It’s hard to miss a musk ox: It looks like a buffalo decked out in a hairy fur coat. And yet this easy-to-spot giant, which lives on tundras from Siberia to Greenland, is still surprisingly mysterious.

“Here is the largest land mammal of the polar zones, but we hardly know anything about musk oxen,” said Joel Berger, a wildlife biologist at Colorado State University and a senior scientist at the Wildlife Conservation Society.

Dr. Berger has studied musk oxen in Alaska for nearly a decade, and on Thursday in the journal Scientific Reports, he and his colleagues reported a disturbing finding: Musk oxen are unexpectedly vulnerable to rapid climate change in the Arctic.

Continue reading “In the Arctic, More Rain May Mean Fewer Musk Oxen” →

Our bodies make roughly 20,000 different kinds of proteins, from the collagen in our skin to the hemoglobin in our blood. Some take the shape of molecular sheets. Others are sculpted into fibers, boxes, tunnels, even scissors.

A protein’s particular shape enables it to do a particular job, whether ferrying oxygen through the body or helping to digest food.

Scientists have studied proteins for nearly two centuries, and over that time they’ve worked out how cells create them from simple building blocks. They have long dreamed of assembling those elements into new proteins not found in nature.

Continue reading “Scientists Are Designing Artisanal Proteins for Your Body” →

The 57-million-year-old fossil is both fearsome and comical: a long-beaked penguin that stood 5 feet 7 inches tall and weighed about 220 pounds.

“It was as tall as a medium-sized man,” said Gerald Mayr, a paleontologist at the Senckenberg Research Institute in Frankfurt, Germany, and lead author of a report in Nature Communications on Tuesday announcing the discovery.

By comparison, the tallest living species, the emperor penguin, reaches about four feet in height. Kumimanu biceae, as the fossil was named, would have towered above the emperor, and above just about all other known ancient penguins.

Continue reading “Ancient Penguins Were Giant Waddling Predators” →

When you drive toward an intersection, the sight of the light turning red will (or should) make you step on the brake. This action happens thanks to a chain of events inside your head.

Your eyes relay signals to the visual centers in the back of your brain. After those signals get processed, they travel along a pathway to another region, the premotor cortex, where the brain plans movements.

Now, imagine that you had a device implanted in your brain that could shortcut the pathway and “inject” information straight into your premotor cortex.

Continue reading “Scientists ‘Inject’ Information Into Monkeys’ Brains” →