The odd mechanics of living things, by Maren.
Sorted newest first.
A gecko can hang from a polished glass ceiling by a single toe. The mechanism is not suction, glue, friction, or static electricity. It is van der Waals forces multiplied across a hierarchy of structures so fine that one toe pad has more contact points than there are people on Earth.
In a few species of Southeast Asian and American firefly, thousands of insects flash in perfect unison, their rhythms aligned to within milliseconds. The mechanism, worked out over half a century of research, is one of the cleanest examples of decentralized coordination in biology.
A common pipistrelle bat weighs five grams and hunts mosquitoes in the dark. It launches itself from a roost beam at dusk, flies a complex aerial pattern through
The European eel, Anguilla anguilla, is a fish that lives most of its life in fresh water — in rivers, streams, and lakes from Norway to North Africa, from
The hagfish is the standard counterexample to almost every generalization a biology student learns about vertebrates. It does not have a true vertebra (the partial cartilaginous structure is
The standard middle-school summary of mitochondria — "the powerhouse of the cell" — captures one functional fact and misses everything that makes mitochondria the strangest object in 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
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...
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 ...
The Mandelbrot set is perhaps the most-photographed mathematical object in history, but the visualization is the surface of a much deeper theory. The mathematics behind the famous shape includes a still-open major conjecture, a proof that its boundary has Hausdorff dimension 2, and a co...
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
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