Organic Materials

Poisonous alkaloids in blue dart frogs' skin are absorbed from ants they eat in the wild. In captivity, the frogs eat mainly crickets and fruit flies and actually lose their toxicity.

All night, every time you breathe out, carbon atoms take off into the night air. Each carbon atom weighs a tiny fraction of a gram. But every breath expels roughly ten billion trillion atoms, so you wake up a pound lighter.

The high carbon-to-oxygen ratio indicates a carbide or diamond interior rather than the silicate geology of the Earth.

A US-British team of astronomers discovered a planet 1,200 light-years away with ultra-high concentrations of carbon. This supports the idea that it could have mountains made up of diamonds.

It is an age-old riddle that has perplexed generations - until now! British scientists found that the formation of egg shells relies on a protein found only in a chicken's ovaries.