A new look at the mammals who lived with dinosaurs
Nature rounds up a “rash of fossil finds” revealing the lives of the first mammals, shedding a little more light on how our forebears survived […]
Month: October 2019
Science Art: Major John Wesley Powell’s Boat, the Emma Dean, 1871.
Click to embiggen Major John Wesley Powell was a soldier and explorer, a geologist and a professor who led the first government expedition down the […]
Easter Island statues made farms more fertile
Science News investigates the benefits of carving monumental heads and burying their bottom halves in the ground. It seems like they might have had a […]
Gut bacteria can help the brain conquer fear; antibiotics can make PTSD recovery harder.
Science magazine explores the gut-brain connection further with a study that finds gut bacteria can help us get over our fear responses… unless antibiotics have […]
SONG: Multicellular
SONG: “Multicellular”. ARTIST: grant. SOURCE: Science News, 17 October 2019, “Acrobatic choanoflagellates could help explain how multicellularity evolved,” as used in the post “How we […]
How we became multicellular
Science News reveals the strange habits of little single-celled swimming organisms called “choanoflagellates” that tend to gather together in clusters for specialized tasks – which […]
Science Art: The normal conduction system of the heart, by Rob Kreuger.
Just looking at heart pictures. No reason. Nice when they work right. Image from Wikimedia Commons.
Scientists endorse civil disobedience to get somebody to actually do something about climate change.
Reuters reports on scientists – 400 of them – who have shed the stereotypical dispassionate patience that goes with, you know, gathering data over long […]
How forensic linguistics reveals who wrote what. (Or, why JK Rowling and Alexander Hamilton can’t stay anonymous.)
National Geographic goes (or went – this article is from 2013) into the science of forensic linguists, using computers to analyze things like word choice […]
Science Art: Development of the Gonophore…., 1891
Click to embiggen From Johns Hopkins circular “On the Structure and Development of the Gonophores of a Certain Siphonophore Belonging to the Order Auronectae (Haeckel).” […]
“Curse of the dancer” reveals backstage backstabbing goes back at least 1,500 years.
LiveScience looks at a lead tablet, translated by a Roman history professor, that consists of a dancer’s curse against a rival: The curse calls upon […]
Paint cows like zebras and they’ll be better off, initial study indicates.
Real Clear Science has a strange Japanese experiment (published in PloS ONE) in which researchers stole an insect-repelling trick from zebras and gave black cattle […]
As Australopithecus to us, so this fossil to sharks.
Nature reveals the “missing link” for sharks, thanks to a cartilaginous fossil of a 383 million-year-old eel-like fish: Christian Klug at the University of Zurich […]
Paralyzed man moves, thanks to mind-controlled exoskeleton.
BBC News has the story (told in many photos) of Thibault, a man who has been able to move all four limbs with a robot […]