An exhibition in London is showcasing more than 600 artworks and artifacts—including costumes, props and sketches—from the famous filmmaker’s career

Steve Lazarides' personal collection of prints, original works, handwritten press releases and burner phones sold at auction for around $1.4 million

On its 66th flyby of the king of planets, Juno has captured spectacular views of the stormy atmosphere, processed by citizen scientists

The 3,800-year-old site near the city of Luxor holds the remains of 11 individuals, who may have been members of the same family. Researchers think the tomb was used for several generations

The beloved reptile in Australia died last weekend and was thought to be up to 120 years old, though that age is only an estimate. Research on his bones might reveal a more exact number

The bone, described two decades after its discovery, suggests the species might have grown up to 20 percent bigger than other terror birds

The viral king penguin chick at Sea Life Melbourne Aquarium is beginning to lose his youthful down, a process that will give him his distinctive and waterproof adult plumage

Found in a cremation cemetery in Belgium, the skeleton includes bones dating to the Neolithic period and a Roman-era skull, according to a new study

While testing the "infinite monkey theorem," mathematicians found that the odds of a chimpanzee typing even a short phrase like "I chimp, therefore I am" before the death of the universe are 1 in 10 million billion billion

It's not the first time savvy entrepreneurs have marketed canned air to tourists. Similar products have been sold at vacation destinations for decades

Lula the bear and Simba the lion have been evacuated to a wildlife shelter in Jordan

The brick-built botanicals celebrate the UK’s 2017 City of Culture

An investigation by David D. Kirkpatrick of the New York Times revealed the buyer's identity

The Whitney Museum has been gifted 400 works by the famed pop artist, while the Smithsonian Archives of American Art will receive half a million documents

It's not clear how the juvenile male ended up so far north, but experts suggest he was motivated by his appetite

On this day in 1912, a team found the remains of Robert Falcon Scott and the crew of the "Terra Nova" expedition. A would-be rescuer said he was forever haunted by the "horrible nightmare"

A new study has shattered historians' long-held assumptions about some of the people who died in Mount Vesuvius' eruption in 79 C.E.

Sławomir and Szymon Milewski were searching for a Roman road when they stumbled upon the cache of coins, which is worth more than $120,000

Cenotes in the Yucatán Peninsula are time capsules preserving remnants of Maya culture and fossils of extinct megafauna

These images from the Smithsonian Magazine Photo Contest capture quintessentially Cuban scenes

In the late 19th century, city officials turned the final resting place for 10,000 souls into what's now Greenwich Village’s James J. Walker Park

Take a virtual tour through the streets and sights of England’s capital city with these stunning travel photos submitted to our photo contest

Get acquainted with the Big Apple’s major sights by browsing through these remarkable travel photos submitted to our photo contest

Getting the perfect shot requires great timing, the right equipment and nerves of steel

See images of the American flag captured by our readers.

Michelle Frankfurter tells the stories of these young migrants and also those of the thousands who jump aboard “the death train”

From swirling aurora borealis to bioluminescent beaches, these award-winning photographs capture rare views of our world at night

See the finalists of our 2014 photo contest and vote for the Readers' Choice winner

In the 1960s, a vaccine for chlamydia made patients more susceptible to chlamydia. Now scientists know why

As of last Wednesday, at least 3,500 sea turtles have been rescued from freezing waters in the midst record-breaking winter storm

In a twist befitting its pages, the satirical, anti-establishment publication that delivered laughs and hijinks to generations of young readers gets the respect it always deserved with a new museum exhibition

These images from the Smithsonian Magazine Photo Contest show how communities in Mexico and beyond mark Día de los Muertos.

The terms “snake oil” and “snake-oil salesperson” are part of the vernacular thanks to Clark Stanley, a quack doctor who marketed a product for joint pain in the late 19th century

Newfoundland filmmaker Justin Simms is releasing his latest film called Sons. It was prompted by the birth of his son and left him wondering how traditional masculine behaviour is learned.

Nellie Winters is 87. From the time she was a child, her hands and mind have been busy pursuing her love of Inuit art and craft.

Bombardier control box recovered during second dive to a World War 2 bomber at the bottom of Gander Lake.

A Labrador foster parent and head of a group working to better the Labrador foster care system is stressing the importance of keeping Indigenous children with Indigenous parents in their Indigenous communities.

Nurses' union president Yvette Coffey says more must be done to ensure young nurses stay in the province. Newfoundland and Labrador Health Services says work is underway to match students with job openings.

People using the library in the Arts and Culture Centre in St. John's are being forced to use alternate entrances due to an unsafe staircase in front of the building.

Ashley Hickey, a parent of a kid with celiac disease, is concerned that Nova Scotia's new school program does not offer any 100 per cent guaranteed gluten-free options.

A researcher studying the rise of extremism in Atlantic Canada warns Ku Klux Klan Halloween costumes are just one example of an insidious effort by far-right groups to normalize hateful attitudes.

Volunteers will be cutting hair at a salon based inside a Cape Breton food bank. The goal is to provide clients with the same salon experience paying customers would receive.

Shilei Du, 36, was charged Monday morning with the premeditated murder of his partner, Guangmei Ye, whose body was found Sunday in a residence on Fontenelle Street in Candiac, Que.

The City of Montreal wants to sell more land to community organizations, housing co-ops and other groups to build off-market housing. 

The union representing dockworkers in Montreal says Canada's labour minister forcing its members back to work at ports in Montreal and Quebec City marks a "dark day for workers' rights."

Quebec provincial police have confirmed that the body found in a Montreal nature park on Oct. 30 was that of kidnapping victim and cryptocurrency influencer Kevin Mirshahi.

Mosquito-borne disease is a major global public health issue. One path toward the development of evidence-based strategies to limit mosquito biting is the study of the mosquito nervous system—in particular, the sensory systems that drive biting behavior. The central nervous system of insects consists of the brain and the ventral nerve cord. Here, we describe a protocol for dissecting, immunofluorescent labeling, and imaging both of these structures in the mosquito. This protocol was optimized for Aedes aegypti and works well on Anopheles gambiae tissue. It has not been tested in other mosquito species, but we anticipate that it would work on a range of mosquitoes, and, if not, our protocol will provide a starting point from which to optimize. Notably, a limited number of antibodies cross-react with Ae. aegypti proteins. This protocol is intended for use with validated antibodies and can also be used to test new antibodies as they are generated. It has been successfully used to visualize protein tags, such as green fluorescent protein, that have been introduced into the mosquito to amplify or detect their presence.

The technique of visualizing axon pathways in the embryonic ventral nerve cord using antibody labeling has been fundamental to our understanding of the genetic and developmental mechanisms underlying nervous system wiring in Drosophila. High-resolution microscopic examination of the ventral nerve cord remains an essential component of many experiments in Drosophila developmental neuroscience. Although it is possible to examine the ventral nerve cord in intact whole-mount embryos, to collect the highest-quality images it is often useful to isolate the nervous system away from the other embryonic tissues through embryo dissection. This protocol describes methods for dissecting ventral nerve cords from Drosophila embryos that have been fixed and stained via immunofluorescence or horseradish peroxidase (HRP) immunohistochemistry. The process of making fine dissection needles for this purpose from electrolytically sharpened tungsten wire is also described. Dissected and mounted ventral nerve cords can be examined and imaged using a variety of microscopy techniques including differential interference contrast (DIC) optics, epifluorescence, or confocal microscopy.

The Drosophila embryonic central nervous system has been used for decades as a model for understanding the genetic regulation of axon guidance and other aspects of neural development. Foundational studies using antibody staining to examine the embryonic ventral nerve cord in wild-type and mutant animals led to the discovery of evolutionarily conserved genes that regulate fundamental aspects of axon guidance, including midline crossing of axons. The development of the regular, segmentally repeating structure of axon pathways in the ventral nerve cord can illustrate basic principles of axon guidance to beginning students and can also be used by expert researchers to characterize new mutants, detect genetic interactions between known genes, and precisely quantify variations in gene function in engineered mutant lines. Here, we describe a protocol for collecting and fixing Drosophila embryos and visualizing axon pathways in the embryonic ventral nerve cord using immunofluorescence or immunohistochemical staining methods. As embryogenesis in Drosophila takes ~24 h to complete, a 1-d collection yields embryos representing all stages of development from newly fertilized through ready-to-hatch larvae, allowing investigation of multiple developmental events within a single batch of collected embryos. The methods described in this protocol should be accessible to introductory laboratory courses as well as seasoned investigators in established research laboratories.

Mosquitoes take blood meals from a diverse range of host animals and their host associations vary by species. Characterizing these associations is an important element of the transmission dynamics of mosquito-vectored pathogens. To characterize mosquito host associations, various molecular techniques have been developed, which are collectively referred to as blood meal analysis. DNA barcoding has diverse biological applications and is well-suited to mosquito blood meal analysis. The standard DNA barcoding marker for animals is a 5' fragment of the cytochrome c oxidase I (COI) gene. A major advantage of this marker is its taxonomic coverage in DNA sequence reference databases, making it feasible to identify a wider range of mosquito host species than with any other gene. However, the COI gene contains high sequence variation at potential priming sites between vertebrate orders. Coupled with the need for primer sequences to be mismatched with mosquito priming sites so that annealing to mosquito DNA is inhibited, it can be difficult to design primers suitable for blood meal analysis applications. Several primers are available that perform well in mosquito blood meal analysis, annealing to priming sites for most vertebrate host taxa, but not to those of mosquitoes. Because priming site sequence variation among vertebrate taxa can cause amplification to fail, a hierarchical approach to DNA barcoding-based blood meal analysis can be applied. In such an approach, no single primer set is expected to be effective for 100% of potential host species. If amplification fails in the initial reaction, a subsequent reaction is attempted with primers that anneal to different priming sites, and so on, until amplification is successful.