Birdies with the big, cute eyes are in the most danger from deforestation.
Science explains the odd irony behind the fact that the cutest birds – the ones gazing out at you with those big eyes – are […]
zoology
Science Art: Roseate Spoonbill, study for Concealing Coloration in the Animal Kingdom, by Abbot Handerson Thayer
Click to embiggen As its Smithsonian Museum page explains, this painting is from a book that hoped to prove a slightly odd hypothesis: that even […]
Science Art: Booby Gannet, by John James Audubon
Click to embiggen A quizzical and curious sea bird, from Birds of America, presented by The Public Library of Cincinnati and Hamilton County.
We’re going to save the mussels of Appalachia. Yes, we are.
Science News has something (perhaps small, perhaps strange) to be optimistic about. The endangered river mussels of America’s eastern mountains might go back to cleaning […]
Bored with hanging out at home? Count some penguins (or spot some galaxies) for science.
Scientific American has some suggestions for your self-isolation. There are a few ways you can help researchers out without ever leaving home: “I think where […]
China’s “Bat Woman” is a virus-hunting hero.
Or something like that. Scientific American looks at how Shi Zhengli’s kind of obscure area zoological research – looking at how bats contract viral diseases […]
Forest fires boost bats.
Scientific American checks out how fire-prevention efforts are actually apparently hurting bat populations: In California’s Sierra Nevada ecosystem, bats have adapted to occasional blazes. But […]
Science Art: Pl. 119 Cittura cyanotis, from A monograph of the Alcedinidae : or, family of kingfishers by Richard Bowdler Sharpe.
Click to embiggen slightly A lilac kingfisher, as pictured in the 1800s in A Monograph of the Alcedinidae, found in the Biodiversity Heritage Library. It’s […]
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 […]
Common insectides have lowered songbird populations – they eat a couple seeds and lose weight.
National Geographic reports on a study that has found nicotine-based insecticides – the world’s most widely used pesticides – act like appetite suppressants for songbirds. […]
How the zebra got its stripes. (An 85-year-old researcher’s first published study!)
Popular Science thinks they know – and the answer is literally cool: Now the 85-year-old amateur scientist [Allison Cobb] has published her first scientific study […]
Why do bats live so long? And how can we live longer too?
Ars Technica tries to discover what it is about bats that could help us humans live longer, healthier lives: For the most part, as the […]
Science Art: Progne purpurea. Purple martin, by Howard Jones, 1886
Click to embiggen A bird in its home (grown on a vine, fashioned by humans). Cute little guy, too. I found this on the Scientific […]
Science Art: Wilson’s Snipe, by W.I. Beecroft, 1912
Yes, Virginia, there is such a thing as a snipe. Lots of kinds of snipe, in fact. And snipe hunting was a real thing, too. […]