Should you really eat that lobster? On invertebrates and pain…
New Scientist takes a surprisingly nuanced look at the way things like oysters and shrimp might actually be responding to trauma. They’re not all the […]
Month: February 2014
Largest space telescope is ready to… observe.
PhysOrg has the skinny on ESA’s Gaia telescope and its quest to catalogue a billion stars: Gaia will be able to discern objects up to […]
MIT astrophysicists set to detect just *how* weird the universe really is.
DailyGalaxy.com shares the weird – an experiment that’s been proposed to tell for once and for all if classical physics can explain the universe, or […]
SONG: “The Road We Wander”
SONG: “The Road We Wander.” [Download] (To download: double right-click & “Save As”) ARTIST: grant. SOURCE: Based on “Monarch migration may become extinct,” Laboratory Equipment, […]
Science Art: Cotylorhynchus, by Nix
The Tumblr illustrator Nix is having a paleoart February, creating a new illustration of a non-dinosaur, non-pterosaur prehistoric creature every day of the month. This […]
Guild Salute: Michael Hearst, Songs for Unusual Creatures
Michael Hearst! Composer! Writer! Player of atypical instruments! Science fan! You are compiling instrumentals based on wonderful animals, like the glass frog, the magnapinna squid, […]
Like a Bridge Over Troubled Cream… no, wait. South Central Skim? *Nightmilking*?
Modern Farmer reports on ongoing research that’s found that cows make more milk when listening to R.E.M. and Simon & Garfunkel: Many dairies in the […]
Elephants empathize.
Science magazine reaches out with new research showing that elephants don’t just mourn their dead, but also try to comfort those in anguish: The study […]
Native Americans go back longer than we thought.
Nature examines a DNA test on a “Clovis boy,” whose DNA proves that 12,000 years ago, the ancestors of today’s Native Americans were already here: […]
Mother’s milk made to order.
Breastfeeding, the Australian Broadcasting Corp tells us, is a little more bespoke than one might expect: “Mothers are producing different biological recipes for sons and […]
Science Art: Life restoration of Ischigualastia jenseni, by Smokeybjb
Click to embiggen Here’s a little (calf-sized being “little” here) fella from the Triassic period (the first of the three periods of dinosaur rule on […]
A cure for love.
New Scientist examines the biochemical roots of the emotion we call “love” – and the chemicals we could take to reverse the symptoms: …[E]thics aside, […]
Buildings kill just about one billion birds a year.
Ecowatch reveals how our cities act as killing machines, with a new study that’s determined that buildings kill nearly one billion birds every year: In […]
Diuretic drug appears to help autism.
Nature explains the unusual effects that chloride ions can have on our developing brains, and what that means for a drug that seems to help […]
Latest graphene surprise: a better conductor than expected.
Or: “Weird substance gets weirder.” Nature has more on how the latest tests have thrown models of how carbon circuits are supposed to work into […]