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Content: Volume 4, Issue 3

showing 6-10 of 25 breaks
Bloody-Minded Parasites and Sex

Most plants and animals reproduce sexually. Why is sex so common? This question has intrigued scientists for generations. Even Darwin pondered its prevalence. Sex occurs when two organisms merge their genetic material. Sexual parents produce genetically distinct offspring. Many organisms, however, reproduce asexually, meaning a... click to read more

  • Kayla Stoy | PhD student at Population Biology, Ecology, and Evolution, Emory University, Atlanta, Georgia, USA
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  • Amanda K. Gibson | Assistant Professor at Population Biology, Ecology, and Evolution, Emory University, Atlanta, Georgia, USA
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parasites
Views 6848
Reading time 3.5 min
published on Sep 17, 2018
The Arctic’s singing whales

The bowhead whale is above all, a whale of superlatives. It is the only large whale to live year-round in the Arctic, its "bowed head" allows it to push up through half a meter of ice, it can live up to 200 years and it... click to read more

  • Kate Stafford | Principal Oceanographer at Applied Physics Laboratory, University of Washington, Washington, USA
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whales
Arctic
songs
communication
language
Views 6537
Reading time 4 min
published on Sep 13, 2018
Consumed to death: bacteria cause their own extinction by over-polluting the environment

Living means consuming resources, we buy food to get fed, clothes to stay warm and burn oil and coal to have energy. Where things are consumed waste is produced. However, this waste does not simply disappear but mountains of trash form, plastic covers the ocean... click to read more

  • Christoph Ratzke | Postdoctoral Research Fellow at Physics of Living Systems, Department of Physics, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, MA, USA
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  • Jonas Denk | PhD student at Arnold-Sommerfeld-Center for Theoretical Physics and Center for NanoScience, Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München, Munich, Germany
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environment
pollution
ecological suicide
Views 10891
Reading time 2.5 min
published on Sep 11, 2018
The closest dwarf planet to the Earth is alive

In our solar system, together with the planets, there are other small bodies: asteroids, comets, and dwarf planets, which keep memory of an ancient past. This because they are considered primordial, and as such, they can tell something of the dawn of our solar system. Between... click to read more

  • Andrea Raponi | Postdoctoral Research Fellow at Istituto di Astrofisica e Planetologia Spaziali, INAF, Roma, Italy
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dwarf planets
Ceres
Dawn
Views 6752
Reading time 4 min
published on Sep 5, 2018
Exploring the development of the neocortex

For all our life we've always wondered: what makes us human? A possible answer to that today would be: the neocortex. This evolutionary youngest part of our brain is a nest for such precious mental features as: emotions, reasoning, attention, communication etc. It's true that... click to read more

  • Anatoly Kozlov | Postdoctoral Research Fellow at Department of Genetics & Evolution, Section of Biology, Faculty of Science, University of Geneva, Switzerland
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brain cells
Views 5464
Reading time 4 min
published on Sep 4, 2018