Few people have heard of the mite harvestman, and fewer still would recognize it at close range. The animal is a relative of the far more familiar daddy longlegs. But its legs are stubby rather than long, and its body is only as big as a sesame seed.

To find mite harvestmen, scientists go to dark, humid forests and sift through the leaf litter. The animals respond by turning motionless, making them impossible for even a trained eye to pick out. “They look like grains of dirt,” said Gonzalo Giribet, an invertebrate biologist at Harvard.

Continue reading “A Daddy Longlegs Tells the Story of the Continents’ Big Shifts” →

To understand the rules that govern life, biologists often seek out the weird extremes. And when it comes to family life, it is hard to find a weirder example than that of a common wasp known as Copidosoma floridanum.

“You couldn’t dream up a more surreal life cycle than these guys have,” said Mike Strand, a professor at the University of Georgia.

Copidosoma floridanum, native throughout the United States, is a parasite. The female wasps lay one or two eggs inside the egg of the cabbage looper moth. As the host egg develops into a caterpillar, the wasp egg grows into a microscopic cluster of grapes.

Continue reading “Lessons From an Insect’s Life Cycle: Extreme Sibling Rivalry” →

When Martin Nowak was in high school, his parents thought he would be a nice boy and become a doctor. But when he left for the University of Vienna, he abandoned medicine for something called biochemistry. As far as his parents could tell, it had something to do with yeast and fermenting. They became a little worried. When their son entered graduate school, they became even more worried. He announced that he was now studying games.

In the end, Dr. Nowak turned out all right. He is now the director of the Program for Evolutionary Dynamics at Harvard. The games were actually versatile mathematical models that Dr. Nowak could use to make important discoveries in fields as varied as economics and cancer biology.

Continue reading “In Games, an Insight Into the Rules of Evolution” →

NEW YORK — A panel of scientists convened by America’s leading scientific advisory group says the hunt for extraterrestrial life should be greatly expanded to include what they call “weird life”: organisms that lack DNA or other molecules found in life as we know it.

“The committee’s investigation makes clear that life is possible in forms different from those on Earth,” the scientists conclude in their report, “The Limits of Organic Life in Planetary Systems,” published by the National Research Council.

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