A slightly scientifically inaccurate illustration from 1909. (Credit: Wikimedia Commons) If, like me, you like fossils and you like sharks, you’re in luck. A recent re-look at a fossil found more than a decade ago has answered a big question about the story of sharks’ evolution. Published recently in American Museum Novitates, a new high-tech reinvestigation of a well-preserved fossil first described in 2003 revealed the animal was more than an Early Devonian sharklike fish. T ...read more

How much damage can the brain take and still function normally? In a new paper, A Lesion-Proof Brain?, Argentinian researchers Adolfo M. García et al. describe the striking case of a woman who shows no apparent deficits despite widespread brain damage. The patient, “CG”, is 44 years old and was previously healthy until a series of strokes lesioned large parts of her brain, as shown below. García et al. say that the damage included “extensive compromise of the rig ...read more

UCI chemistry professor Ken Shea (right) and doctoral student Jeffrey O’Brien (left) have developed a potential new broad-spectrum snake venom antidote. Photo credit: Steve Zylius / UCI Living in countries like the U.S., Australia, and the U.K., it can be all too easy to forget that snakebites are a serious and neglected global medical problem. It’s estimated that upwards of 4.5 million people are envenomated by snakes every year; about half of them suffer seriou ...read more

Earlier this week, Jordan Anaya asked an interesting question on Twitter: Why do we blame the media for reporting on bad studies but we don’t blame scientists for citing bad studies? — Omnes Res (@OmnesResNetwork) March 6, 2017 This got me thinking about what we might call the ethics of citation. Citation is a little-discussed subject in science. Certainly, there’s plenty of talk about citations – about whether it is right to judge papers by the number of citations the ...read more

You may have noticed some strange weather recently where you live. For example, in February, it reached 100o in Mangum, Oklahoma when 56o is the average. For the first time ever, temperatures in Antartica rose to the high 60s. And when was the last time you saw a headline reading Hawaii Has Had More Snow than Chicago or Denver in 2017? Some may link these strange events to a changing climate, and although climate influences weather patterns, it’s important to make a distinction between the ...read more

ALMA observations have uncovered an extremely young, dusty galaxy already polluted with the products of supernovae, as pictured in this artist’s impression. (Credit: ESO/M. Kornmesser) The Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA) in the Chilean Andes has made several groundbreaking discoveries since it was brought online in 2011. Able to image the sky in millimeter and submillimeter wavelengths, ALMA can spot emission associated with molecular gas and dust, which are ...read more

Photo: flickr/jonny goldstein We’ve all experienced it: the dreaded “earworm,” in which a song keeps playing in your head long after you’ve heard it on the radio. The causes of this phenomenon are still unclear, although studies suggest that random events, sounds, and thoughts may be to blame, and it might happen more often when we are thinking too much or too little. But more important is knowing how how to get rid of this “involuntary musical imagery” ...read more