Comb jellies, the delicate bells that pulse their iridescent bodies through the ocean, are some of the strangest creatures on earth. “They are the aliens of the sea,” said Leonid Moroz, a neuroscientist at the Whitney Laboratory for Marine Bioscience in St. Augustine, Fla.

The aliens belong to the oldest branch of the animal family tree. They split from the ancestors of all other living animals about 700 million years ago and have traveled down their own odd evolutionary path ever since. Studies by Dr. Moroz and others suggest that comb jellies evolved their own nervous system, as well as their own muscles and digestive tract — complete with two anuses.

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A fruit fly’s brain is smaller than a poppy seed, but it packs tremendous complexity into that tiny space. Over 140,000 neurons are joined together by more than 490 feet of wiring, as long as four blue whales placed end to end.

Hundreds of scientists mapped out those connections in stunning detail in a series of papers published on Wednesday in the journal Nature. The wiring diagram will be a boon to researchers who have studied the nervous system of the fly species, Drosophila melanogaster, for generations.

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Giorgia Auteri is still haunted by what she saw in an abandoned mine in 2014. As a graduate student studying how bats hibernate, she had frequently climbed into mines and caves to observe thousands of sleeping bats hanging from the walls.

But when she walked into the mine in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula in 2014, she discovered heaps of dead bats on the floor.

Continue reading “A Fungus Decimated American Bats. Now Scientists Are Fighting Back.” →

The sky may not seem like a promising place to find life. But in the 1920s, scientists flew planes across the United States and caught floating spores.

A century later, the living atmosphere remains a fairly mysterious place. On Monday, researchers reported that on flights over Japan, at altitudes as high as 10,000 feet, they had caught hundreds of different types of bacteria and fungi. The team estimated that the microbes had flown over 1,200 miles when they were captured. Most intriguing of all, some of the species might be able to cause diseases in people.

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In the 1960s, Jane Goodall started spending weeks at a time in Gombe Stream National Park in Tanzania watching chimpanzees. One of her most important discoveries was that the apes regularly made gestures to one another. Male chimpanzees tipped their heads up as a threat, for example, while mothers motioned to their young to climb on their backs for a ride.

Generations of primatologists have followed up on Dr. Goodall’s work, discovering over 80 meaningful gestures made by not only chimpanzees, but also bonobos, gorillas and orangutans.

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