See this little guy? He's just emerged into the world, but the appropriately-named Dumbo octopus is already taking his first flaps. Resemblance to a certain flying elephant notwithstanding, Dumbo octopuses actually live far below the ocean's surface. They're some of the deepest-living octopuses, and are so rare that this is the first hatchling that was caught on camera. The "ears" are actually fins that help them to swan about the seafloor. Stretch Your Wings They belong to a sub-order ...read more

Ah, nothing beats the crispy crunch of a jellyfish chip. Wait, what? Forget "Lady Doritos," jellyfish chips are a future snack for the masses. It turns out that the swimming gelatinous invertebrates can be leached of water to leave behind a thin, crispy wafer. It tastes of sea salt, apparently. Crispy, Crunchy News of the delicacy first appeared last summer, when Mie Pedersen, a gastrophysicist from the University of Southern Denmark announced that she and her team had found a new way ...read more

We here at Seriously, Science? really respect roaches. Not only do rambling roaches require receivers to run 'round roadblocks, but recently, researchers reproduced resourceful running of roaches to rapidly reorient running robots by ramming right into restrictions rather than retarding and reorienting. Never mind, just watch these videos of cockroaches running into things. It will help you relax. [embed]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VwI6FBiBUVw[/embed] [embed]https://www.youtube.com/wat ...read more

In this cruel world, it's impossible to navigate from cradle to grave without experiencing the bitter fruits of injustice. But bitter fruits, it turns out, are better shared. According to findings from a study published Monday in the journal JNeurosci, punishing the wrongdoer seems to be more rewarding than helping out the victim. The participants, 53 males (a bit skewed, I'd say), all played a two-player game designed to analyze how people perceive and respond to a thief. Each player — t ...read more

Today, Indonesia's Sinabung had its biggest blast in its nearly 5 years of eruptions. I reported on the initial reports of the blast and now we have some pretty stunning images from space on the eruption. It really captures the power of the blast and how the ash spread mainly to the north over Sumatra (rather than the west as predicted). Sinabung appears to have settled down since the explosion, but with this change of character, volcanologists will be looking for signs if this change will b ...read more

Scott and Mark Kelly are identical twin brothers. Though that alone does not make them unique, what does is the fact that they are also both astronauts. In order to take advantage of the Kellys’ unique situation, NASA scientists decided to conduct a detailed study on the twins, aimed at unraveling how nature versus nurture plays out in space. As part of NASA's Twins Study, researchers collected biological samples from each of the Kellys before sending Scott to the International Space ...read more

In the wake of the Valentine’s Day shooting at a Broward County, Florida high school, a familiar trope has reemerged: Often, when a young man is the shooter, people try to blame the tragedy on violent video games and other forms of media. Florida lawmaker Jared Moskowitz made the connection the day after the shooting, saying the gunman “was prepared to pick off students like it’s a video game.” In January, after two students were killed and many others wounded by a 15-ye ...read more

Sinabung has been erupting for almost 5 years now, mostly producing moderate explosions that generate pyroclastic flows. These flows roar down the slopes of the volcano -- sometimes catching people in their paths. On February 19, 2018, the volcano decided to change its tune and unleashed a massive explosion that potentially reached 55,000 feet (~16.5 kilometers), making it the largest eruption since the volcano became active again in 2013. ⚠️VIDEO | Impactante Grabación de l ...read more

Meanwhile, ice losses elsewhere allowed a Russian tanker to make the first winter crossing of the Arctic — without an icebreaker The Bering Sea off Alaska's west coast has just experienced a shocking loss of ice over a 10-day period — in winter. See the graph below for the details. To my eye it looks like sea ice extent declined from about 420,000 square kilometers on Feb. 6 to about 260,000 square kilometers on the 16th. That's a drop of 38 percent (and an area ...read more

By: Hope Henderson Through the atrium of an Oakland, CA community center, and down a narrow, paint-spattered hallway, sits Counter Culture Labs (CCL). This bocce-ball-court-turned-research-laboratory has been the east bay home for citizen science and biohacking since 2012. Ongoing projects at CCL include the Real Vegan Cheese project, which is programming yeast to produce milk proteins that can be turned into “real” cheese. Open Insulin aims to develop an open source protocol to pr ...read more