The mosquito conundrum: Why not kill ’em all?
Nature wades into the controversy, asking scientists what would really happen if we killed all the mosquitoes: A stronger argument for keeping mosquitoes might be […]
Month: July 2010
Snail spit kills pain.
I have a vague memory of writing a story back in the 1990s about researchers trying to figure out how to use lethal cone snail […]
Super-scum. Again.
This is more covering-the-coverage than flogging a new discovery, but the New York Times is keeping tabs on the process of turning pond scum into […]
Teen motherhood: Evolutionary strategy.
There’s a whole shovel-load of politics wrapped up in this New Scientist report on the evolutionary effects of poverty on human reproduction: There is no […]
Science Art: Venus and the Ark, by Anne Sexton
The missile to launch a missile was almost a secret. Two male Ph.D.’s were picked and primed to fill it and one hundred carefully counted […]
SONG: nobody else can hear
SONG: “nobody else can hear”. (To download: double right-click & “Save As”) ARTIST: grant. SOURCE: “Super squid sex organ discovered”, BBC News, 7 July 2010, […]
How NASA finds oil.
Unfortunately, as NPR reveals, we’re not talking about the kind that’s still safely underground: The NASA Earth Observatory explains that since ocean waters are never […]
X in uniform.
MAPS has published a study confirming that MDMA really does work in treating post-traumatic stress disorder: Participants treated with a combination of MDMA and psychotherapy […]
If you love a sewage-eating robot, set it free.
So New Scientist recommends in a new report on an artificial gut that allows robots to become self-sustaining: [F]ood-munching robots have been demonstrated in the […]
Read in color!
New Scientist teaches you how to make yourself synaesthetic: Olympia Colizoli at the University of Amsterdam in the Netherlands, and colleagues… gave seven volunteers a […]
Science Art: The Microwave Sky, Planck Telescope, 2010
Click to embiggen This image – a composite view of, well, everything – was made by the European Space Agency’s Planck Telescope, an orbiting observatory […]
Get up. Really.
New York Times quotes research that proves exercise won’t save you. It’s the sitting that kills you: …[S]cientists from the University of South Carolina and […]
To cure my wife, you want to transplant my *what*?
New York Times gets to the fundamentals of the strange world of microbes-as-medicine: “She was just dwindling down the drain, and she probably would have […]
Super squid penis. (No, this is not spam.)
BBC recently covered the salacious details when scientists discovered a squid’s enormous sexual organ: The male squid’s sexual organ is almost as long as its […]
Prozac pollution and shrimp suicide.
BBC News reports that antidepressant runoff is encouraging shrimp to go toward the white light: The researchers say this causes the shrimps to forget to […]