Yes, the plucky, inventive island castaway Robinson Crusoe was a fictional character. But author Robert Louis Stevenson, writing in the mid-1800s, based him on the very real Alexander Selkirk, who survived for four years after being stranded on a Pacific Island more than a century earlier. And now archaeologists have found his camp:
Science Daily:
An article in the journal Post-Medieval [...]
Researchers peering through microscopes at ancient mud have found the fossilized remains of a truly bizarre life form:
“Imagine our surprise to discover not only a fossil bloom of bacteria that make iron-oxide magnets within their cells, but also an entirely unknown set of organisms that grew magnetic crystals to giant sizes,” said Caltech postdoctoral scholar Timothy Raub, who collected [...]
The LA Times reports on a new psychological study in Science that proves something we all probably take for granted – that warmth is more than skin deep:
To their surprise, they found that people who held a cup of hot coffee for 10 to 25 seconds warmed to a perfect stranger. Holding a cup of iced coffee had the [...]
Did I post this before? I have no way of knowing. New Scientist tells me (for what I hope is the first time) that researchers have found a single enzyme that can erase specific memories:
Several years ago, researchers showed that injecting mice with a drug that stops new proteins from forming can block an old memory as it is [...]
Perhaps not heart-stoppingly foul, but, as LiveScience informs us, that distinctive smell is enough to give the circulatory system pause:
The unpleasant aroma of the gas, called hydrogen sulfide (H2S), can be a little too familiar, as it is expelled by bacteria living in the human colon and eventually makes its way, well, out.
The new research found that cells [...]
Click to embiggen slightly.
Some call them sea slugs, but they’re so striking, so sensual, that nudibranch has to be the better term.
SONG:Now the Snow. (To download: double right-click & “Save As”)
ARTIST: grant.
SOURCE: “It’s snowing on Mars”, iTwire, 30 Sep 2008, as cited in the post It falls everywhere.
ABSTRACT: The Phoenix lander is lonely. (It’s also dying as I write this, but then again, so are we all.) It’s very far from home in a [...]
Recently, Dr. Roger Tsien earned a Nobel prize for his work in creating a stunning array of colorful, glowing proteins. Not only are they, like, totally psychedelically intense, man, but they’re also very useful in tagging cells and seeing how they interact with things in their environment – like drugs, or viruses, or toxins.
CBS:
Tsien developed GFP-like proteins [...]
Entolomologists working in Borneo have found what they believe to be world’s longest insect:
PhysOrg writes:
The specimen was found by a local villager and handed to Malaysian amateur naturalist Datuk Chan Chew Lun in 1989, according to Philip Bragg, who formally identified the insect in this month’s issue of peer-reviewed journal Zootaxa. The insect was named Phobaeticus chani, or “Chan’s [...]
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