(Credit: Shutterstock)
Google Street View can pretty much show you every location in the world, even the Faroe Islands thanks to camera-yielding sheep, from the ground. While Satellite View shows us a large-scale aerial of the world, what about what’s in between?
Gregory Crutsinger, a scientist who’s worked for drone companies like 3D Robotics and Parrot, recently started a UAV consulting company called Drone Scholars and is leading a citizen scientist drone project c ...read more
A suspension of stem cells in liquid nitrogen. (Credit: Elena Pavlovich/Shutterstock)
Tiny brain “organoids,” or clusters of neurons grown from human stem cells, have been implanted into rats.
The news comes from Stat, and it seems that two different teams have managed to integrate human brain cells into rat brains. The organoids began stretching out new cells, and even showed signs of activity when the researchers shone lights at the rat’s eyes, a sign that they were fu ...read more
Jane Goodall in Gombe Stream National Park, circa 1965. (Credit: The Jane Goodall Institute)
Jane Goodall has been a flashpoint in science circles. Was her years-long study of chimpanzees in the Gombe Stream National Park in Tanzania real science? Or was it too subjective to have scientific value?
The questions arise anew in the wake of a new documentary, Jane, that looks back at Goodall’s career and how she became a household name in the 1960s. In 1965, her CBS special Miss Goodall and ...read more
After a win, mangrove crabs (Perisesarma eumolpe) will gloat to keep opponents from going for round two. Photo Credit: Marut Sayannikroth/Shutterstock
From touchdown dances to victory laps, we all love to bask in the glory after a big win. So do mangrove crabs. After a fierce physical altercation, victorious male crabs sometimes stridulate, planting one claw into the ground and rubbing it vigorously with the other to both visibly and audibly revel in their triumph. But the purpose of ...read more
Image: Flickr/Rick Harris
Do you know what you like? That may sound like a dumb question, but disentangling all the different reasons for loving one thing and hating another can be tricky. Take bananas, for instance. Many people pronounce a clear preference for a certain level of ripeness when it comes to their bananas. But is this preference related to the actual taste of bananas of different ripeness, or is due to other cues, such as the shelf life of the banana? Well, here comes the sc ...read more
Every Schizophyllum commune you see is likely a new gender. (Credit: wasanajai/Shutterstock)
Gender isn’t really a fungal construct.
Where we have two traditionally recognized genders, male and female, some species of fungi can have thousands. It sounds confusing, but it’s actually helpful — with so many variations, the fungi can mate with nearly every individual of their species they meet. It must make for a wild singles night.
Sexy Fun Guys
One species of fungi, Schizophyll ...read more
I recently decided to revisit a 2014 case that regular readers might remember.
Back in 2014, I posted about a terrible piece of statistical ‘spin’ that somehow made it into the peer-reviewed Journal of Psychiatric Research. The offending authors, led by Swedish psychiatrist Lars H. Thorell, had run a study to determine whether an electrodermal hyporeactivity test was able to predict suicide and suicidal behaviour in depressed inpatients.
Now, the standard way to evaluate the perfor ...read more
Glance at the news lately and you might see these headlines that would make Kent “ACTION NEWS” Brockman proud:
A snapshot at Google News from the weekend.
Let’s set some thing straight. No, we’re not around the corner from VOLCANIC APOCALYPSE
A volcano can show many signs that an eruption might be brewing. These include, but aren’t limited to:
Inflation – As magma rises, it takes up space, so the volcano inflates. Sometimes that inflation is subtle ...read more
Have you ever seen a face on a football?
In a new paper, neuroscientists Gerwin Schalk et al. report that brain stimulation caused a man to experience strange hallucinations. The patient saw faces in everyday objects, including an orange soccer ball and a featureless box. The researchers coined the word “facephenes” to refer to these face-like perceptions.
Schalk et al. studied a 26 year old Japanese man suffering from intractable epilepsy. The patient was implanted with a large num ...read more
