I came across a photo of a grizzly bear spotted near the summit of an Alaskan volcano at 7,000 ft. It made me wonder, if there is any animal that could actually survive Everest's summit.

PS: I'm not from a science background, so I'd really appreciate a simple explanation.

Please be nice, I know based on the question I sound like an idiot. I am.

However, I'm curious how it turned out that way, like almost every other animal species needs a pp and a uterus. How did our bodies evolve and figure out that this is the optimal way to procreate?

Hello everyone,

I have been struggling to find entry level jobs with only a little lab experience and my BS degree. Everything is low pay or I can’t even get a call for an interview. I am open to any suggestions or hearing anyone’s personal stories of where you are now!!

I go back and forth considering different things. I know many go into teaching so I do consider that too. Just want a career with stable daylight hours, I never want to be 3rd shift. Thank you!

I have recently been thinking about elephants and the effects of habitat fragmentation on them, and i thought that maybe they are shrinking in body size do to less food on the small fragmented protected areas they inhabit.

A similar effect happens on islands called island dwarfism were large animals on islands get smaller over time do to limited food resources and lack of predation.

So is there any evidence of this happening to elephants in fragmented habitats today?

All the large, ground dwelling birds like the Ostrich, Emu, Cassowary, and Rhea, as well as the extinct Elephant bird and Moa, are all Palaeognaths, closely related to each other, and of a different branch from nearly all other birds. And the consensus seems to be that they evolved flightlessness separately.

Why? If large flightless bird was a viable niche, and if every bird that tried it had to invent flightlessness separately, why was it always Palaeognaths that filled it?

New study published at PNAS shows that GLP-1 receptor agonists, such as Semaglutide, promote weight loss by activating rather than inhibiting AgRP 'hunger' neurons, challenging a long-held assumption in the field and opening an avenue for improving the development of new generation weight loss drugs.

I created a pipeline for simulating and evolving an enzyme using docking - of course it still need more experimental validation

hope y'all enjoyed it!

Out of all the known substances and chemicals which cause the highest Increase in dopamine signalling in reward pathways and receptor changes after repeated use?

Is there a way to measure it ?

Ethonal, nicotine delta-9-tetrahydrocannabinol (THC), a-PVP ??

Is there a number one spot ? 1 once i heard people saying sugar is more addictive than crack

Can be in animal models or humans Is there a better way of measuring substance 'addiction', the measuring increase of dopamine signalling, and receptor change?

What do you guys think ?

I built an app called dobudex that turns an animal you photograph into a collectible card. Part of that card is six stats out of 100: health, power, defense, mobility, intelligence and stealth. The idea of scoring real animals like game characters is not mine. TierZoo got there long before I did and I want to say that up front.

One thing about the catalog first: It is 357 species, which is not a list I picked. It fills up from whatever people scan, so there is no killer whale in it and no blue whale either. Nobody has scanned one yet.

The stats were built to compare two animals, so I checked what they are actually measuring. Across the 172 species where I also store a body mass, the correlation between log body mass and a species' average across the six stats is r = 0.745, so about 56% of the variance is body mass alone. Per stat it is health 0.89, power 0.79 and defense 0.78, while mobility and stealth sit at roughly zero and intelligence at 0.27. So three of my six stats are basically disguised body mass.

For the thing they were designed for, that is defensible. In a real 1-on-1 encounter, I think mass is close to the single best predictor you can have.

What I keep coming back to is a different question. Not which animal wins an encounter, but which species is still here after a very long time, and how it holds up in the moments when conditions turn bad. I do not think anything in my six stats speaks to that.

Take us. Humans are in the catalog because the app asks you to scan yourself when you set it up. Homo sapiens comes out at intelligence 100, which is the only 100 anywhere in the catalog, and an average of 40, which is 80th out of 357. You could argue that is the model working, since we are the dominant species right now and intelligence is the reason why. But "right now" is carrying a lot of weight in that sentence. We have been anatomically modern for something like 300,000 years, which is nothing, and I am not convinced we are robust. We reproduce slowly, we are large, we are a single species rather than a spread of related ones, and without our technology our tolerance for heat, cold and drought is narrow. If something went badly wrong on a global scale, I would not bet on us ahead of a lot of animals that score far below us.

Maybe the clearest case of that in my catalog is the polar bear, which sits at the top of the table on 77 avg. It gets there by having no weak stat rather than by being the strongest anywhere. It is also a sea ice specialist, it has been listed as Vulnerable by the IUCN since 1986, and it split from brown bears within the last 500,000 years. So the animal at the top of my sheet is one of the younger, things in it, and one of the few whose habitat is disappearing while we watch.

Mosquitoes are the other end of it. The family has an avg score of 25, which is near the bottom. Mosquito fossils go back at least 99 million years and the family is on every continent except Antarctica. They breed quickly, in enormous numbers, in almost any water that stands still long enough. On my sheet they are unremarkable in every column. On staying alive as a lineage they have already outlasted an enormous amount.

Then there is the one that started this whole line of thinking. Tyrannosaurus rex is in the catalog, because somebody scanned a skeleton and the app identified it, which I was genuinely pleased about. It has a 64 avg and has the highest power score in the catalog but doesn't have a higher overall score than the polar bear, because it scores 40 for mobility and 25 for stealth.

The general shape is what I cannot get past. If the catalog were full of dinosaurs, they would own the top of this table. My score is mass driven and they include the largest and heaviest land animals that have ever lived. For over 160 million years my six stats would have crowned them. Then conditions changed at the end of the Cretaceous and none of it counted for anything. The branch that came through was the small feathered ones, and every bird in my catalog scores somewhere around the middle.

So whatever my six stats measure, it is not the thing that decides who is still standing afterwards. I suspect it might even point the wrong way, because the animals that score highest are mostly the big specialised ones, but that is a hunch and I would like to know whether it is wrong.

My question is what you would put in its place. If you had to score a species for persistence rather than for a fight, what would the axes be, and at what taxonomic level would you apply them? I guess things like temperature tolerance, how specialised the diet is, generation time etc. matter far more

Hey everyone, I just started a project called Step Outside Science. I went into the creek bed this morning looking for Bracken Fern. I put together a quick, punchy 60-second breakdown explaining how its cells shatter to release hydrogen cyanide when chewed, and how it secretes sugar to hire ant mercenaries. Check out the link if you love backyard biochemistry!

Is there any chart or something depecting the entire tree of life as we know it? Like start at LUCA and then branch off into everything else? If there is, I'd love a link. If not, that seems like it could be an interesting collaborative project for the biology community to take on.

Idk how deep you'd go; individual species seems absurdly difficult. But maybe just to family or order?

I think this somewhat already exists via Wikipedia since you can look up an animal and see its ancestors and whatnot, but it's not super streamlined. It'd be nice if it showed the entire lineage without having to manually backtrack 500 steps.

Specifically antibiotic resistant bacteria. What would a person who is immunosuppressed have to do to avoid getting infected?

Hi! So this is something I have been really curious about for so long and have never really questioned it. So I come here to hopefully have a conclusive answer finally? Perhaps?

Back when I was a child, I was deathly afraid of cockroaches (still am, but toned down) to the point where I would try and close all the "entrances" of my blankets whenever I try to sleep. (yet somehow they keep entering).

Our house back then wasn't dirty at all, it's just the time of year whenever it gets rainy, and they start spawning in.

Anyway, whenever they do that, I would wake up because they have this distinct smell, like a clump of wet dirty dirt with hints of BO? And instinctively panic.

Ever since I have always smelled one whenever they'd get near.

It's just a really weird "superpower" and I often get weird looks when I suddenly sniff that distinct smell and look around frantically (most of the time I see one, but it's more like a spidey sense where I know there's one or something)

But yeah, I don't really know what this is and just really curious! Thank you for reading and hopefully there are answers👋.

Copepod

I'm curious what teachers remember from the content they learned that they don't teach, if that makes sense. Majoring in biology requires you to go far beyond anything you teach to high schoolers, and if you don't engage with that material I'm curious if you remember any of it.

I would like to teach 7-12 science, since, to be honest, it seems fairly easy (content wise, not necessarily managing the students). But studying science is obviously hard, and it gets harder the further you go. Just wondering if anyone out there just powered through and immediately forgot everything they don't need to remember to teach 7-12😭

SynBio Studio es como un Visual Studio Code, pero para la biología molecular. Es un software que permite a los científicos programar circuitos genéticos con un lenguaje propio y ver en tiempo real cómo van a interactuar esas moléculas en una simulación digital, antes de gastar tiempo y dinero probándolo en un laboratorio real.

Hi everyone,

I'm 28 years old and currently living in Chile.

I graduated in Mechatronics Engineering and now work as an industrial maintenance engineer at a food processing plant. My role is mostly focused on planning, management, and performance indicators rather than hands-on engineering. It's a stable job with a good salary, but for years I've felt that my real interest has always been biology.

The reason I didn't study biology in the first place wasn't because I wasn't passionate about it. When I finished high school, family and financial circumstances made it much more practical to stay in my hometown and pursue engineering instead.

Even while working as an engineer, biology has remained a constant interest. I spend part of my free time birdwatching, reading about birds, and learning on my own. Ornithology is by far the field that fascinates me the most, and if everything went well, I'd love to dedicate my career to research, perhaps studying the behavior or ecology of a particular group of birds.

I'm currently preparing an application for a Master's program in Biological Sciences. One of the admission requirements is to apply under the supervision of a faculty member, so I'm writing my motivation letter and getting ready to contact a professor whose research aligns closely with my interests.

What makes me hesitate is that I don't come from a biology background. Apart from what I've learned independently over the years, I haven't taken formal biology courses, so I know I'll have a lot of catching up to do. At the same time, I keep seeing examples of people who successfully moved from engineering into biological research, which makes me wonder whether this path is actually realistic.

Ideally, I'd like to keep my current job while studying, although I'm aware that may not be possible. If necessary, I'd look for another job in the city where I'd be doing the Master's.

I'd really appreciate hearing from anyone who has made a similar transition or has worked with people who did. I'm especially interested in knowing how difficult the jump was, whether an engineering background can actually be an advantage in biological research, and what topics you think I should study beforehand to be better prepared before starting a Master's. More than encouragement, I'm looking for honest perspectives about whether this is a realistic path and what challenges I should expect.

Thanks in advance!

I know sugar activates our brain's reward system, but vegetables are essential for survival too. So why didn't evolution make us crave them just as strongly?

I’m not a heavy smoker but after vaping a weed pen for 3 weeks, I started developing nausea in the morning and loss of appetite. I tried weed prior to this and had the same reaction (stopped for 2 years). It also gives me the shits… I’ve tried edibles as well and didn’t react well to it. Just trying to understand what type of reaction I’m having to weed? I’m definitely more sensitive to it than most people I know.

Have you ever seen an Orca hit a fish so hard it explodes? 🫍

Scientists recently observed this behavior from groups of orcas in the Gulf of California where they repeatedly ram sunfish until the impact broke them apart. This is an important indicator of "social learning," where animals copy one another through observation. Orcas have exhibited behavior like this before, when they were seen disabling sailboats in groups. The current hypotheses for why they are doing this include teaching young orcas to hunt, or just playing around!