Five hundred years ago, in a mountain-rimmed ocean fjord in southeast Alaska, Tlingit hunters armed with bone-tipped harpoons eased their canoes through chunks of floating ice, stalking seals near Sít Tlein (Hubbard) glacier. They must have glanced nervously up at the glacier’s looming, fractured face, aware that cascades of ice could thunder...
Scientists call the region of space influenced by the Sun the heliosphere – but without an interstellar probe, they don’t know much about its shape
The Sun warms the Earth, making it habitable for people and animals. But that’s not all it does, and it affects a much larger area of space. The heliosphere[1], the area of space influenced by the Sun, is over a hundred times larger[2] than the distance from the Sun to the Earth.
The Sun is a star that constantly emits a steady...
AI plus gene editing promises to shift biotech into high gear

During her chemistry Nobel Prize lecture[1] in 2018, Frances Arnold said, “Today we can for all practical purposes read, write and edit any sequence of DNA, but we cannot compose it.” That isn’t true anymore.
Since then, science and technology have progressed so much that artificial intelligence has learned to compose DNA, and with...
Read more https://theconversation.com/ai-plus-gene-editing-promises-to-shift-biotech-into-high-gear-230183
Female giraffes drove the evolution of long giraffe necks in order to feed on the most nutritious leaves, new research suggests
Everything in biology ultimately boils down to food and sex. To survive as an individual you need food. To survive as a species you need sex.
Not surprisingly then, the age-old question of why giraffes have long necks has centered around food and sex. After debating this question for the past 150 years, biologists still cannot agree on...