(Credit: Stacey Tecot)
How do you care for the creatures you love? You shoot them with tranquilizer darts, capture them in cages, embed microchips, pierce their ears or make them wear funny collars.
For scientists who monitor endangered species, these are tried-and-true methods to count and track individuals in a given population—along with photography and experts’ sharp eyes. But capturing or sedating an animal is stressing (and could cause physical harm), and boots-on-the-ground ...read more
Contamination map of the Chernobyl region in 1996. Twenty one years later the hottest areas remain off limits, but quasi-normal life has returned in the less affected “unnamed zone,” including the Rivne Province at the west (left) end of this map. (Credit: CIA Factbook/Sting/MTruch)
Regular readers of this blog know that I normally focus on cosmic topics: comets, exoplanets, dark matter, the search for alien life, and the like. I don’t tangle so much with the everyday challen ...read more
(Credit: ra2studio/Shutterstock)
When we hold a conversation, it’s not just our ears that are paying attention. We may not realize it, but our eyes are picking up on visual information as well to give us a better idea of what we should be hearing. It’s not necessary, of course, we can easily carry on a conversation in the dark, but it’s a form of redundancy that helps to make up for any aural lapses.
Our brains integrate information from both senses to compile a complete ...read more
Astronaut Ron Garan has no time to come back in for a bathroom break during a spacewalk in 2011. (Credit: NASA)
When you’ve gotta’ go you’ve gotta’ go. But what if you’re on a space walk when nature calls?
“Spaceflight is not always glamorous,” said NASA astronaut Rick Mastracchio in a video released on the HeroX crowdsourcing site in October which introduced NASA’s Space Poop Challenge—yup, space poop.
The goal for participants, aside from ...read more
Would you trust a memory that felt as real as all your other memories, and if other people confirmed that they remembered it too? What if the memory turned out to be false? This scenario was named the ‘Mandela effect’ by the self-described ‘paranormal consultant’ Fiona Broome after she discovered that other people shared her (false) memory of the South African civil rights leader Nelson Mandela dying in prison in the 1980s.
Is a shared false memory really due to a s ...read more
Charles Chiu in the lab with colleague Steve Miller. (Credit: Elisabeth Fall/UCSF)
Pathogens move fast.
You wake up one morning feeling ready to take on the world. On your way to work, you notice your throat’s a bit scratchy, your forehead a bit warm. By lunch you’ve got a pounding headache and it hurts to breathe. Co-workers agree, you’ve got whatever’s been going around. You end the day early, using the last of your strength to drag yourself to bed.
Identifying the org ...read more
Scientists refer to the study of biological toxins as toxinology (not to be confused with toxicology, with a C—as I explain below). From bacterial toxins like anthrax to the deadliest snake venoms, toxinology examines the chemical warfare between animals, plants, fungi and bacteria. This is the first in a new series I call Toxinology 101, where I explain and explore the fundamentals of toxin science to reveal the unusual, often unfamiliar, and unnerving world created by ...read more
By: Marc J. Kuchner
Eighty-seven years ago, this week, Clyde Tombaugh was poring over a pair of photographic plates, hoping to change the world. He was staring hard into an arcane device called a blink comparator, which allowed him to rapidly switch from viewing one image to the next. In those days before computers, that was the best tool he had for finding the faint, moving dot he was seeking, a new planet in our solar system.
When Tombaugh discovered Pluto in those photographic plat ...read more
