Learning to love Lucilia

Baron Dominique-Jean Larrey, observed in the 18th and 19th century that maggots of a certain “blue fly” only removed dead tissue and had a positive effect on the remaining healthy tissue. Reports of their use to treat the wounds of war date back to the...

Algal biofuels

Sacrifice for the Swarm

questions. Was this amount of death simply collateral damage or did it have any bearing on the mechanism of SR? Were the dead cells providing a physical barrier against antibiotic penetration or had they helped theremaining bacteria evade the antibiotic...

Inside the killing jar

with a glass lid. It's identical to the many other cases I can see around me and, like them, it contains more than a hundred dead beetles on pins. In fact, Barclay estimates that there are more than 10 million beetles in the NHM's collection. From tiny...

Could legalising the trade in rhino horn save the species?

Sustainable horn harvesting could ensure rhino are worth more alive than dead The Biologist Vol 63(6) p7 Like the leopard, lion and elephant, white and black rhinos are part of Africa's 'big five' and are under increasing threat. They are hunted...

Salt Survivors

vents where the water is very hot (thermophiles and hyperthermophiles); in saline ponds and salt lakes such as the Dead Sea (halophiles); in marine and salt marsh environments, where salt concentrations fluctuate over a broad range (halotolerant...

Ground rules

and when soils dry out or other unfavourable conditions occur, nematodes encyst or form a resting stage. Nematodes live on dead and decaying organic matter or living roots, or prey on living organisms. Earthworms are perhaps the best known of the soil...

Pinch point

the total loss of the mother’s eggs. Thankfully, nature has a solution. The crayfish mothers tend to their eggs, removing dead ones with a small claw-like appendage at the end of each leg. This ideally stops the spread of natural fungi from one egg to...

"It's so simple to make brain organoids. There is even a kit you can buy that has everything in it"

do on organoids because they are not organised and have no senses. For example perturbational complexity, done on brain dead or potentially brain dead people to test if they are actually brain dead: you stimulate a part of the brain, and then you look...

Invisible allies

of 1942, as German troops encircled the Russian city of Stalingrad, Nazi commanders began to receive bizarre reports of dead bodies disappearing from German field hospitals. In the dead of night, Soviet scouts were crossing the front line daringly to...

Staring death in the face

humour' important to people in your line of work? There has to be gallows humour, but it is never disrespectful to the dead. At the crime scene in Kosovo I mentioned earlier, we had SO13, the anti-terrorist police force, as our security. They told me...

RSB Photography competitions shortlist announced

In biochemistry it is an intermediate in the citric acid cycle, which occurs in the metabolism of all aerobic organisms. Dead leaf or almost Photographer: Guilhem Duvot A dead leaf grasshopper. The perfect camouflage - nature is amazing. I saw the...

Striking leopard gecko and patterned autumnal leaves win RSB Photographer of the Year competition

In biochemistry it is an intermediate in the citric acid cycle, which occurs in the metabolism of all aerobic organisms. Dead leaf or almost Photographer: Guilhem Duvot A dead leaf grasshopper. The perfect camouflage - nature is amazing. I saw the...

The Matter of Life

Like so many physicists, I am excited and intrigued when order appears, unbidden, in collections of objects, living or dead – not only textbook examples, like crystalline lattices, but macroscopic manifestations, like stripe patterns in clouds or sand...

The Motorcycle Diaries

rescued one-eyed crested caracara in Chile, named Pirata Last year outside Mendoza, Argentina, 34 Andean condors were found dead next to the corpse of a puma, all due to carbofuran. Such tragedy is as heart-breaking as it is needless. Further education...

A cultural phenomenon

real: animals that exist as cultural archetypes, not flesh-and-blood species awaiting discovery. Maybe cryptozoology is dead. But long live cryptozoology. Darren Naish is a palaeozoological researcher, author, editor, consultant and lectureraffiliated...

Stress in the city

encounter was the final straw for city officials. After being designated a public safety threat, Carl was shot dead by US Department of Agriculture agents1. Nobody wants encounters like this, but as our urban spaces expand into wild areas and animals...

Reports

nitrogen. In the cold, wet matrix below the green moss there is no decay – in fact the mosses from the frozen peat are not dead: they will sprout again if brought into the light and ‘warmth’. Dr Shaun Russell, Director of Treborth Botanical Gardens,...

How to Fail Well

science is built on the back of failure – it is literally part of the scientific process. The mistakes, the errors, the dead ends, the incorrect hypotheses – all of these play a crucial role in getting to robustand replicable explanations. And...

Sparking new life

up and drop the seeds to the floor. There are various benefits for these green first responders. In a post-fire landscape, dead bark, wood and leaf litter have been removed. Each of these can choke plant growth and block new nutrients returning to the...