Ricefield Eels Start Female. The Thermostat Decides What Comes Next.
They start female. Somewhere along the way, their surroundings can begin pushing their ovaries toward testes. Researchers think they've found the molecular switch.
Vitals
Jersey City born and raised. Daughter of a pediatrician. YGBFKM virtual contributor. Grew up around medical journals, doctors, and hospitals but still finds the human body, what it can do, and what can happen to it weird, wild, and wonderful.
More Than Half the Memory Connections Disappeared. The Memories Didn't.
The brain can lose more than half its memory-related connections and still remember. What got preserved, and why, is the part science hasn't figured out yet.
Mammals Have One Antibody System. Bats Didn't Get the Memo.
Bats carry Ebola, coronaviruses and worse without breaking a sweat. Turns out they may have been running a completely different immune system.
The Song Stuck in Your Head Leaves a Readable Trace in Your Brain
Ten people imagined familiar melodies without making a sound. What their neural activity revealed was detailed enough for researchers to reconstruct the actual notes.
Your Teeth Know Something Your Oncologist Didn't
The cancer survival gap was nearly two years, and it had something to do with tooth count, but nothing to do with chewing.
The Brain Tumor Is in the Skull. The Fight Against It Is in the Neck.
The tumor is in the skull. So why does removing the immune response from the neck make the treatment stop working?
Your Midlife Brain Swaps Out Its Immune Cells for Angrier Ones
Something in your head has been quietly changing crews since your 50s. Nobody vetted the new hires, and researchers just got their first real look at who showed up.
Saber-Toothed Cats Had Bad Backs and Worse Luck
A predator built for combat carried a nerve disorder 900 times rarer than in modern humans. Researchers now think it wasn't bad luck, it was genetics catching up with a shrinking population.
Reducing the Deadliest Ovarian Cancer by Nearly 80% Doesn't Require Removing Ovaries
Surgeons have been in the room with the answer for decades. What took so long, and what still stands between knowing and doing?
A Mental Disorder and Lung Disease Share a Genetic Link
One of psychiatry's most debated diagnoses just turned up sharing DNA with a completely unrelated organ system. Diagnostic categories, it turns out, are not how biology actually sorts itself.
Bumblebees Lick Their Lips When They Like Something. They Shake Their Heads When They Don't.
A bee brain is smaller than a grain of sand. Apparently that's enough to have opinions about what you're eating. What that means for "feelings" is where it gets complicated.
Your Brain Has a Secret Drain. Aging Is Slowly Closing It.
Cerebrospinal fluid escapes through microscopic holes in a skull bone near your nose. The passage narrows over decades, but a nasal spray restored full flow in older mice.
Every Egg You'll Ever Have. Except Maybe That's Wrong.
The biology fact you never questioned, that women are born with all the eggs they'll ever have, may be resting on a 70-year-old assumption that's starting to crack.
A CRISPR Enzyme That Recognizes Cancer and Shreds It From the Inside
Cancer cells give off a molecular signature no drug has ever been able to touch. This one doesn't bother being gentle with it.
Nerve Fibers the Body Wrote Off Are Growing Back
A genetic "off switch" inside your neurons decides, somewhere around month five of fetal development, that nerve fiber regrowth is done. What if it could be flipped back?
A Poop Transplant Gave Old Mice Their Young Brains Back
Lazy eye treatment only works on brains still able to rewire themselves. So how did a gut microbiome switch that ability back on in animals long past it?
Your Skin Cells Fire Electrical Spikes When You're Injured. They Work Nothing Like a Nerve.
A wound sets off a wave of activity that races across nearby tissue for over an hour, using signaling biology assumed reserved for neurons. What it's actually communicating is still unclear.
A Bat Sat on a Sleeping Boy's Face. He Had No Bite Marks. He Died of Rabies.
A bat lands on a sleeping kid's face. No bite. No scratch. No reason to worry. The family was wrong, and the reason why is something most people still don't know.