Ellie Harper 
The Blood-Pressure Pill That Fakes Starvation (If You’re a Worm) A drug already sitting in medicine cabinets for high blood pressure made lab worms live longer, and it did that without a single missed meal. In a 2023 study published in Aging Cell, researchers from the University of Liverpool, ETH Zürich, and Harvard Medical School, … Read more
The Restless Widow When a rhesus macaque (Macaca mulatta) mother on Cayo Santiago, Puerto Rico, loses her infant, she doesn’t shut down. She speeds up. A 2025 study in Biology Letters, led by Emily A. Johnson at University College London with Flóra Talyigás and Alecia Carter, followed 11 rhesus macaque mothers on the island after … Read more
A single inhale from a house cat doesn’t travel through its nose as one sheet of air. It splits, immediately, into two separate streams: one slow current that gets cleaned and humidified before it ever reaches the lungs, and one fast, direct stream that shoots straight to the smell-processing tissue at the back of the … Read more
**Corrected issues:** 1. “grew up and avoided music outright”, awkward phrasing, tightened to “avoided music outright as adults” for clarity (they were already described as adults). 2. “fewer/less”, “The more strongly a female’s auditory cortex responded… the less she liked it” is correct (uncountable liking), no change needed. 3. Minor comma and flow fix in … Read more
A fossil pulled from a quarry in Gloucestershire, England, in 1969 has been sitting in the Natural History Museum’s collection under someone else’s name for more than fifty years. It was cataloged as Terrestrisuchus gracilis, a small, land-dwelling Late Triassic crocodylomorph already well known from the same site. It was not Terrestrisuchus. Nobody checked closely … Read more
A One-Minute Crawl That Takes Six A sea turtle hatchling has one job on its first night out of the nest: get from the sand to the surf before the sun and the crabs find it. Florida Atlantic University researchers built 49-foot (15-meter) artificial crawlways on three Florida beaches, Juno Beach, Jupiter, and Boca Raton, … Read more
Two Halves, Hundreds of Miles Apart A rhynchocephalian skeleton pressed into limestone in Germany’s Solnhofen Archipelago spent decades split between two countries without anyone noticing it was one animal. One slab sat in the Senckenberg Museum in Frankfurt, cataloged as SMF R414. The other, cataloged as NHMUK PV R 2741, sat in the Natural History … Read more
Meet B, a ribbon worm named Baseodiscus punnetti who is at least 26 years old, and probably closer to 30. That figure comes from biologist Jon Allen and colleagues, published in the Journal of Experimental Zoology. Stretched out in his tank, B measures about 3 feet (1 meter) long. He has lived that long as … Read more
Eight Identical Arms. Two Different Jobs. Sixty-four percent of everything a wild octopus’s arms do comes from the front four alone. The rear four cover the other 36 percent, and the two halves are doing almost entirely different jobs. Chelsea Bennice, a research fellow at Florida Atlantic University working with the Marine Biological Laboratory in … Read more
Two Teeth, One Broken Assumption Pull a mammoth tooth from the ground in British Columbia, Canada, and you expect it to confirm what everyone already knows: that woolly mammoths and Columbian mammoths kept to themselves. Two teeth just did the opposite. A study published in the journal Biology Letters on September 24, 2025, led by … Read more
