What's in your garden?
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Author: Vishay Singh
What If Your Blood Could Kill Mosquitoes?
(Credit: frank60/Shutterstock) A commonly used anti-parasite drug could be the next weapon in the fight against malaria. Researchers from Kenya and the United Kingdom report that dosing people with ivermectin, commonly used in heartworm pills, makes them deadly targets for the mosquitoes that transmit malaria. Nearly all of the mosquitoes in the experiment died after drinking ivermectin-laced blood, they say. Deadly Blood While malaria rates have been dropping historically, the disease still a ...read more
From the Overview Effect to “One Strange Rock”: A Conversation with Leland Melvin
Leland Melvin shows the two sides of his passion, with the wonder of the “overview” showing outside his Shuttle window. [Credit: NASA] It’s hard to think of any modern human activity that has had more of a multiplicative impact on the imagination than space exploration. To date, a grand total of 562 humans have left the Earth—a trivial fraction compared to the 7.6 billion people currently staying put. Yet the image of astronauts voyaging away from their home planet has ...read more
The Fantastic Bionic Flying Fox
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Digisexuality: Merging Sex and Technology
Ryan Gosling regards an AI in Blade Runner: 2049. (Credit: Warner Bros) Human culture has always evolved in tandem with technological developments. And that includes sexuality. Robots, virtual reality, and telecommunication tech are all just beginning to be repurposed to fulfill sexual needs. They can range from something as simple as vibrators that use Bluetooth to communicate with your phone to advanced AI-based sex dolls, and they fall under the umbrella of digisexuality, a term t ...read more
Let's Ditch the Boring Bunny! The Scientific Case for the Easter Echidna or Pasch Platypus
How can a bunny bring eggs?! Photo Credit: geralt It’s time to have a serious talk about the Easter Bunny. I know, the long ears and twitchy nose are super cute. But it makes no sense for them to bring eggs for Easter. As members of the family Leporidae—which includes all hares and rabbits—bunnies bear live young. In fact, having lots of squirming babies is one of their most quintessential traits. We don’t have the saying “breed like rabbits” for no reas ...read more
This may be as close as you can come to going on a spacewalk 240-ish miles above Earth
The vertiginous video also offers an opportunity to consider theories posited by two of the giants of science [embedded content] While on a spacewalk outside the International Space Station over Mexico, NASA astronaut Randy Bresnik captured this spectacular, vertiginous video with a GoPro camera. I spotted it in a NASA Tweet yesterday, and when I watched it, I really did have the sensation that this would be as close as I’ll ever come to experiencing free-falling around the Earth. (Sh ...read more
Your Weekly Attenborough: Euptychia attenboroughi
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Dramatic satellite images reveal thick palls of dust choking Beijing and blowing across 2,000 miles of Asia
An animation of satellite images reveals the stunning pall of dust and pollution that recently choked Beijing. (Images: NASA Worldview. Animation: Tom Yulsman) About a week ago, dust sweeping north from the Sahara blanketed parts of Eastern Europe, turning snow-covered ski slopes a strange shade of orange. Now, another far-ranging pall of dust — exacerbated by nasty air pollution — is in the news, this time in northeast Asia. Starting on March 26th, China’s nort ...read more
What Happens When a Blind Person Takes LSD?
How do blind people experience psychedelic drugs? This is the topic of an interesting, but unusual, paper just out in Consciousness and Cognition. The paper’s authors are University of Bath researchers Sara Dell’Erba, David J.Brown, and Michael J.Proulx. However, the real star contributor is a man referred to only as “Mr Blue Pentagon”. Blue Pentagon (“BP”) is the pseudonym for a 70 year old blind man who reports taking large quantities of LSD and other drugs ...read more