The insects scandalously embracing in this picture are decorated crickets (Grylllodes sigillatus), which can be found in the southwestern United States, among other places. The droplet on the male’s tail is–for want of a better word–a gift. After producing this glob he sticks it onto the package of sperm he places on the female. After the crickets are finished with their encounter, the female will grab the gift and snack on it.
Back in March I described a provocative paper that suggested that plants might be able to get around Mendel’s laws of heredity. Reed Cartwright, the grad student behind De Rerum Natura, left a commentexpressing some deep skepticism. Now he reports that he and Luca Comai of the University of Washington have published a letter in the journal Plant Cell. You can read the letter for free. (There’s another paper commenting on it in the journal, but it requires a subscription.)
Discover, October 31, 2005
Tim White of the University of California at Berkeley has been at the frontier of paleoanthropology since the 1970s, when he helped discover fossils of Australopithecus afarensis, a species that includes the famous “Lucy” skeleton. Since then he has focused his efforts on a small region of central Ethiopia, where he discovered a variety of fossils, from 5.5-million-year-old hominids to some of the earliest members of our own species, dating back 160,000 years.
Discover, October 31, 2005
In the past, most of the big news about human evolution came from remote dig sites in places like Africa or Indonesia. In the future, the big news will come from familiar sites closer to home: hospitals. That’s because hospitals are equipped with powerful new scanning machines primarily used to identify tumors, ballooning blood vessels, bone fractures, and a wide range of disorders in people. Those same scanners also make it possible for paleoanthropologists to look inside the fossils of ancient hominids and see things that until now have been shrouded in mystery.
A new autumn has brought another burst of red and yellow leaves. And it has also brought an interesting new idea about why trees put on this show every year.