If you’re familiar with “hackathons” – intense hacking marathons, or “mapathons” – mapping parties commonly held by mappers worldwide, the term “catchathon” might be starting to make some sense by now. If not – read on. There’s a marathon of Alzheimer’s citizen science coming on July 22nd, and you can be part of it! By Egle Marija Ramanauskaite, Citizen Science Coordinator at EyesOnALZ Stall Catchers pizza party a ...read more

On Twitter, I learned that the British government is citing neuroscience studies as part of a new welfare initiative. The “Health and Work Conversation” (HWC) is a newly-introduced procedure for welfare claimants receiving support because sickness or disability impairs their ability to work. The one hour “conversation” is mandatory in most cases and it seems intended to encourage people to seek whatever work they are able to do. A Freedom of Information Act request has r ...read more

A spurge hawk-moth caterpillar. (Credit: Chekaramit/Shutterstock) It’s a twist of fate that wouldn’t feel out of place in a horror movie: A platoon of caterpillars, young and hungry, descend on a defenseless tomato plant to feast, but as they begin to eat something goes terribly wrong. The leaves no longer satisfy, and they turn on each other in a cannibalistic frenzy — feeding wildly until just one, sated and content, remains. You can read it as a Carrie-like ...read more

Image: Flickr/Mark Strobl Although the best-known mummies are the cloth-wrapped Egyptian variety so often seen in horror movies, many kinds of mummies have been found all over the world. And it’s not only the human bodies that have been preserved during the process of mummification–often human parasites are, too! Scientists can use the presence of parasites on and in mummies to track the history of their association. Here, scientists report finding head and pubic lice on mummi ...read more

This post is part of our Divers’ series. We encourage readers to continue the conversation by adding their own comments, question or concerns on our Facebook page. You’ll find links to other posts at the end of this story.  Two years ago I rang in the New Year by scuba diving with giant manta rays off the coast of Hawaii’s Big Island. It was a bucket list experience I will never forget and one that introduced me to a new form of citizen science. That evening, after en ...read more

The GOES-16 weather satellite eyed Tropical Depression Four in the central Atlantic Ocean on Thursday afternoon, July 6, 2017, as it raced ahead of a huge blob of brownish dust streaming off the Sahara in Africa. (Source: CIRA/RAMMB/NOAA) It may have a humdrum name, but since Tropical Depression Four formed in the central Atlantic Ocean on Wednesday evening, it has certainly distinguished itself. It is a “small, tenacious depression” that “has continued to hold its own,&rdquo ...read more

A praying mantis making a meal of a ruby-throated hummingbird. (Credit: “What’s That Bug?”/Randy Anderson) Poor hummingbirds. The fragile, fleet-winged birds often don’t make it past their first year of life as they are tasty snacks for cats, large-mouth bass, snakes, lizards…you get the idea. Now, perhaps surprisingly, we can add praying mantises to that macabre list. A new paper reviewing the avian death-literature finds that praying mantises are enth ...read more

(Credit: Shutterstock) As a kid, Mouad Mkamel played with pet snakes, vipers and scorpions. As a Ph.D. student at University King Hassan II of Casablanca, Mkamel is now breeding scorpions and milking their venom using a robot he designed. At $7,000 to $8,000 per gram, scorpion venom is one of the most expensive liquids in the world. Mkamel believes scorpion venom has the potential to “create a new generation of medicine,” estimating that there are about five million unstudied compo ...read more

A strange new paper reports “abnormal” brain activity in 10 patients with electrohypersensitivity (EHS) – a controversial condition allegedly triggered by electromagnetic fields from devices such as phones and power-lines. But the methods used in this study were very odd. According to the authors, Gunnar Heuser and Sylvia A. Heuser, the ten patients all suffered from symptoms such as Headaches, impairment of cognitive function, tremors, weakness, and others. Multi-system comp ...read more

This animation consists of false-color images of the Russian coast and adjoining East Siberian Sea acquired by NASA’s Aqua satellite. On June 18, the offshore waters were choked with sea ice. By July 6, 2017, a lot of it had broken up. In the false-color scheme, land is green, black is indicative of open water, and ice is a light turquoise. The darker blue prominent in the June 18th image probably is indicative of melting snow and ice that’s causing liq ...read more