Imagine trying to listen for a whisper while making a loud noise yourself. An African elephantnose fish faces a similar problem underwater. It sends out small electric pulses to explore its surroundings, but those pulses could drown out the faint signals it needs to detect food and other fish. The fish has sensors in its […]
The post How Electric Fish Tune Out Their Own Signals appeared first on Knowridge Science Report.
You might imagine that the DNA in your cells has a simple history. Even though it’s been recombined in every generation through sex and gained the occasional mutation, on the whole the genome has been stable and has been passed down reliably from your ancestors. But that’s not the entire story. Nearly half of your genome is a wild drama: mobile, repetitive, disruptive, even viral.
Around 700 million years ago, a group of organisms resembling little more than glowing, gelatinous blobs split off from the rest of the animals, forming possibly the earliest branching animal lineage. Nearly 200 species of ctenophores, commonly known as comb jellies (but unrelated to jellyfish), live today in environments ranging from the cold depths of the sea to warm coastal surface waters.
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