Photo Credit: Coolhaus
As the peak of summer approaches, we here at Science & Food love to reach for one of our favorite frosty treats: the ice cream sandwich. Being true Science & Foodies, we started to wonder about this amazing composite material- how do you get the coexisting chewy cookie yet firm ice cream? We began to search for answers by turning to Natasha Case, founder of the Los Angeles favorite “Coolhaus” which serves gourmet ice cream and ice cream sandwiches. Tra ...read more
The first flower, revealed today by researchers in Nature Communications, is more than 140 million years old. (Credit Hervé Sauquet and Jürg Schönenberger)
About 90 percent of all terrestrial plants today are angiosperms, or flowering plants. Yet finding the flower ancestral to them all has been a, ahem, fruitless search. Until now.
Although plants do turn up in the fossil record — such as the stunning 52-million-year-old tomatillos revealed earlier this year — some ...read more
There’s nothing romantic about this cheek to cheek dance between two large male lionfish. Photo Credit: Alex Fogg
Understanding animal behavior can be tough, as observing individuals for hours can be incredibly boring and our mere presence can affect how they act. Things get even harder when those animals happen to live in the ocean; our inability to breathe water makes quietly sitting and watching creatures significantly more difficult. So it was lucky to say the ...read more
By Cora Lund Preston, Communication Specialist for Monarch Joint Venture
The Monarch Monitoring Blitz has begun! Grab your hats, sunscreen and clipboards and join fellow citizen scientists for some fresh air and an international monarch monitoring blitz from July 29-August 5th! With enough reports, your information will provide a snapshot that helps scientists understand the range and population size of late summer breeding monarchs across North America.
If you’re already familia ...read more
(Credit: Africa Studio/Shutterstock)
If bacteria all glowed the way some bioluminescent species do, you’d probably go blind walking into your kitchen. An abundance of organic material and damp surfaces allows microbial life to flourish around spaces where food is prepared, but one particular item shines brightest in the bacterial firmament. It’s the kitchen sponge, that workhorse of culinary clean-ups, and it is absolutely overrun with bacteria.
Kitchen sponges have been picked out ...read more
In a post earlier this month, I discussed a new Journal of Neuroscience paper on statistical power in neuroscience. That paper was a response to and reanalysis of a previous article, and in my post I noted my surprise that the new paper hadn’t appeared in Nature Reviews: Neuroscience (NRN), where the original paper had been published.
It turns out there’s a bit of a backstory here. According to the senior author of the new paper, Jon Roiser, his group did want to submit to NRN, but ...read more
Where the heck did this storm come from?!
Tropical Storm Emily, as seen in a timelapse of GOES-16 weather satellite imagery covering two and a half hours, starting at about 7 a.m. (Florida time) on Monday, July 31, 2017. (Source: CIMSS Satellite Blog)
Seemingly out of the blue, Tropical Storm Emily has spun up off Florida’s Gulf Coast and made landfall just south of Tamp this morning. Where the heck did this storm come from?
At 2 p.m. EDT on Sunday, the National Hurricane Cente ...read more
A view of the website featuring some members of the XPRIZE Foundation’s Science Fiction Advisory Council. Credit: XPRIZE
The world of 20 years ago would probably seem unrecognizable to many who have grown with Internet and mobile services enabling an always-connected, everything-on-demand lifestyle. Now imagine hitting fast forward and teleporting 20 years into the future to consider how science and technology may have shaped society in the world of 2037. That’s the premi ...read more
