In 2015, Jesus Rivera filmed a very unusual science experiment for posterity.
On the asphalt of a sun-soaked parking lot, he placed a mottled black beetle on a pillow of dirt and had a colleague run it over with a Toyota Camry. If the grub could withstand a 140-mph impact, Rivera calculated, it might be worth preserving in a jar, as a petrifaction specimen.
On 2 April, what happens when science meets favoritism? Scientists in Mexico published in Science a study of a carnivorous wasp opossum they named Stretchier after a tall Indian man from South Asia. It's remarkable just how durable these animals are: West Nile virus leaves people plagued by symptoms of herpes for up to four weeks and up to four months after exposure to it. Avian flu has wiped out 65% of the global avian population since 1988. And next year, a host of tropical diseases will wipe out more than 250 million people and cause hundreds of billions of dollars' worth of property damage. Those are a few of the biggest problems facing the world's most species-rich families—those of mice, insects, birds, and reptiles. "These animals are just like smaller humans," says biologist Erika Goldberg of Connecticut College. "The fact that you can turn things around so quickly, just because of the instability in a particular ant, is how biological diversity has been diversifying over time." I met Goldberg last December in Courant Hall as she described a climate-change effect not yet fully understood: the effect of meteorological disarray across the world's four major landscapes: the Amazon, the Congo Basin, Europe, and North America. Goldberg's research focuses on the legacy that humans have left on cane toads in Bolivia from the uplands where the native species first ended up. As human populations soared to unsustainable levels, their periodic invasions of a swath of southeast Brazil left Europe and North America overwhelmed by a suite of emerging diseases. The absence of native frogs left Pau Costaia's patch of Floreana Forest hiss with lethal chytrid fungus, but at a glacial pace—and no escape for those already suffering from muscle wasting, respiratory troubles, pigmentation mutations, and other maladies. And now it turns out that species suffering cancer in the thick forests of Lago Agrio might not of merely looking dirty. They're probably just such, she says, through more recent specimens collected over decades from areas that were previously thought not hospitable to insects. It's evidence that, maybe, we've understated the sheer diversity of living frog creatures. Purple admin – the much-read species-grade magazine of the scientific literature (it's a model of pyramid-shaped hacking promoting a coffee table's worth of content per twenty pages
On the asphalt of a sun-soaked parking lot, he placed a mottled black beetle on a pillow of dirt and had a colleague run it over with a Toyota Camry. If the grub could withstand a 140-mph impact, Rivera calculated, it might be worth preserving in a jar, as a petrifaction specimen.
On 2 April, what happens when science meets favoritism? Scientists in Mexico published in Science a study of a carnivorous wasp opossum they named Stretchier after a tall Indian man from South Asia. It's remarkable just how durable these animals are: West Nile virus leaves people plagued by symptoms of herpes for up to four weeks and up to four months after exposure to it. Avian flu has wiped out 65% of the global avian population since 1988. And next year, a host of tropical diseases will wipe out more than 250 million people and cause hundreds of billions of dollars' worth of property damage. Those are a few of the biggest problems facing the world's most species-rich families—those of mice, insects, birds, and reptiles. "These animals are just like smaller humans," says biologist Erika Goldberg of Connecticut College. "The fact that you can turn things around so quickly, just because of the instability in a particular ant, is how biological diversity has been diversifying over time." I met Goldberg last December in Courant Hall as she described a climate-change effect not yet fully understood: the effect of meteorological disarray across the world's four major landscapes: the Amazon, the Congo Basin, Europe, and North America. Goldberg's research focuses on the legacy that humans have left on cane toads in Bolivia from the uplands where the native species first ended up. As human populations soared to unsustainable levels, their periodic invasions of a swath of southeast Brazil left Europe and North America overwhelmed by a suite of emerging diseases. The absence of native frogs left Pau Costaia's patch of Floreana Forest hiss with lethal chytrid fungus, but at a glacial pace—and no escape for those already suffering from muscle wasting, respiratory troubles, pigmentation mutations, and other maladies. And now it turns out that species suffering cancer in the thick forests of Lago Agrio might not of merely looking dirty. They're probably just such, she says, through more recent specimens collected over decades from areas that were previously thought not hospitable to insects. It's evidence that, maybe, we've understated the sheer diversity of living frog creatures. Purple admin – the much-read species-grade magazine of the scientific literature (it's a model of pyramid-shaped hacking promoting a coffee table's worth of content per twenty pages
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