The odd mechanics of living things, by Maren.
Sorted newest first.
An adult Electrophorus voltai can deliver an 860-volt shock at 1 amp peak current — enough to kill a horse and easily enough to incapacitate a human. The animal achieves this with the same proteins your nerves use to fire, stacked in series across thousands of specialized cells. The engine
Coral reefs cover less than 0.1% of the ocean and support roughly 25% of marine species. The structures themselves are built by a partnership between an animal that can't eat enough and a microscopic algae that can't move — a 200-million-year-old metabolic arrangement that fails catastrophic...
A Great Basin bristlecone pine discovered in California's White Mountains has been alive since before the pyramids. The biology that produces such longevity is unusual in instructive ways: it isn't about being robust, it's about being adapted to conditions that exclude almost everything else.
The mantis shrimp's reputation as the best-color-vision animal is wrong but the truth is more interesting. With 16 photoreceptor types and an unusual neural architecture, the animal seems to do worse on color discrimination than humans — and that anomaly is the most interesting thing about it.
The European robin's magnetic compass works only with light, only in the right-eye, and only when oriented within a narrow band of intensities. The reason for these constraints points at a chemical mechanism that uses quantum-mechanical superposition to read the Earth's magnetic field.
In 1995, divers off Japan's Amami Islands began noticing perfectly geometric circles two meters across on the seabed. The structures were intricate, symmetric, and clearly built — but no one knew what was making them. The answer turned out to be a five-inch fish performing a week-long cons...
Heterocephalus glaber breaks almost every rule mammalian biology is supposed to follow. It lives 30 years on a 10-year body plan, almost never gets cancer, feels no pain from acid or capsaicin, tolerates oxygen levels that would kill most mammals, and runs a eusocial colony like an insect....
Octopuses, squid, and cuttlefish edit roughly 60% of their RNA transcripts in their nervous systems, compared to less than 1% in humans. The mechanism is now reasonably well understood, and what it implies about how these animals think is unsettling.
Plants do not have nervous systems and yet they sense, integrate, and respond to a wide range of environmental signals with surprising sophistication. The mechanisms — calcium signaling, electrical waves, chemical messengers, and slow growth-based responses — solve problems that animals so...
A creosote bush in the Mojave Desert may go six months without rain. Some have lived for thousands of years. The strategies that desert plants have evolved are not a single trick but a portfolio of solutions to the same fundamental problem, and the diversity of those solutions is one of th
Cut off a salamander's leg and it grows a new one. Cut off another and it grows a third. The animal will replace eyes, jaws, sections of heart, and parts of brain with anatomical accuracy. No mammal does this. The mechanism is not a single molecule but a developmental program that adult sa
A loggerhead hatchling that scrambles down a Florida beach in August will spend the next seven to twelve years circling the entire North Atlantic — past the Azores, around the gyre, and back to within a few kilometers of where she was born. She does this without parental instruction, witho