Digging 3 meters down into the dark marine mud of a former log storage pond in Mindanao, Philippines, scientists have discovered five live specimens of an elusive creature previously known only through the 1 to 1.5–meter-long calcium carbonate shells it left behind.

By carefully chipping away at the end of a chalky tube (right, above), researchers found a long, black, wormlike mass oozing from its casing – the first live specimen of the giant shipworm Kuphus polythalamia. The animal’s length makes it the longest of any living bivalve, a class of typically small critters including clams, oysters, and scallops. And as far as shipworms go, which usually burrow into and feed on wood from ships or sunken trees, K. polythalamia is unique for squa ...

Started in Imperial China in the 10th or 11th century, upper-class court dancers would wrap their feet to make them permanently smaller.

Although this made it difficult for a woman to walk, small feet indicated that a woman’s husband did not need his wife’s labor. To make the feet even smaller, sometimes the baby’s feet were broken and wrapped tightly. Some baby’s toes were cut off! Footbinding was banned by the Chinese government in 1911, but continued to be practiced in some places for several decades, as shown in the picture above. ...

Gotta love stop days.

Including the preceding or ensuing weekend, stop days give every college student a chance to catch his or her breath and relax for at least a few days before final exams begin.

But just like normal school days, in which you are often scrambling to complete ten different activities while still finding time to study, there is an art to maximizing your stop days.

So without further ado, here are five suggestions to keep in mind as you near those glorious few open dates on the calendar.

1. Don't study for at least two days. This one is self explanatory. You miss out on the whole idea of stop days if you plow through them buried in a textbook. Don't worry – you'll still have time to get your required amount of studying in befor ...

Some students go to great – and often curious – lengths to maximize their studying time before finals.

After countless semesters and multiple rounds of rounds of finals, I'm confident I've seen it all when it comes to crazy, odd or just plain absurd study methods.

Well, almost all.

I'm sure some of you fellow Biology Forums members out there have some interesting stories.

There was the kid across the hall freshman year who Aderol'ed himself into a 36-hour sleepless stupor. Don't take Aderol… just don't.

Then there's the classic (and much more popular) I'm-going-to-go-to-sleep-at-4-and-wake-up-at-5 method that is meant to secure some semblance of sanity.

There are the library residents, the library frequenters, the casual library users and the kid ...