Biology

Enlarge / The spider in question, without its young. Milk comes from mammals. It’s kind of a distinctly mammalian thing. Even our government knows that. And yet, Chinese scientists have documented jumping spiders that provide their young with droplets of a nutrient-rich fluid from a furrow on the mother’s body. It is the sole nourishment…

If you have ADHD, chances are higher that your siblings do, too. Estimates differ as to how strong the connection is, but the arrows point in the same direction: genetics helps determine someone's risk for ADHD. Beyond that, we still have myriad questions and not many answers—which genes play a role? And how do those…

Enlarge / He Jiankui, the scientist who has claimed to have led an effort to gene-edit humans. On Sunday, news reports indicated that the first gene-edited human babies had been born in China. As of right now, the information on what, exactly, has been accomplished is confusing. The scientist behind the announcement has made a…

Enlarge / The first printout of the human genome to be presented as a series of books, displayed in the 'Medicine Now' room at the Wellcome Collection, London. The human genome sequence, first published in 2001, has some important information missing. The latest version of it, called GRCh38, has a monstrous 3.1 gigabases of information—but…

Enlarge / A baby Guinea baboon in its pre-diddling days goes for a ride. Male Guinea baboons have a curious habit. They will walk—or sometimes run—to another male baboon and say a quick hello in a very enthusiastic way: with a “mutual penis diddle”. Or sometimes it’s a quick mount from behind. Other times, they…

Enlarge / The flu virus, showing the H and N proteins on its surface. Llama antibodies are different from ours. Our antibodies are a mix of two pairs of proteins, heavy and light, wrapped around each other. Llamas, camels, and sharks all use only a pair of heavy chains. Because they are smaller, they can…

Enlarge / Pink vs. blue—innocent gender self-expression or material wealth creating more entrenched gender stereotypes? In Sweden, girls are just as likely to go to school and university as boys are. Women make up a greater proportion of the country’s professional and technical workers than any other country in the world. And their representation in…

Enlarge / The two systems developed into therapies by today's Nobel winners. For both systems, the APC is an immune cell that presents proteins to the T cell so that it can determine if they're recognized. On the left, if CTLA-4 (yellow) is engaged on the T cell, it tones down the immune response. The…

We've known for a long time that we can limit malaria infections by controlling the mosquitos that transmit them. But that knowledge hasn't translated into control efforts that have always been completely successful. Many of the approaches we've used to control mosquitos have caused environmental problems, and mosquito populations are large enough that they have…