This is the flying lemur, or colugo, also known as the order Dermoptera – the “skin-wings.” They’re related to shrews and bats moreso than real lemurs, which is too bad. It’d be cool to have these a little closer on the family tree. They’re as big as cats and they hang glide through the jungles of [...]

Or, well, their valences, which is as good as it gets without Heisenberg getting in the way. Yeah, the Corante Pipeline has a post describing what it’s like to look inside atoms:

The researchers have improved the resolution and sensitivity, narrowing things down to single-atom tips. So instead of a tungsten surface, we have a single carbon [...]

That’s the trick. That’s how this guy in South Africa’s Mail & Guardian (and elsewhere) says we’ll do it. We’ll be able to send people to Mars as long as we don’t bring them back:

By eliminating the need to transport heavy fuel and equipment for the return journey, costs could be slashed by 80% or more. Supplies and [...]

This may just be a behavioral curiosity, but I can’t help wonder if the devastation from white-nose fungus is playing more havoc than we realize. I don’t see a connection, but still – it’s weird. Scientists in Italy have found a bat population that doesn’t come out to hunt at night:

“One late afternoon, walking in the woodland, we [...]

Or at least a very, very big, mythical bird… that turned out to be real:

“It was certainly capable of swooping down and taking a child,” said Paul Scofield, the curator of vertebrate zoology at the Canterbury Museum. “They had the ability to not only strike with their talons but to close the talons and put them through quite [...]

The Antipodean ABC Science News has hopeful news about antibiotic resistant superbugs. They might have an Achilles heel after all:

Researchers at New York University report in the journal Science, that bacteria produce certain nitric oxide-producing enzymes to resist antibiotics.

Drugs that inhibit these enzymes can make antibiotics much more potent, making even deadly superbugs like Methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus [...]

Click to embiggen

A still life from the NASA Great Images collection.

This was a prototype of the craft that went on to explore the outer reaches of the solar system, then become a machine consciousness in Star Trek: The Motion Picture.

We all have to start somewhere. Shaking.

We’ve been watching chimpanzee’s faces. Why not? They can be funny to look at, often, and they can help us understand how we communicate emotions and why we do what we see.

Irish Times:

Being able to interpret [the emotions behind chimpanzee facial expressions] might not help us understand human babies any better but they might help us discover [...]

ABC Science (the Australian network, not the American one) is taking a long look at lizards – specifically, the medical information we can get from geckos’ wriggling tails:

Professor Anthony Russell of the University of Calgary in Canada says the new finding could shed light on the functions of the spinal cord and the effects of spinal cord [...]