Subway riders in Hong Kong. (Credit: Sean Pavone/Shutterstock)
Microbes are all around us and in us and especially on us. Our skin can be both a barrier between our bodies and the microbes in our environment and a way in. Once microbes find their way onto our hands, they’re a step closer to getting inside us through our eyes, mouths, and noses.
Don’t despair. A diverse ecosystem of bacteria calls our skin and bodies home without causing us any harm at all. ...read more
Chinese scientists have discovered how a plant tricks wasps into carrying its seeds great distances. Photo Credit: adapted from Chen et al. 2017 Figure S1; used with permission from Gao Chen
Stemona tuberosa is well known for its use in Chinese traditional medicine, but it’s got a much more intriguing claim to fame: It’s one of less than a handful of plants known to science that engages in vespicochory—that i ...read more
(Credit: Monty Python/YouTube)
Any nerd worth her NaCl knows all about English comedy group Monty Python, and their version of the King Arthur legend, “Monty Python and the Holy Grail.â€� But lesser known are the troupe’s other feature-length films, including 1983’s “The Meaning of Life.â€� Amidst a dinner party with Death and a machine that goes “ping!â&euro ...read more
Doctors recently discovered rat lungworm in Chinese red-headed centipedes after two people became ill from eating them raw. Centipede Photo: Yasunori Koide
When the 78 year old woman arrived at the hospital, it was clear something was wrong. She’d been suffering from headaches and been in a drowsy fog for weeks. So doctors checked her cerebral spinal fluid, and found it was cloudy and yellow instead of clear. It was brimming with white blood cells, indicating a ...read more
An aerial view of the Andes mountains in Argentina. (Credit: Nicolas Prieto/Unsplash)
There’s only one place on the planet where you can see flamingos roaming salt flats, vicuñas grazing in herds and condors soaring overhead, all as hot springs bubble beneath towering volcanoes. It’s the Altiplano of South America — a nearly 1,000-kilometer-long, otherworldly plateau that stretches from southern Peru through Bolivia and in ...read more
Artist’s illustration of the dusty disk of the early Solar System with an inset microscope image of a hibonite crystal. (Credit: Field Museum, University of Chicago, NASA, ESA, and E. Feild (STSCL))
Tiny crystals in meteorites were witness to the sun’s unruly behavior in its earliest years.
The sun sends a lot more than sunshine and rainbows our way. High-energy particles capable of messing with the nuclei of atoms stream off our star constantly. Earth&aci ...read more
Lockheed Martin’s Mars Base Camp is part of a vision to bring astronauts to the Red Planet. But to enjoy living there longterm, many scientists have long dreamed of altering the planet’s atmosphere. (Credit: Lockheed Martin)
Mars might not have the right ingredients to terraform into our planetary home away from home – even with the recent discovery of liquid water buried near its south pole.
Research published Monday in Nature Astronomy ...read more
Being a generalist specialist, a unique niche, is the hallmark of our species, say researchers — and the reason Homo sapiens (left) are still around but other hominins, including Neanderthals (right), are not. (Credit: Wikimedia Commons)
Some animals are jacks of all trades, some masters of one. Homo sapiens, argues a provocative new commentary, are an evolutionary success story because our ancestors pulled off a unique feat: being masterly jacks of all trades. But ...read more
Kīlauea’s summit seen on a July 28, 2018 overflight, showing the deep new crater. USGS/HVO.
The eruption at KÃlauea has almost reached 3 months and in a sense, this eruption was a two-for-the-price of one. Most of the attention has been on the lava flows on the lower East Rift zone and rightly so. Those lava flows are the largest eruption in historic times at the Hawaiian volcano and have destroyed hundreds of homes, along with permanently altering par ...read more
I spent these last few days meeting and discussing and learning more and more about ICO ventures at the Beyond Blogs Summit in South Korea and the Blockchain Partners Summit 2018 which
had a very interesting tagline : A New Paradigm, A New Future. The Irony is that after interviewing more than 20 ICO founders and their teams, i was somewhat disappointed that they did not know their numbers and when their business model will break even and or how they will go to market and achieve projected reve ...read more
