Over 8.7 million species are known to be found on Earth today, and many scientists believe that we have only scratched the surface.

You asked it and here we have! Wondering what was popular on Research Matters in 2018? Following are our top-ten stories that gained traction by readers like you. Thank you for your support and hope to see it continue in the years to come.

Researchers at the World Animal Protection and University of Oxford, UK, have analysed why some rural tribes in Assam hunt pangolins, the motivation behind this and possible interventions to stop hunting.

Researchers from two Spanish institutes—the University of Barcelona and the Barcelona Institute of Science and Technology, and CCMB in Hyderabad, have identified some genes and regulatory elements involved in damage-response of the Drosophila regeneration process.

Researchers discover eight new species of bent-toed geckos in the Northeast states of India.

If you are a budding researcher with a keen interest in evolution and biology, the Jawaharlal Nehru Centre for Advanced Scientific Research (JNCASR) has some good news for you. The multidisciplinary research institute in Bengaluru is all set to host the first-ever 15-day school in Evolutionary Biology. It is planned to be held from 12–26 March 2019 and is sponsored by the Science and Engineering Research Board (SERB).

A team of Irish and Indian biologists from the University College Dublin (UCD), Ireland, the Natural History Museum (NHM), UK, and the University of Delhi (DU), India, have provided detailed descriptions of these newly discovered frogs.

If you have noticed a young child draw clouds, you might observe that irrespective of the size of these clouds, they have the same distinctive shape. Surprisingly, there is a scientific basis for this observation and is said to be because of the ‘fractal’ or self-similar nature of clouds.

The neurotoxin series: Part 1. The first of a series that talks about the neurotoxins found in the cone snails.

Cloud seeding is the technology of introducing artificial nuclei or “seeds” (silver iodide, salt, dry ice), into clouds from either the air or ground to increase the chances of rain. The popular belief is that cloud seeding is done only to bring rain in a particular place. But did you know that the same technique is used to disperse rain?