Twitter’s been on fire with people amazed by cats that seem compelled to park themselves in squares of tape marked out on the floor. These felines appear powerless to resist the call of the #CatSquare.
This social media fascination is a variation on a question I heard over and over as a panelist on Animal Planet’s “America’s Cutest Pets” series. I was asked to watch video after video of cats climbing into cardboard boxes, suitcases, sinks, plastic storage bins, cu ...read more
Be glad our species wasn't around some 400 million years ago...we would have had to contend with giant sea scorpions, some more than 10 feet in length and capable of prowling about on land in search of a meal. And that's not all: Researchers reveal that at least one of these Monsters of Deep Time had a particularly violent — and unusual — way of dispatching its prey.
Published today in The American Naturalist, the spine-tingling tale of a stabby sea scorpion is ...read more
But in reality, it is a flying saucer moon named Atlas
Who knew? I certainly didn't... Saturn has a moon shaped eerily like a flying saucer.
Check it out in the image above, acquired by NASA's Cassini spacecraft on April 12, 2017 during a flyby that came as close as 7,000 miles from the moon.
This is the closest image ever taken of the moon, named Atlas, according to NASA. The object is just 19 miles across; it orbits Saturn just outside the giant planet's A ring —& ...read more
The equatorial Pacific Ocean is suffering from a split personality disorder: El Niño-ish in the east; La Niña-ish to the west. El Niño is likely to win out.
Climate forecast models are predicting a full-fledged El Niño by summer or fall. If it should happen, it would bring all manner of disruption to global weather patterns.
And it would also be an extraordinary event.
If you'll recall, in 2015-16, the planet experienced a monster El Niño event, one of the ...read more
You've likely seen some version of this scenario on television or in the halls of a university: A researcher runs out of the lab in a frenzy, electrified after suddenly arriving at the solution to an impossible problem. These "aha!" moments are supremely satisfying, whether you're a scientist, a hard-bitten detective or an unlucky horror movie actress realizing that something's just not right.
But what happens to us in the moments just before the light bulb turns on? New research from ...read more
In a thought-provoking new paper called What are neural correlates neural correlates of?, NYU sociologist Gabriel Abend argues that neuroscientists need to pay more attention to philosophy, social science, and the humanities.
Abend's main argument is that if we are to study the neural correlates or neural basis of a certain phenomenon, we must first define that phenomenon and know how to identify instances of it.
Sometimes, this identification is straightforward: in a study of brai ...read more
Every morning at Hamelin Pool, in Western Australia, the first rays of sunshine illuminate knobby reef-like structures, submerged or peeking just above the gentle waves, depending on the tide. On the crudely rounded surfaces of these rocks, microorganisms stir and begin the daily task of photosynthesizing, fighting against occluding sand grains to harvest the sunlight.
This scene, or something like it, has likely been occurring every morning, somewhere on Earth, for the last 3.7 billion y ...read more
It's surprisingly hard to stick a camera to a dolphin. Surprising, anyway, when you consider the other animals that have carried monitoring devices down into the ocean for human scientists: sharks, sea turtles, birds, manatees, even whales. When a group of researchers recently overcame the challenges and created a camera that dolphins can wear, they were inducted into a dizzying underwater world.
Scientists may attach instruments to marine animals to do environmental research, as wi ...read more
Smelling someone's stinky body odor can really bum you out, at least temporarily. But did you know that BO can communicate emotions directly? According to this study, human body odor may contain chemicals, also known as "chemosignals", that can carry information about emotional states. To test this hypothesis, the researchers evoked emotions in 12 men by showing them movie clips to make them either happy (e.g., “Bare Necessities” from The Jungle Book), a ...read more
The 2017 UCLA Science & Food public lecture series is here!
FOOD WASTE: Solutions Informed by Science (and what to do with your leftovers)
Tuesday, May 2nd
7:00 pm to 8:30 pm
Freud Playhouse, Macgowan Hall
World-renowned chef Massimo Bottura, UCLA professor Jenny Jay, Zero Waste Consultant and “Waste Warrior” Amy Hammes will participate in a panel discussion moderated by Evan Kleiman on “Food waste: solutions informed by science,” hosted by Dr. Amy Rowat, Scienc ...read more
