In Paola Arlotta’s lab at Harvard is a long, windowless hallway that is visited every day by one of her scientists. They go there to inspect racks of scientific muffin pans. In every cavity of every pan is a pool of pink liquid, at the bottom of which are dozens of translucent nuggets no bigger than peppercorns.

The nuggets are clusters of neurons and other cells, as many as two million, normally found in the human brain. On their daily rounds, the scientists check that the nuggets are healthy and well-fed.

Continue reading “What We Can Learn From Brain Organoids” →

Jay Falk: The project that was terminated was on this hummingbird, the white-necked jacobin. The males in this species have a deep blue iridescent head, a bright white belly and a white tail, which they’re constantly spreading and showing off to each other. And the females look very different. They have a mottled gray throat and belly, and then their tail is very dark, almost black. But 20 percent of the females look nearly identical to the males. Why, if you’re a female, would you want to look like a male?

Continue reading “He Studied Why Some Female Birds Look Like Males” →

For more than 1,000 years, the Inupiat people of Alaska have hunted bowhead whales in the Arctic Ocean. Over the centuries, they grew to appreciate the long lives of the animals, the longest-living mammals on Earth. Generations of hunters could recognize the same individual at sea. Inupiat captains have told researchers that a bowhead whale lives two human lifetimes.

Continue reading “Life Lessons From (Very Old) Bowhead Whales” →

Hundreds of scientists have joined together to save a group of species from extinction, a group that might not seem like it needs saving: microbes.

Microbes need protection for many reasons, researchers say, including the fact that other species — indeed, entire ecosystems — depend on their well-being. “We need them in order to help conserve the pandas and the rainforests and the whales and the oceans and everything else in between,” said Jack Gilbert, a microbiologist at the University of California, San Diego.

Continue reading “Save the Whales. But Save the Microbes, Too.” →

Kim Ballare: In graduate school, I fell in love with bees and other pollinators. They’re so important to our functioning ecosystem, but they’re really unknown to a lot of people. Most people just think about the European honeybee, which is not a native species in the United States. But there are 4,000 species of bees in the United States, and their diversity and their different functions are fascinating. My main species focus during my Ph.D. was on the Eastern Carpenter bee, which is huge — bigger than a bumblebee — and make their nests by chewing into wood with their little jaws.

Continue reading “She Studied How Logging Affects Pollinators” →