Split-Sex Animals Are Unusual, Yes, but Not as Rare as You’d Think
All serious butterfly collectors remember their first gynandromorph: a butterfly with a color and pattern that are distinctly male on one wing and female on the other. Seeing one sparks wonder and curiosity. For the biologist Nipam H. Patel, the sighting offered a possible answer to a question he had been pondering for years: During embryonic and larval development, how do cells know where to stop and where to go? He was sure that the delicate black outlines between male and
The Death Predictor: A Helpful New Tool or an Ethical Morass?
Whenever Eric Karl Oermann has to tell a patient about a terrible prognosis, their first question is always: “how long do I have?” Oermann would like to offer a precise answer, to provide some certainty and help guide treatment. But although he’s one of the country’s foremost experts in medical artificial intelligence, Oermann is still dependent on a computer algorithm that’s often wrong. Doctors are notoriously terrible at guessing how long their patients will live. Artifici
A Rare Bird Indeed: A Cardinal That’s Half Male, Half Female
A bird hopping outside the window lately is the strangest that Shirley and Jeffrey Caldwell have ever seen. Its left side is the taupe shade of female cardinals; its right, the signature scarlet of males. Researchers believe that the cardinal frequenting the Caldwells’ bird feeder in Erie, Pa., is a rare bilateral gynandromorph, half male and half female. Not much is known about the unusual phenomenon, but this sexual split has been reported among birds, reptiles, butterflies
