The Book of Barely Imagined Beings

...when we generate evolutionary explanations for why we behave the way we do, for why our bodies function as they do, we need to be cogniz...

Birds in Nebraska have evolved shorter wings, which may help them avoid dying on roads by taking off quickly and darting away from cars. ...

...Ethologists who study animal behaviour increasingly accept the idea that fear keeps animals away from predators, lust draws them towa...

A Tibetan mystic saying goes: We are here to realize the illusion of our separateness. The spiritual sentiment has a biological cognate. ...

The Book of Imaginary Beings is a compendium of extraordinary fictions of the human brain. The Book of Barely Imagined Beings celebr...

Nature allows every child to play tricks with her; every fool to have judgment upon her; thousands to walk stupidly over her and see no...

The Creature from the Black Lagoon The eggs, nestled in a protective jelly stained golden by tannins that glistened in the light, might...

The recognition of these hazards may help us understand deeper mysteries about Life in the Universe. Many explanations have been offered ...

I'm rereading The Origin and, geekishly, really enjoying this sort of thing (from Morphology , Chapter XIV): Most physiologists be...

Viruses, instead of being single-minded agents of disease and death, now begin to look more like mobile genes. Evolution is still an infini...

Another example of the almost unimaginable potential of evolution: Both the TRPA1 and TRPV1 genes are hundreds of millions of years old, h...

cells are powered not by chemical reactions, but by a kind of electricity, specifically by a difference in the concentration of protons (th...

The discovery of an unusual hybrid virus living in one of the harshest environments on the planet suggests a solution to the conundrum of ho...

...are reciprocity (fairness) and empathy (compassion).' There is little new in this presentation if you're already familiar with ...

...aka 'disaster taxa' in the wake of our current mass exintinction: Ultimately...life will recover: it always has. The mass extin...

Though experiments probing the information structure of the human brain are still in their early stages, mathematical simulations have show...

A study suggests that most fish in the oceans today are descended from freshwater species. One possible implication of this, notes a report...

Ain't nobody here but us Scyllarides latus larvae Stranger and more plausible than the theory (attributed to Aristophanes in the S...

The larva of Luidia sarsi is a semi-transparent diaphanous sprite that feeds on algae and grows to a remarkable 4 centimetres. Then some...

Eoandromeda octobrachiata may or may not set the tree of life wobbling but it has certainly been given a beautiful name, inspired by the f...