Naked mole-rats are highly unusual rodents. These long-lived, cold-blooded mammals are immune to certain types of pain, highly resistant to cancer and able to survive up to 18 minutes without oxygen. They have a highly cooperative social lifestyle, rare among mammals but common in insects... click to read more

Bacteria of the genus Achromatium are known since the 1890s. They occupy the uppermost layer of aquatic sediments at the boundary between the oxic water and the anoxic benthos where Achromatium uses sulfide for energy. Achromatium is recognizable by two distinctive features: (1) it is... click to read more

Many animals use their limbs to handle their food and obtain edible pieces from it. To take a relatable example, we humans peel fruits, fillet fish, and break crabs with our hands and tools. In contrast, most animals that lack limbs (like snakes) would be... click to read more

When the Isthmus of Panama formed, it connected North and South America, allowing the interchange of the previously separated faunas from two continents. A puzzling aspect of this interchange is that North American mammals seem to be more successful. The fossil record shows more mammals... click to read more

As soon as the sun sets, hundreds of Egyptian fruit bats leave their cave and fly out, one-by-one, into the night. Their goal: trees bearing ripe fleshy fruits. They must consume more than twice their own body weight of this relatively uncommon and patchily-distributed resource... click to read more