Giant squid beaks turned up in whale stomachs long before anyone filmed the animal. An oceanologist explains why people are missing from the deep sea.
Read more →
Besides electrical spikes, brain cells can wrap non-coding RNA in membrane bubbles and send it to neighbours, changing how their genes work. A biologist explains.
Read more →
Women have two X chromosomes and men one, so female cells wrap one X in a coat of non-coding RNA and switch it off. A biologist explains why it matters.
Read more →
Mice exposed to stress had pups that were anxious from birth. Biologist Aleksey Shatskikh explains how small RNAs in sperm can carry that signal to the embryo.
Read more →
Drilling for oil under the sea, people sequenced the mud and met fungi, bacteria and viruses. One oceanologist says they may outweigh the rest of life on Earth.
Read more →
Farmers pour 10 million tonnes of fungicide a year on fields. Mycologist Mikhail Vishnevsky says the fungi that survive fly in through hospital windows.
Read more →
Fungi that eat plastic are real. A mycologist explains why the people who found one got scared, and what a loose strain could do to a civilisation built on plastic.
Read more →
Fungi that grew in Chernobyl may feed on radiation. A mycologist explains why the same trait makes them a threat on a space station and an ally on Mars.
Read more →
Mycologist Mikhail Vishnevsky on why mycelia never merge: three sibling spores in a dish end up at war, and a fungus waters its birches only for itself.
Read more →