Three articles for this month, mainly focusing on biology. The first two articles are about animals, one being about how some birds in North America are shrinking due to warmer temperatures and the other one is about the only true immortal animal on Earth. The last article is about an attempt by a French reality tv show to replicate the controversial Stanley Milgram experiment of 1961.

I’ve read about shrinking animals that may be caused by climate change before but I believe this is the first time I’ve chosen to highlight this issue. This particular article from the BBC covers a study involving almost half a million birds from over a hundred different species that passed through the Carnegie Museum’s Powdermill ringing station in Pennsylvania, US between 1967 and 2007. By studying the records of weight and wingspan measurements, the researchers found that most of the species have grown slightly smaller over time. The average loss is small but it appears that birds that winter in the tropics have shrunk the most.

Continue reading Recent Interesting Science Articles (March ’10) →