“[T]he coffee it makes is good. … That grown in South Sudan had ‘notes of raspberry coulis, figs, plums, and milk chocolate.’ It has comparable caffeine levels to Arabica, so can be an appropriate substitute as growing conditions for Arabica continue to decline.”
“Wolves with antibodies against [Toxoplasma gondii] were significantly more likely to disperse (leave their packs and set out on their own) and to become pack leaders. Pursuing both of these courses of action constitutes aggressive and risky wolf behavior.”
“The spiders searched the part of the web where the cricket had been—the sheet or the lines—which indicated a memory of prey location. And when Sergi stole prey from the gumfooted lines, the spiders made more searches for prey that was especially large relative to themselves.”
“[O]ctopuses can alter the coloration of their skin, with darker colors typically being indicative of aggression. The authors found that octopuses with dark coloration threw debris more forcefully and were more likely to hit another octopus.”
“They also found that, in general, the size of the birds’ repertoire decreased as anthropogenic noise increased, especially when the birds were exposed to levels of anthropogenic noise that were above the usual noise to which they were accustomed.”
“[P]eople who were homozygous (had two copies) of this protective gene variant involved in antigen presentation were 40 percent more likely to survive the plague than those with two copies of a deleterious variant, which encodes a broken protein.”
“GISAID, a global database of influenza virus genetic sequences that typically gets thousands of flu sequences each year, has not received a single B/Yamagata sequence with specimen collection data after March 2020.”
“The original silphion was said to have appeared suddenly, after a great downpour. Miski observed that, when rains came to Cappadocia in April, Ferula drudeana would spring from the ground, growing up to six feet in just over a month.”
“[T]he cases may arise from a co-infection of two different viruses—one of which could be an adenovirus and the other a hitchhiking virus—in children who also happen to have a specific genetic predisposition to hepatitis.”
“[T]he ancient wolf genomes clustered together in time. That is, a given wolf was most likely to be closely related to other wolves alive at around the same time, no matter where those wolves lived on the planet.”
“[T]he fascination with humans and the failure to understand basic condor etiquette were signs of a more profound problem. Those first reintroduced birds were released too young, and had not had contact with adults who could teach them how a condor behaves.”
“[I]t turned out that the strain of plague that ravaged northern Kyrgyzstan in 1338–1339 was an ancestor of every other 14th-century plague genome that has ever been sequenced. The plague strain from the Lake Issyk-Kul villages also seems to be the most recent common ancestor of four Y. pestis lineages that circulate in modern rodent populations.”
“From the 40 [vacuumed DNA] samples they took, the team members identified 49 different species, from a rhino down to the guppies in the Rainforest Room. … Some of the detected species — such as the water vole and red squirrel — weren’t even zoo animals; they were just nearby.”
“A study from J&J in September [2021] showed that after a second dose, the J&J vaccine was about 91% effective, nearly matching the efficacy of the Pfizer and Moderna shots after two doses.”
“Searle looked at two other locations much further to the south: the Azores and Madeira — and in both places they found mice there carried the same genetic signature as that carried by the Viking mouse. Crucially, they found very few mice that carried genetic signatures like those found in mouse populations in Portugal, whose mariners were also reckoned to be the first to settle on these islands.”