A chunk of plastic after 10 worms spent about 30 minutes feasting. (Credit: CSIC Communications Department)
A caterpillar that can eat plastic and produce an industrially useful compound while doing so could take a bite out of the global scourge of plastic trash, a new study finds.
Plastics typically resist breaking down, and as plastic use has risen exponentially over the past 50 years, plastic garbage is piling up in landfills and could wreak havoc on wildlife and the environment for centuri ...read more
An animation of images from the new GOES-16 weather satellite shows the progression of a day for 12 hours starting on April 21, 2017. (Source: CIRA/RAMMB/NOAA)
With Earth Day just behind us, I’ve been inspired to start a new series here at ImaGeo: semi-regular posts showcasing the truly dazzling imagery now being produced by the GOES-16 weather satellite.
It’s now on its shakedown cruise, so to speak. Scientists are still testing everything out and evaluating the data being returne ...read more
A visual celebration of the home planet, starting with a view from Earth as seen from Saturn — 870 million miles away — and zooming in close
In this image, acquired by the Cassini spacecraft just this past April 12th, the rings of Saturn dominate the view. But see that little white dot? That’s home — 870 million miles away.
On the morning of the first Earth Day, on April 20th, 1970, a friend and I boarded the IRT subway line in Brooklyn and headed for Manhatta ...read more
As the March for Science has drawn near, scientists and science-lovers across the country have pontificated at length on why they are—or aren’t—marching. But while today’s 400-plus demonstrations around the nation will hopefully resonate with lawmakers, it takes more than rallies to accomplish lasting change. The following is a guest post from Dr. Kira Krend, a biology teacher in Honolulu, HI, on her March for Science—one that she does ever ...read more
Is climate change playing any role in an apparent lengthening of the hurricane season?
Arlene, as seen by NASA’s Terra satellite on the morning of Friday, April 21, 2017 — probably before it was downgraded in status from a tropical storm. The U.S. East Coast is off screen to the left. (Source: NASA Worldview)
It’s way early for hurricane season to start, but that’s precisely what happened yesterday with the formation of Tropical Storm Arlene in the far northern Atlantic. ...read more
The animation, based on data from a NASA airborne observatory, show just how much the state’s snowpack has grown
Snow water equivalent — the water content of snow — in California’s Tuolumne River Basin, as seen in an animation comparing 2015 and 2017. Lighter blue indicates less snow, deeper blue is more snow (see color bar at left). The 2017 snow water equivalent was 21 times greater than 2015, which was the lowest snowpack on record. (Source: NASA)
The incre ...read more
A new article posted on preprint site bioRxiv has generated a lot of interest among neuroscientists on Twitter. The article reports the existence of ‘functional connectivity‘ between surgically disconnected distant brain regions using fMRI, something that in theory shouldn’t be possible.
This is big news, if true, because it suggests that fMRI functional connectivity isn’t entirely a reflection of actual signalling between brain areas. Rather, something else must be able ...read more
An artists impression of Homo floresiensis. (Credit: Katrina Kenny, SA Museum)
The 2003 discovery of the Homo floresiensis added a new, weird branch to the human family tree. At the same time humans were spreading across Asia and Neanderthals were inching toward extinction in Europe (and the mysterious Denisovans were doing … something), this three-and-a-half foot human relative was carving out an existence on the Flores island in what is now Indonesia.
But where, exactly, it came from ...read more
Whoever named the sea cucumber after a vegetable didn’t give it enough credit. Yes, sea cucumbers are soft, warty tubes that scoot eyelessly along the seafloor. But they aren’t helpless. Some secrete a poison that’s deadly to other animals. And some, when threatened, shoot sticky threads out of their anuses to tangle up predators. When researchers collected these bizarre weapons and tested them in the lab, they discovered a material that’s unique amon ...read more
