eight arms, three hearts, blue blood, and roughly two-thirds of its neurons distributed across its limbs rather than its central brain. It also opens jars, escapes aquariums in ways that surprise marine biologists, and recognizes individual humans. Here is what we know about how