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Researched by Sarah Wild In Brazil, 404 babies were born with microcephaly in 2015 – a disorder in which a foetus’s brain does not develop properly in the womb — with thousands more cases under investigation. Of those, 17 babies were infected with the zika virus, a mosquito-borne disease, and 76 have died. Due to…
Researched by Sarah Wild The zika virus, which has been associated with cases of microcephaly in Brazil and nervous system disorders in Micronesia, was originally discovered in Africa in 1947. “For 60 years, [zika] was seen as a mosquito-spread virus causing mild illness occasionally in African populations across the equatorial belt,” Prof Jimmy Whitworth, with…
It looks like a pellet of buck dung, it smells like one too, but the centimetre-long seed is not dung, and is one of the few proven instances of sensory deception for seed dispersal. “The smell is incredible,” says Jeremy Midgley, a professor in biological sciences at the University of Cape Town. “From the smell,…