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Marketing by some private biobanks may be misleading expectant parents about the procedure’s value, writes Jacklin Kwan

\"Maybe they weren't afraid for their lives anymore,\" she said, adding that in the wild, loud clicks may serve as a split-second distraction for juvenile sharks to make their escape when they are seized by predators. Each click lasted around 48 milliseconds, with volumes sometimes exceeding 155 decibels, which is comparable to shotgun blast. RELATED STORIES —Scientists examine bloody mating wounds to reveal details of sharks' secret sex lives —Incredibly rare, ghostly white shark discovered off Albania —A really big shark got gobbled up by another, massive shark in 1st known case of its kind Nieder said future studies could target closely related shark species to investigate whether they are also capable of making noises, and whether they make noise in response to stress.

\"Sharks have long been thought to be mute, relying on stealth to hunt their prey and avoid predators. But now, sharks have been recorded making sounds for the very first time. The new recordings reveal that rig sharks (Mustelus lenticulatus)--small, bottom-dwelling sharks native to New Zealand--emit distinct clicks when handled by researchers underwater. These sounds were consistent and repeated across multiple individuals, and were potentially tied to distress or defensive responses, according to a study published Mar. 26 [2025] in the journal Royal Society Open Science.\" (Live Science) Learn about the discovery that rig sharks can make surprising clicking sounds.

Understanding how lightning shapes forest structure and species composition could shed light on how resilient these ecosystems are in the face of climate change. To get a longer term picture of the effect of lightning strikes on tonka bean trees and their neighbors, the team analyzed decades' worth of tree plot records. Past studies suggested that the tree has high internal conductivity, enabling lightning current to flow through without building up damaging heat — like a well-insulated wire. Because it tends to grow large — up to 130 feet (40 meters) — and live for centuries, a single tonka bean tree is estimated to be struck at least five times after reaching maturity, with each strike helping to clear out vines and competitors, opening up the canopy to help it thrive.

The gravid frog, from the species Gansubatrachus qilianensis, was found in a fossil bed in northwest China and dates from the Cretaceous period (145 million to 66 million years ago), researchers revealed in a study published Feb. 6 in the journal Royal Society B: The giant tadpole that turns into a little frog —240 million-year-old fossil of salamander-like creature with 'gnarly teeth' unearthed in rocks for garden wall Amplexus, which means embrace in Latin, describes the behavior when males mount and grip onto females with their front legs for hours or days at a time until her eggs are fertilized. While more fossil records are required to substantiate the findings that early frogs were sexually mature before adulthood, the discovery provides a tantalizing glimpse into the development of ancient frogs.

\"Ceoptera helps to narrow down the timing of several major events in the evolution of flying reptiles,\" Paul Barrett, a researcher at the Natural History Museum and senior author on the new study, said in a statement. \"The time period that Ceoptera is from is one of the most important periods of pterosaur evolution, and is also one in which we have some of the fewest specimens, indicating its significance,\" study lead author Elizabeth Martin-Silverstone, a paleobiologist at the University of Bristol in the U.K., said in the statement. RELATED STORIES —What was the typical life span of a dinosaur? —Living fossils: 12 creatures that look the same now as they did millions of years ago —365 million-year-old 'alien' fish had one of the most extreme underbites on record The Middle Jurassic was a critical time in pterosaur evolution in which primitive, short-handed, long-tailed pterosaurs evolved into long-handed, short-tailed animals.

Nobody has seen something like this,\" Claudio Campagna, a conservation researcher at the Wildlife Conservation Society (WSC) in Argentina and lead author of a new study on the mass die off, told Live Science. In the paper, published Dec. 25 in the journal Marine Mammal Science,, the researchers report a \"catastrophic\" mortality of southern elephant seal pups (Mirounga leonina) in November 2023. The researchers don't yet know how adult elephant seal populations have been impacted by the virus, but the paper recorded 46 adult deaths in a high-density beach, where a single death during a typical year would be rare.

The researchers looked at gene variants previously associated with the development of amyloidosis in black-footed cats. Inbreeding may increase the prevalence of these mutations, the researchers suggest, as it increases the chances that offspring inherits the same gene variant from both parents, because genetic diversity in the population is overall lower. The researchers wrote that they had uncovered \"alarming levels of inbreeding\" among black-footed cats, and that this appears to have happened recently as a result of \"severe genetic isolation\" from habitat fragmentation.

The scientists made the startling discovery while studying decades' worth of data from the Bermuda Atlantic Time-series Study (BATS), the world's longest-running record of oceanographic properties that collects deep-sea measurements in the Atlantic Ocean near Bermuda. \"The ocean heat content in the 2020s is unparalleled to the longest record we have going back to the 1950s,\" lead author Nicholas Bates, a chemical oceanographer at Arizona State University's Bermuda Institute of Ocean Science, told Live Science. The Sargasso Sea is a unique region in the North Atlantic Ocean, which not only serves as a rich marine ecosystem but also a vital node in global ocean circulation.