50 years ago, Surtsey Island came into being. Now, we’re drilling to find out how.
Nature reports on scientists with big drills in Iceland, trying to find out how it was that Surtsey Island came rising up from the ocean […]
biology
Puppetmaster parasite steers fish – from inside their eyeballs.
New Scientist has the creepy story of a parasitic worm that controls fish behavior by controlling how they see the world: When the parasite is […]
Someone tell Peter Thiel. Consuming young fish poop makes old fish live longer.
Nature has what must be the least appetizing life-extension program yet discovered: The findings were posted to the bioRxiv.org preprint server on 27 March1 by […]
Scale-shedding gecko a nasty mouthful for predators
Science News reveals the unappetizing trick of a newly discovered gecko species. The lizard sheds its large scales to wriggle out of predators’ mouths: All […]
Life… finds a way. With a self-impregnating leopard shark.
New Scientist covers a shark who managed to make babies despite being separated from any males: Leonie the zebra shark (Stegostoma fasciatum) met her male […]
Insect biobots are ready to respond to disasters.
Science Daily reports on the cybernetic insects that can be used alongside drones to quickly map out unfamiliar terrain: “The idea would be to release […]
These mice were born from skin, not eggs. And were never in a womb.
Nature reports on a new technique that has successfully converted skin cells into fertile egg cells and brought babies to term without ever implanting them […]
Science Art: The Life Cycle of Acetabularia mediterranea, 1960.
This is how an alga (that’s how it’s spelled in the book) reproduces. It looks like an underwater nasturtium. Here, it’s being used to demonstrate […]
Science Art: Woodcut: H. Regius proving spirits in the slug, in flask, 1654.
Click to embiggen This is a slug in a bottle. To be more specific, it’s “Illustrations of the experiments of H. Regius to prove the […]
Living robot: mechanical stingray swims with rat-cell muscles.
Popular Mechanics describes the rat-cell engine that powers this stingray robot: “Roughly speaking, we made this thing with a pinch of rat cardiac cells, a […]
Human embryos grown for two weeks in lab.
Nature has followed history’s longest-cultured human embryos: Developmental biologists have grown human embryos in the lab for up to 13 days after fertilization, shattering the […]
How can slime mold learn? But it does….
Wired investigates an organism – not even an animal, doesn’t even have internal organs or nerves, much less a brain – that still somehow learns […]
At Marlon Brando’s island, the war on mosquitos is being won.
Stat goes to the front-line laboratories in French Polynesia, where scientists are beating back mosquitos in revolutionary ways: Hervé Bossin and his team have released […]
So we’ve made sperm. No man necessary.
Nature cuts my last potential for productivity to the quick with news that researchers have made mouse sperm in a dish: Researchers in China say […]
Awfullest science headline of the month: “The aliens are silent because they’re dead.”
Science Daily clinches it – not because of inaccuracy, but because of the sheer despair in considering that we’re not hearing anyone in our galaxy […]