Author: The Green Room
-
Condoms, cannibalism, and brain-control.
This week things get hot and heavy in The Green Room. The innocent spinifex grass is not only interesting for its doughnut shape, but its ability to make super-slim condoms. Speaking of safe sex, fungus has developed brain-control mechanisms to increase libido of infected organisms. How romantic. But do you want true romance? Male Monarch […]
-
Spiders, spinifex, and subterranean beetles.
You know what’s a cool experiment? Looking at 5 million years of evolution in a beetle, as it adapts to life underground. Life below the earth’s surface is rooted with evolutionary mysteries… like why does spinifex grow in the shape of a donut? Is this the work of harmful soil microbes? But we digress, as […]
-
Sand, simulations, and sticky spiders.
Why don’t spiders stick to their own webs? The answer may surprise you, along with the myriad of unexpected (and sometimes sexual) functions of a spider’s web. We uncover a 1970s computer simulation that suggests that even selfish organisms can work together to sustain life on our planet. And over to you, Jamaica, where 500 […]
-
Brains, goggles, and aphids suck.
This week, we take a sneak peek inside the brain of a grieving crow and a coma patient. They teach us things about how and why we study brains, and the nature of the ego. A wacky team of scientists stick 3D goggles onto some cuttlefish and make them watch TV… for science. And a pregnant aphid is pregnant with pregnant aphids. Wait, what?