News by Subject Biology

Eight years, more than 500 articles and no less than 13 000 pages since its launch, Pensoft's flagship botanical title Phytokeys, celebrates its 100th issue. In its anniversary issue the journal features two new species and taxonomic revisions on families Brassicaceae, Zamiaceae and Menispermaceae.

A new study by researchers at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and the Applied Physics Laboratory, Johns Hopkins University has brought science one step closer to a molecular-level understanding of how patterns form in living tissue. The researchers engineered bacteria that, when incubated and grown, exhibited stochastic Turing patterns: a 'lawn' of synthesized bacteria in a petri dish fluoresced an irregular pattern of red polka dots on a field of green.

Researchers at the University of Montana recently discovered that hybridization played an important role in snowshoe hares' ability to match their environment.

Researchers reporting in Current Biology on June 21 have found that nocturnal Bogong moths, like migratory birds, depend on the Earth's magnetic field to guide them on their way. The discovery offers the first reliable evidence that nocturnal insects can use the Earth's magnetic field to steer flight during migration, the researchers say.

A remarkably high diversity of goblin spiders is reported from the Sri Lankan forests by two researchers from the National Institute of Fundamental Studies, Kandy, Sri Lanka. Nine new species are described in a recent paper in the open-access journal Evolutionary Systematics, where six are named after goblins and brownies from Enid Blyton's children's books. There are now 45 goblin spider species belonging to 13 genera known to inhabit the island country.

A team of scientists and students, conducting research aboard the R/V Akademik Ioffe, will offer select museums, as well as classrooms and citizen scientists worldwide, an opportunity to explore with them in real time a dramatically changing Arctic Ocean, and to discuss their research in the first-ever live, interactive broadcasts from the fabled Northwest Passage.

Humans and other primates are outliers among mammals for having nails instead of claws. But how, when and why we transitioned from claws to nails has been an evolutionary head-scratcher.