Science Art: Male Wood Duck, by Abbott H. Thayer, 1904.
This is half of one color plate from a book intended to show how “showy” coloration can actually make some creatures harder to spot in […]
biology
SONG: Whispering Secrets to Me
SONG: “Whispering Secrets to Me” [Download] . ARTIST: grant. SOURCE: Defector 15 Nov 2022, “Turtles Have Been Vocalizing All This Time. Why Did We Not […]
Studying lizard lungs to build replacement human lungs.
Princeton researchers are looking at the fast-growing lungs of ordinary, common lizards called brown anoles to find way to quickly create replacement lungs for humans […]
Grape seed extract extends mice lifespans (and health) by 9 percent.
New Scientist reports on a Nature Metabolism study that found a chemical found in grape seeds helped bodies weed out weaker “senescent” cells, leading to […]
Science Art: Triops longicaudatus, by Steve Jurvetson, 2005
This is a triops, a three-eyed critter something like a trilobite (though it’s not actually one of those at all). From the Wikimedia Commons description: […]
Viable sperm sent on a postcard
New Scientist opens a new, fertile field of biological research with the discovery at Japan’s University of Yamanashi that it’s possible to freeze-dry viable sperm […]
Sending baby squid to the space station.
BBC reports on a NASA project that’s transporting cute little cephalopods into orbit, launching 128 baby bobtail squid and 5,000 tardigrades to the International Space […]
Really old poop yields really new microbes – and new medical treatments.
Omaha digs deep for a story on how millennia-old feces has reintroduced us to some long-lost germs in the human gut biome – that might […]
Science Art: Acrosome Reaction Diagram
Happy Mother’s Day! Wikimedia Commons user LadyofHats made this image of motherhood. And fatherhood, I suppose. Technically, this fertilization is happening in a sea urchin, […]
Blood-sugar test gives us the first way to quantify exactly how hungry you are.
Nature reports on experiments mapping out exactly how hungry people will feel over the next 24 hours – giving a hard number to what’s usually […]
A piece of human brain survived 2,600 years.
Science magazine reveals the secret to cellular survival for a chunk of human brain that didn’t rot for more than two and half millennia after […]
“Just grow a table.”
MIT News looks at the new science of tissue engineering, taking lab-grown cells and training them to grow objects to order: It takes a lot […]
Now America is being invaded by jumping worms.
Science News checks out yet another disaster, though one on a smaller scale and a bit closer to the ground than most, as armies of […]
Sperm do lopsided barrel-rolls. They don’t have propeller tails.
Science News dashes the popular image of sperm as swimming furiously by spinning their tails like boat propellers. Instead, the little guys only move their […]
SONG: Cluster Anatomy
SONG: “Cluster Anatomy” [Download] . (I made an .ogg version, too.) ARTIST: grant. SOURCE: Science News, 2 June 2020, “A new 3-D map illuminates the […]