In the 1930s, the Austrian biologist Karl von Frisch, of waggle-dancing honey bee fame, performed some little-known experiments on dancing minnows. The fish weren’t dancing for fun.
Von Frisch showed that when a minnow’s skin cells are damaged, as happens during a predator attack, the fish releases a chemical into the water that triggers nearby fish to flee. Von Frisch called the chemical “Schreckstoff,” German for “scary stuff,” and yesterday, scientists described its chemical makeup.
The research team first separated the skin mucous of zebrafish into its different chemical components and then tested how each affects the behavior of a group of fish in a tank. One of the chemicals, a sugar called chondroitin sulfate, caused a dramatic fear response.
Read more (and watch the video!) at…
Smithsonian’s Surprising Science, February 2012.
When human urban habitat runs into the terrain of other species, the results can be traumatic for many of the parties involved.
Nature, for all of its free-wheeling weeds and lightning strikes, is also full of biological regularity: the rows of an alligator’s teeth, the stripes on a zebrafish, the spacing of a chicken’s feathers. How do these patterns arise?
The development of white matter tracts, the nerve bundles that join one brain region to another, is different in babies who go on to develop autism compared with those who do not, according to a new study.
Just over a year ago, I wrote about a handful of research groups creating robots that can engage children who have autism using speech, facial expressions or body movements. These 
By screening the genomes of hundreds of people with autism and analyzing the effect of newly identified mutations in cultured neurons, researchers have clarified the disorder’s complex link to a gene called SHANK2.
Some 40 years ago, researchers at the University of Missouri were searching for an alternative to the condom — a cheap, trustworthy and reversible form of male birth control.
