An Illustration of the Many Ways to Be Multicellular on Planet Earth
How many ways are there to be multicellular on Earth? You know, organisms made of more than one cell? Let’s see . . . plants, animals, and fungi.
Stories by Jennifer Frazer
A Closer Look at a Tiny, Floating Horde
It’s a strange but true fact that the young of many familiar sea creatures look nothing like them. Drifting on currents to distribute their kind, they are an unsung part of the plankton, itself an unsung part of the sea...
Suspicious Virus Makes Rare Cross-Kingdom Leap From Plants to Honeybees
When HIV jumped from chimpanzees to humans sometime in the early 1900′s, it crossed a gulf spanning several million years of evolution.
My Favorite Biology Finds in London’s Natural History Museum
This past year, I made a pilgrimage that every natural history lover should, if possible, make. I visited the Natural History Museum in London, the house that Richard Owen built, the home of the first dinosaur bones ever discovered, the first Archaeopteryx fossil, and a first-edition copy of “On the Origin of Species”...
Love Wine and Tea? Scientists Discover Plant Part Whence Their Pucker Springs
When you take a sip of red wine or black tea, you’re swallowing a stiff swig of tannins. These astringent plant chemicals give the beverages their characteristic pucker.
Wonderful Things: Leaping Fish Spends Entire Life on Land
This is the sixth post in the “Wonderful Things” series. The next time you feel like a fish out of water, think of the Pacific leaping blenny.
On the Curious Motions of Syphilis and Lyme Disease Bacteria
The bacteria that cause syphilis and Lyme Disease have something extraordinary in common: they manage to propel themselves through their environment in spite of the fact their tails are located inside their bodies...
My Interview on the Pacific Northwest Cryptococcus Outbreak on SCPR
I have just a quick update today as I’m working on a long blog post for this weekend. Last week I gave an interview for the Southern California Public Radio show “Take Two” on my feature story in this month’s issue of Scientific American on the outbreak of the yeast Cryptococcus gattii among people living [...]..
Wonderful Things: The Pugnacious, Alien-esque Skeleton Shrimp
This is the fifth post in the Wonderful Things series. This creature is not an insect, nor something you need to worry about exploding from your chest.
Strange Fungi Now Stalk Healthy People
A strange fungal disease in Canada and the U.S. heralds a new threat to human health
You Know You Want To Help (6-Legged) Monarchs. Here’s How.
Last year, a hard year by monarch butterfly migration standards, 60 million monarchs showed up at their misty wintering grounds in Mexico. This year, so far, a mere 3 million have straggled in — and late, too, according to a disturbing must-read piece (“The Year the Monarch Didn’t Appear”) published last Friday in the New [...]..
Accident of Evolution Allows Fungi to Thrive in Our Bodies
Cryptococcal fungi have evolved mechanisms for eluding their protist predators, giving them an inadvertent advantage over look-alike immune cells in humans, porpoises and other mammals
Fungi on the March: My New Feature Story for Scientific American
Healthy humans are strangely impervious to fatal fungi. It usually takes something like a shot in the spine with a contaminated drug to give fungi the necessary upper hand.
How Your Morning Commute Resembles a Fungus
In many fungi, the DNA storage compartments called nuclei are not prisoners of the cells they reside in, the way they are in animals and plants.
How the Mosses That Got Run Over By a Glacier Survived Their Ordeal
A few months ago, scientists revealed that some plucky mosses in Canada managed to do something long thought impossible: survive a 400-year close encounter with the business end of a glacier, and live to sprout another day...
What Do Vampire Squid Really Eat? Hint: It’s Not Blood
Oxygen-poor zones are not just found off the coast of South America, as we saw last time. “Oxygen minimum zones” may occur throughout the world’s ocean’s at mid-water depths where food consumption is high but supplies of oxygen are low...
Missing Nitrogen May Be Vanishing in the Tubes of Giant Bacteria
Off the coast of Mexico’s Baja Peninsula lies a dark, still, deep place. It is called the Soledad Basin, and in it lies a garden of bacteria so large you can see them with your own eyes...
There’s Darwin’s Fungus!
Last winter I wrote a post called “Darwin’s Neon Golf Balls” about a fungus called Cyttaria that Darwin collected during his journey on the Beagle.
Are Cycads Social Plants?
Botanists have long puzzled over a peculiarity of ancient plants called cycads: they have huge, bright, fleshy seeds displayed in enormous cones.
The Private Life of Plankton — in HD
Artistic, black and white photos of plankton — as we saw last time — are fabulous. But what if one hungers for HD? The Plankton Chronicles have got you covered.
