Mary, a 54-year-old Asian elephant at the Berlin Zoo, is the “queen of showering,” but her companion Anchali seems to have figured out how to exploit that habit to play pranks

The Cuban-American actor and producer has stars on Hollywood’s Walk of Fame, but this new honor pays tribute to his start as a musician in South Florida

These shots from the Smithsonian Magazine Photo Contest show why it’s one of the most-visited nations on earth

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

From Setsubun in Japan to Fèt Gede in Haiti, these festivals relish in the macabre

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

See photographs of the beautiful natural wonders from the Smithsonian Magazine Photo Contest

These amazing images from the Smithsonian Magazine Photo Contest show the Arctic animals at their fierce but adorable best

"Fascinating, Captain"

The surge of hungry four-legged visitors to Belushya Guba is part of a larger trend

In one reef, three million sea cucumbers released 64,000 metric tons of nutrient-packed poo back into the ecosystem

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

In summer months above the North and South Poles, glowing clouds occasionally form naturally at sunset under the right conditions

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

On the island of Laeso in Denmark, one man is reviving the lost art of eelgrass thatching and, in doing so, bringing attention to a plant that has great potential

It’s easy to write bugs off as pests, but consider the ways in which they have positively impacted our lives

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.

The A.C. Hunter Public Library wants people in St. John’s to know that it’s open and accessible, despite how the entrance looks. The main staircase is under repair but there’s plenty of signs directing folks to other entrances. Still, librarians say people are judging this book by its cover and assuming the library is closed.

Pat White, an entrepreneur who launched EVAS Air and the Gander Flight Training, has died. He was 69 years old.

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.

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.

A candidate for the Nova Scotia NDP has apologized and is no longer running for the party in the provincial election after her comments on Israel and the Holocaust drew concern from the Jewish organizations. 

About a thousand people stood solemnly in the rain at a cenotaph in downtown Halifax on Monday morning to pay tribute to veterans on Remembrance Day.

As Week 3 of the provincial election campaign begins, there are questions about how Nova Scotia's major political parties plan to combat the rising number of opioid overdose deaths. 

Some Nova Scotia municipal leaders are defending a funding stream the federal Conservatives say they will cut if elected, calling it a "game changer."

The new mayor and council are planning big changes for the Cape Breton Regional Municipality, and one of those is at the top of the staff organizational chart now that chief administrative officer Marie Walsh is set to retire.

Amid rapid global advances and deployment of artificial intelligence technologies, the federal government has invested millions to combine the minds of three existing institutes into one that can keep an eye on potential dangers ahead.

In insects, gustatory neurons sense chemicals upon contact and directly inform many behaviors critical for survival and reproduction, including biting, feeding, mating, and egg laying. However, the taste sensory system is underexplored in many anthropophilic disease vectors such as mosquitoes, which acquire and transmit human pathogens during blood feeding from human hosts. This results in a big gap in vector biology—the study of organisms that spread disease by transmitting pathogens—because insect vectors closely interact with humans while selecting suitable individuals and appropriate bite sites for blood meals. Human sweat and skin-associated chemistries are rich in nonvolatile compounds that can be sensed by the mosquito's taste system when she lands on the skin. Taste sensory units, called sensilla, are distributed in many organs across the mosquito body, including the mouthparts, legs, and ovipositors (female-specific structures used to lay eggs). Each sensillum is innervated by as many as five taste neurons, which allow detection and discrimination between various tastants such as water, sugars, salts, amino acids, and plant-derived compounds that taste bitter to humans. Single-sensillum recordings provide a robust way to survey taste responsiveness of individual sensilla to various diagnostic and ecologically relevant chemicals. Such analyses are of immense value for understanding links between mosquito taste responses and behaviors to specific chemical cues and can provide insights into why mosquitoes prefer certain hosts. The results can also aid development of strategies to disrupt close-range mosquito–human interactions to control disease transmission. Here we describe a protocol that is curated for electrophysiological recordings from taste sensilla in mosquitoes and sure to yield exciting results for the field.

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.

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.

Mosquito species vary in their host associations. Although some species are relative generalists, most specialize, to varying extents, on particular types of host animals. Mosquito host associations are among the most important factors that influence the transmission dynamics of mosquito-vectored pathogens, and understanding these associations can provide insight on how such pathogens move within ecosystems. Characterization of the host associations of mosquito species requires applying blood meal analysis to the largest possible sample size of mosquito blood meals. Processing large samples of mosquito blood meals can be time-consuming, especially when chain-termination sequencing is used, necessitating individual processing of each specimen. Various methods and commercially available kits and products are available for extracting DNA from mosquito blood meals. The hot sodium hydroxide and Tris (HotSHOT) method is a rapid and inexpensive method of DNA extraction that is compatible with the recovery of DNA from mosquito blood meals preserved on QIAcard Flinders Technology Associates (FTA) Classic Cards (FTA cards). FTA cards allow nucleic acids found in blood meals to be preserved easily, even in field conditions. DNA prepared using this method is suitable for polymerase chain reaction (PCR)-based blood meal analysis.

All PCR- and DNA-based blood meal analyses require host DNA from a mosquito blood meal to be effectively preserved between the time when the specimen is collected and the extraction of DNA. As soon as a mosquito ingests blood from a host animal, digestion of host cells and cellular components within the blood meal by enzymes in the mosquito midgut begins to degrade the host DNA templates that are the targets of polymerase chain reaction (PCR) amplification. Without effective preservation, host DNA is typically undetectable by PCR 48 h after feeding, because of digestion. Preservation methods for mosquito blood meals vary in their efficacy, and the logistics of fieldwork can limit the options for preservation of blood meals and maintenance of the integrity of host DNA. This protocol describes a method of blood meal preservation that is effective, convenient, and amenable to fieldwork in remote locations where cryopreservation at –20°C or –80°C may not be feasible. It uses a Flinders Technology Associates (FTA) card, which is a chemically treated card that lyses cells and allows nucleic acids to be preserved. This method is also expected to preserve the DNA or RNA of pathogens present within the engorged mosquito abdomen, including RNA viruses.

Food is a focal point for understanding broader environmental problems. In this podcast, we learn how food buyers are influenced in surprising ways.

The ancient burial structures, strikingly similar all across Europe and the mediterranean, have puzzled scientists and historians for centuries

By raising her son to be curious about the natural world, this mother helped shape the trajectory of the National Museum of Natural History

The Northwest Territories Power Corporation expects that by the end of March it will have generated 72 per cent of power for the North Slave region using hydro, and 28 per cent from diesel. Last year, about half the region's power was from diesel because of low water levels.

Former Dawson City Mayor Bill Kendrick has filed his defence against the town's encroachment violation lawsuit.

Water quality guidelines for mercury are 0.02 micrograms per litre of water. Several results show that levels at four sites are far above that threshold. During the second week of October, one value close to the mine was more than seven times the acceptable level.

Yukon appeal court Justice Karen Horsman granted a temporary stay of the requirement on Friday, the latest development in an ongoing legal battle over the property between the territorial government, cabin-owner Len Tarka and tenant Eric DeLong. 

As people across the country mourn the Honourable Justice Murray Sinclair, some in the Northwest Territories justice system are reflecting on his contributions to the country — one of those being Gladue principles. 

A Whitehorse homeowner has been charged in connection with an explosion last year that destroyed his home and killed a man in a neighbouring house. 

A group of volunteers have been providing emergency services to West Dawson residents during the periods of freeze up and break up, when there is no reliable access across the Yukon River to town.

The bronze wreath immortalized the moment when the members of the Honor Guard removed their hats and placed them on the president's grave during his burial

As a child, the future president acquired a marine animal's skull, which became the first specimen in his natural history collection

A new exhibition at the British Library explores the public, private and spiritual lives of such figures as Joan of Arc, Christine de Pizan and Hildegard of Bingen

After he was forced off the German stage in 1934 by antisemitic hecklers, Leo Reuss found a daring way to hide in plain sight

"Spectropia" demystified the techniques used by mediums who claimed they could speak to the dead, revealing the "absurd follies of Spiritualism"

Texts like the "Sortes Astrampsychi" promised insights on clients' love lives, career prospects, financial woes and families

In the Jim Crow South, activists became martyrs at the hands of white racists, all for the just cause of using the vote to fight for equality and freedom

A Romare Bearden print served as a starting point for the American playwright's 1987 drama, which follows a Black family's struggle to decide the fate of an ancestral heirloom