Photo: flickr/Alan Levine We know that dogs have a guilty look, but can they actually be guilty? Well, according to this study, the answer is… kind of. Here, researchers show that dogs are capable of “deceptive-like behavior.” In a set of experiments, dogs tended to lead a human “competitor” away from food when that human would keep it for himself. However, the same dogs happily lead their “cooperative” owner to the ...read more

By Lishka Arata, Conservation Educator at Point Blue Volunteers collecting a sample from the lake to examine under the microscope. Photo: CMC Despite the current administration’s efforts to roll back the Clean Water Act and dismantle the Environmental Protection Agency, interest and participation is growing in a new EPA- and stakeholder-led citizen science project that aims to inform clean water management. The Cyanobacteria Monitoring Collaborative has been gathering steam since 2010, wh ...read more

A 3-D rendering of the internal structure of a microchip. The material in yellow is copper — showing the processor’s circuit connections which link the individual transistors. The smallest lines shown are individually around 45 nanometers wide. (Credit: Mirko Holler) Computer chips continue to shrink ever smaller, but we still wring more processing power out of them. One of the problems that comes with taking our technology to the nanoscale, however, is that we can no longer s ...read more

A farmer sprays field with a nitrogen, phosphorus, potassium fertilizer. (Credit: oticki/Shutterstock) All life needs phosphorus and agricultural yields are improved when phosphorus is added to growing plants and the diet of livestock. Consequently, it is used globally as a fertilizer – and plays an important role in meeting the world’s food requirements. In order for us to add it, however, we first need to extract it from a concentrated form – and the supply comes almost exc ...read more

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