“From the perch atop the viewing tower, the spiders carefully surveyed the scene before descending the tower and climbing up a walkway. Most [Portia jumping] spiders chose the path that led to the meal, even if this meant moving away from the prey and passing the incorrect walkway on the way.”
“[T]he Iron Age sample also had a high abundance of two species of fungi: Penicillium roqueforti — commonly used in the fermentation of cheese — and Saccharomyces cerevisiae, used for fermenting bread and alcoholic beverages like beer, mead, and wine.”
“[T]he pfhrp2 deletions had arisen recently and hadn’t had time for mutation and recombination to scramble the DNA sequences nearby. So, all the [malaria] parasites that carry the pfhrp2 deletion seemed to have inherited it from the same ancestor, that ancestor was very recent, and there was a selective pressure that was driving the expansion of parasites that inherited the deletion.”
“A major reason that these odd-sided cells were necessary is that the bees will start building at different sites by making honeycombs with different orientations. Thus, as these different segments grow to meet each other, their hexagonal arrays will be oriented with incompatible angles.”
“There is a major lab, the Wuhan Institute of Virology, that studies and experiments on coronaviruses, located in the same province what appears to have been the initial outbreak. But no one has even come close to making a positive case for a causal link beyond those coincidental facts and a shrugging ‘it’s possible.’”
“The findings suggest that some of the most important members of our gastrointestinal menagerie—the ‘keystone taxa,’ as Candela and his colleagues put it—have been with us even longer than modern humans have existed.”
“Here we encounter our first surprise. The normal RNA characters are A, C, G and U. U is also known as ‘T’ in DNA. But here we find a Ψ, what is going on?”
“Cattle with the painted eyes on their rumps were significantly more likely to survive than those cattle that had crosses painted on their butts and those that weren’t painted at all.”