Despite containing plenty of its active component, nepetalactone, free-choice trials show that cats overwhelmingly prefer to self-anoint with silver vine - to the point of ignoring catnip when both are available! 🧪
link.springer.com/article/10.1...
Most animals tightly regulate vitamin A because excess is toxic, but some Mexican tetra populations have lost their carotenoid‑cleaving enzyme, Bco2a, so vitamin A accumulates - a state that these cavefish tolerate and may even benefit from! 🧪
www.cell.com/current-biol...
Worker bees physiologically reprogram themselves in order to build queen cells with specific mechanical and chemical cues essential for the development of royal larvae. 🧪
www.nature.com/articles/s41...
Dinoflagellates embedded in a photo‑curable hydrogel were 3D‑printed into engineered shapes. Compressing these living prints produces visible bioluminescence! 🧪
www.science.org/doi/full/10....
Brandon Moore, PhD
Brandon Moore, PhD
Elephants are essential to savanna ecosystems. Without them, dung‑beetle diversity and biomass suffer sharp declines, resulting in delayed dung and seed processing from these impaired beetle‑mediated functions! 🧪
www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...
This newly discovered Paleocene fossil assemblage from Egypt includes 21 fish taxa across 9 orders, demonstrating that modern fish lineages appear earlier than previously thought: within 4 million years of the asteroid impact that killed the dinosaurs! 🧪
www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...
Stretching ~1,200 km across part of the Indian Ocean's Diamantina Zone (4.5-7 km deep), this vast whale "necropolis" consists of five modern and 476 fossil whale-falls that support thriving communities of brittle stars, bone-eating worms, and chemosynthetic clams! 🧪
www.nature.com/articles/s41...
Bumble bees are able to spontaneously move a ball into position so that they can reach a suspended reward demonstrating goal-directed problem-solving which extends beyond simple conditioning! 🧪
www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...
Brandon Moore, PhD
Though many Cretaceous birds lacked tail vanes, Plumadraco bankoorum sported two large, broad-shafted tail feathers that were twice the length of its body and tipped with small pennant-like flags! 🧪
journals.plos.org/plosone/arti...
Brandon Moore, PhD
Ancient squirrel poop preserved in the Yukon permafrost, spanning from the Holocene to Middle Pleistocene, contains megafauna DNA: horses, bison, mammoths, and even big cats! This genetic time capsule suggests that these rodents may have been avid scavengers! 🧪
www.nature.com/articles/s41...
