Browsing: Lens_biology

You Can “Catch” Stress Through a TV Screen

Health

Your heart rate speeds up, your breathing quickens. Your muscles tighten. Your stomach ties itself in knots. All of these changes are symptoms of the condition called stress. When animals, including humans, are under acute stress, their bodies respond with a powerful neurochemical chain reaction. Glucose, the fuel for our cells, is released into the […]

Evolution May Be Drunk, But It’s Serious About Making Brains

Evolution

A new study shows that the comb jelly Pleurobrachia bachei evolved its complex features, including neurons and muscles, separately from animals like us.Leonid Moroz and Mat Citarella Our brains, perched atop a network of nerve cells that ascend the length of our bodies, are thought to have arisen once in an animal hundreds of millions […]

The Natural World Is an Elephant World

Zoology

Elephant dung perfumes the air, a fresh, sweet smell, with undertones of sour vegetation. These balls of waste, scattered across the Kenyan savanna, carry the aroma of the bush, an open sea of acacia trees, aloe vera, Sansevieria, and drapes of elephant pudding, a succulent vine that tastes like salty snap beans but smells like […]

Strange Eyeless Fish Creates Its Own Sonar Signals to “See”

Evolution

The blind cavefish alongside two of its sighted relativesImage Courtesy of NYU Deep in some pitch-black, underwater caves in Mexico, there lives a peculiar little pinkish-white fish. Only about four inches long, this albino has taste buds on the outside of its lower jaw, sleeps very little, and, most interestingly, has no eyes.  Nautilus Members […]

Mood Ring—Cell Phones Can Hear Depression in People’s Voices

Three examples of speech from a person with bipolar disorder. The rows show one second each of manic, euthymic (normal), and depressed speech. The colored rectangles show various features extracted from the speech, where color indicates the amplitude of that feature for that speaker. The 10 features measure qualities of the person’s voice like pitch, […]