Image from PHIL, the Public Health Image Library of the Centers for Disease Control.

It’s an old-fashioned fridge, as recommended by the Minnesota Board of Health in 1929 as a means of defeating food-borne illness.

It’s not just ants and naked mole rats that organize into eerily intelligent colonies, Discovery News says. Worms are getting in on the action, too:

The study, published in the latest Proceedings of the Royal Society B, is the first to determine that any worm lives in a colony with organized division of labor. In this case, trematode flatworm [...]

Researchers at Glasgow Caledonian University are using music (and audio engineering) to treat pain and depression – by mapping out emotional terrain in pop songs:

Each volunteer listens to pieces of previously unheard contemporary popular music* and assigns each one a position on a graph. One axis measures the type of feeling (positivity or negativity) that the piece communicates; [...]

This is so going to trigger spam filters, but I don’t care. Science News has reported breaking news… that male ducks grow bigger penises when they’re around other males:

A drake’s penis substantially wastes away at the end of one breeding season and then regrows as the next season begins. Among lesser scaup and ruddy ducks, the regrowth varies [...]

Hurricane Igor, from the International Space Station.

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It’s happening now, the CS Monitor writes. The entire Lake Michigan ecosystem is collapsing:

The quagga [mussel] is found in all of the Great Lakes; the invasive species was introduced by ocean-going vessels dumping ballast water. Their favorite food is phytoplankton. Hank Vanderploeg, a colleague of Kerfoot’s, calculated that they consume phytoplankton at a rate that’s five to seven [...]

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Found in VintagePrintable.com’s Life Science gallery.

There’s a great piece up at ScienceBlogs demonstrating how paleontology (and, even better, paleontological art) really works. It’s Darren Naish enthusing about a particularly strange-looking cousin of the allosaurs:

What interests me in particular about Concavenator it that it essentially vindicates my stupid suggestion: in this theropod, the 11th and 12th dorsal vertebrae have really tall neural spines, five times [...]

New Scientist tells the story of dolphins using tools to hunt:

Simon Allen, a behavioural ecologist at Murdoch University in Perth, Australia, was out on a routine survey when one of the dolphins surfaced “with a monstrous shell oriented skywards”. It shook the shell up and down, and left and right. After a few minutes it disappeared underwater [...]