Scientists knew that sliding along surfaces gives water drops a charge. Those droplets can damage bridges, cars and more over time, new work shows.

The seeing world is dominated with eyes that come in sets of two or more. But single-eyed oddities have long had a place in the animal kingdom — and our imagination.

Perhaps the most famed of these creatures is the Cyclops Polyphemus. He appears in The Odyssey, an ancient Greek tale by Homer. It got turned into a live-action movie earlier this year. As Odysseus and his men reached the island of Sicily on their epic journey home, they found a formidable foe. This giant, one-eyed creature had a taste for sailors. As chronicled in the tale, the Cyclops held the men captive, then ate them two-by-two — until he was outsmarted.

In a modern version of the story, Percy Jackson ends up in a similar misadventure. Polyphemus takes captive Percy’s satyr buddy Grover. But Percy prevails because he has a cyclops on his side, his brother Tyson.

While the stuff of mythology, Cyclopes may have their roots in biology. Homer and the ancient Greeks, for instance, may have misinterpreted fossils — especially those of prehistoric elephant ancestors.

In the time of Homer, “nobody in Greece had ever seen a living elephant,” says Adrienne Mayor. She’s a historian of ancient science at Stanford University in California. Ancient peoples thought the immense bones of massive mammals belonged to giants, heroes and mythical creatures.

Those elephant ancestors had a big opening in the center of the skull for the trunk. That could have led ancient Greeks to think the creature had one big eye. “The eye sockets,” she notes, “are really not very noticeable.”

While this possible inspiration for the Greek Cyclops may not have actually had one eye, several creatures have evolved over time to have a single eye.

One-eyed wonders

To find a real one-eyed creature, just visit an ocean. Tiny crustaceans called copepods are about a millimeter (0.04 inch) long. They make up a big share of the base of the food chain in oceans and many bodies of water. A single, bright red eye peers from between two antennae on the heads of some species.

Copepod eyes “wouldn’t have high resolution like [our eyes] would,” says Megan Porter. She’s an evolutionary biologist. She studies visual systems at the University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa. A copepod’s fairly simple eyes contain three cuplike structures that sense light. They point in different directions, which probably gives copepods a broad field of vision. That vision is good enough, Porter says, to guide copepods that live in the ocean to navigate from shallow waters at night to deeper waters during the day. That helps them to evade predators.

But copepods aren’t the only creatures to have had only one eye. Around 560 million years ago, an ancestor of all vertebrates — including us — also had a single “median eye” on the top of its head. This eye could detect light but couldn’t resolve detailed images.

For this water-dwelling critter, going to one eye was evolutionary innovation. Its ancestor had a pair of eyes on the sides of the head plus another median eye, says George Kafetzis. He’s an evolutionary neuroscientist at the University of Sussex in England. The eyes on either side of the head probably handled navigation. The median eye followed the daily rhythms of the sun.

Kafetzis and his colleagues think this creature then lost the original lateral eyes, retaining only the median one. This might have happened when this creature abandoned its free-swimming lifestyle for a sedentary burrowing one, Kafetzis says. “When you’re partially burrowed,” he says, “the steering eyes don’t have much purpose to serve anymore.”

His team described the evolution of this lone-eyed vertebrate in the February Current Biology.

Over a few million years, lifestyles changed again. Vertebrates evolved. Three eyes again became better than one.

Two became the kinds of eyes you’re probably using to read this story. And our “third eye”? It descended into the brain to become the pineal gland. This gland regulates our circadian rhythm based on information it receives from our seeing eyes.

For some reptiles, amphibians and fish, a version of this median eye remains exposed on the top of their head. It can still sense light directly. You could say these examples stretch the definition of the cyclops beyond a centered eye that is the only one on their face.

When one eye is deadly

When a human embryo is growing, it also starts out with a single eye, of sorts. But it only stays like that in rare — and deadly — cases.

As they’re growing in the womb as an embryo, the cells that eventually become eyes begin as a cluster. Later, it will split in two. But in rare cases, genetics or environmental factors can cause cyclopia. In this deadly disorder, that cluster of eye cells doesn’t split and instead develops as one large eye.

“Cyclopia is sort of the extreme end of a whole range of malformations,” says Philip Beachy. He’s a developmental molecular biologist at Stanford University.

Some important clues about how this disorder develops came from Idaho farmers in the 1950s. Some of their sheep ate a few too many corn lily plants while they were pregnant.

“During a drought, [the farmers sent their sheep] to higher pastures so that their flocks would have something to graze on. And they consumed this plant. And guess what? The lambs were born cyclopic,” Beachy says. The plant chemical that caused this was later identified and named cyclopamine (Sy-KLOH-puh-meen).

While today’s one-eyed wonders are a world apart from the monsters of Greek mythology, they still inspire us to explore — and marvel at — our world.

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A bank of fog might seem gloomy. But that mist may carry an unexpected community of environmental helpers. Ground-dwelling clouds can house bacteria that clean the air, a new study finds.

Microbes can find air a harsh place, notes Kathleen Weathers. Temperatures can fluctuate broadly. And even in fog, there can be a high risk of drying out. A fog scientist, Weathers works at the Cary Institute of Ecosystem Studies in Millbrook, N.Y. But, she adds, fog hosts many things needed for those microbes to “make a living.” These include moisture, nutrients and comfortable temperatures.

Yet until now, scientists hadn’t known microbes could actually live there, says Weathers, who did not take part in the new work.

It took Thi Thuong Thuong Cao, a chemist who loves hiking on foggy mountainsides, to show microbes not only can live in fog, but also grow and reproduce.

Collecting clouds 

As a chemist, Cao wondered what might be inside fog droplets. At first, she focused on their chemistry. Soon, though, she teamed up with other scientists to see what microbes might hitchhike in fog — and what they might be doing.

At the time, Cao was a graduate student at Arizona State University in Tempe. Part of her team traveled to Pennsylvania, where another team member was based. The area had great spots to collect fog.

This team focused its hunt on a special type of low-lying cloud: radiation fog. It forms at night when the ground cools and then lowers the air’s temperature. Cooler air can’t hold much water. So it sheds the excess into the air as small droplets, creating fog.

Radiation fog doesn’t roll in. Instead, it forms in place. So any microbes should be local, not ones carried in from elsewhere.

Over about two years, the team collected samples of water from 32 “fog events.” They used a device called a cloud-water collector. It pulls air into a chamber containing strings.

As fog condenses on the strings, it forms droplets that drip into a bottle below. The scientists collected up to 200 milliliters (about 7 ounces) of fog water per event. That’s roughly the volume of a juice box. They also collected samples of the air in between the fog droplets. They trapped similar air samples before and after fog events.

The fog samples housed a multitude of microbes. In fact, fog water is about as densely populated with microbes as ocean or lake water. When examined under a microscope, many fog-water microbes seemed to have been dividing when they were collected. That led the researchers to conclude the microbes had been growing in the fog.

Next, the team extracted the fog-dwellers’ RNA, a type of genetic information. Cao’s team compared these types of genetic maps to those in a database on known microbes. That helped them identify the fog’s inhabitants.

An average of 188 unique genetic patterns showed up in each fog event. Each represented a unique type of bacteria. The communities of microbes present were similar across all fog samples. But they differed quite a bit from those found in air without fog.

Cao and her team shared their findings in mBio on May 22.

Turning pollution into food 

Their analyses showed Methylobacterium was the most abundant microbe in fog water. It accounted for up to half of all microbes present.

To grow in fog, the team reasoned, those Methylobacteria must have found something in it to eat. This microbe is known to consume carbon-containing chemicals, such as formaldehyde.

Formaldehyde is a common and toxic air pollutant. Breathing it can cause harm. Some formaldehyde comes from natural sources, such as rotting plant materials. Human activities, such as construction and burning fossil fuels, also release it. It’s even one of the chemicals that makes cigarette smoke harmful.

Methylobacteria are well suited for dealing with this chemical, Cao says. “They can survive formaldehyde at a concentration higher than other bacteria [can].” They break it down hundreds of times faster than other microbes, too.

Her group measured formaldehyde in freshly collected fog water. Over several hours, levels of the chemical fell surprisingly fast.

The researchers also isolated Methylobacterium from fog water and then grew it on its own. These bacteria were able to quickly remove formaldehyde when exposed to an artificial fog water containing the chemical.

It disappeared so quickly, in fact, that the bacteria couldn’t have used it all for growth. The microbe may break the chemical down as well as eat it, the team concludes. Such a strategy might keep formaldehyde from reaching toxic levels.

This all seems to confirm Methylobacterium can remove formaldehyde from fog. The researchers don’t yet know how the bacteria might affect air quality. But their new data now point to fog as a potential ecosystem.

Fog can transport water and microbes across a landscape. These data now suggest that as it does, it may play a role in shaping the chemistry of the environment.

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It takes a village to deliver a whale calf. That’s what the most detailed video ever of a sperm whale birth shows.

In the footage, a female whale in labor is surrounded by others assisting her. Almost all of her helpers are female. But not all are related to the birthing mom. This shows that sperm whales benefit from cooperation, just as humans do.

Because getting to watch the birth of a whale is extremely rare, only a few scientific studies have described them. Some of those reports have noted other whales helping the mom through the birthing process. But scientists had never caught this on video.

In 2023, David Gruber was part of a team that got very lucky. Gruber is a marine biologist. He works with Project CETI, a nonprofit dedicated to sperm whale research. Project CETI is partly based on the island of Dominica in the Caribbean Sea. Gruber was in a boat right off the coast when his team caught the birth.

The researchers weren’t looking for a whale birth. They just happened to be in the right place, at the right time — with the right equipment. Using two drones, the team caught the whole 34-minute birthing process on tape.

A group of 10 whales surrounded the laboring mom. After the birth, her assistants took turns lifting the newborn to the surface for hours. This allowed the calf to breathe air until it could swim on its own.

The whales seemed to include the scientists in this event, Gruber says. “They literally carried the baby right past the front of our boat.” His group shared its video in Science on March 26.

Helping hands — or fins

Project CETI has been studying sperm whales around Dominica for long enough that Gruber and his colleagues could identify every individual in the video. “Not only did we capture such an amazing dataset, but we actually knew each of these whales,” he says.

Computers tracked each whale’s position in the footage. Then, a team member labeled each animal. A whale named Rounder was giving birth, the researchers determined. They also figured out what each of the other 10 whales did and how they were related to the mom. 

Rounder’s helpers included whales from two different female lines. These are like whale families, also called kin groups. The kin groups’ teamwork was surprising, because these groups don’t usually spend time together searching for food. But whales from the two groups fully mixed for hours after the birth. All helped lift the newborn calf at some point.

The four whales that helped hold the calf the most were its mother, aunt, an older kin member and one whale from outside the calf’s kin group. Holding the baby up is very important, because it can’t float on its own yet. Without help, Gruber says, “it would have sunk.”

Killer whales, belugas and other cetaceans have also been seen pushing newborns to the surface. This behavior may go back to when those species shared a common ancestor, Gruber says.

The wails of labor

Along with the video, the researchers also recorded audio of the birth. They analyzed these sounds with help from some other researchers. 

Sperm whales make sounds called codas. The scientists looked for changes in things like the codas’ rhythm. Those codas changed during important moments in the birth. One specific coda was heard more frequently during the birth. The team reported its findings March 26 in Scientific Reports.

Different sounds being linked with the birth is not surprising, says Denise Herzing. She’s a marine biologist who heads the Wild Dolphin Project. Based in Jupiter, Fla., this nonprofit focuses on Atlantic spotted dolphins.

“Marine mammals, in general, have specific sounds during specific behavioral contexts,” says Herzing.

After the birth, the sperm whales also ran into several pilot whales. Now, the sperm whales’ vocal style changed more. That might be because pilot whales sometimes bother sperm whales.

It takes a village

Giving birth is one of the most critical moments of a female whale’s life. Such high stakes might have driven these mammals to evolve cooperative instincts, the researchers say.

This is spot on, Herzing says. “We see different alliances of dolphins grouping into bigger groups to fight off a predator or to mate.”

Sharing the birth with the world took cooperation from the human team, too. Many scientists had to work together to film the video, analyze it and map the relationships between the whales. “It was a very profound experience for all of us,” says Gruber.