Threaten a sea urchin, and you may see it point its spines at you. This defensive response is pretty unremarkable—except for the fact that, if you look closer, you will not see the sea urchin’s eyes. It doesn’t have any.
Sea urchins are the only animals that have vision despite “conspicuously lacking eyes,” write Dan-Eric Nilsson, a biologist at the University of Lund in Sweden who studies animal vision, and his colleagues. In a new study, the researchers gave the ...read more
Lava flows from Fissure 8. The lava fountain from the fissure can be seen in the background. Seen on May 28, 2018. Image: USGS
What is rapidly becoming the new normal in the lower East Rift Zone of Kīlauea continued over last few days. Fissures in the Leilani Estates and Lanipuna Gardens have waxed and waned, with Fissure 8 taking center stage now, producing ~60 meter (200 foot) lava fountains and a lava flow that moved at ~15 meters per hour. Many other fissures have quieted as has the mul ...read more
Peggy Whitson took her record-setting 8th spacewalk outside the ISS on March 30, 2017. (Credit: NASA Johnson Space Center)
Life is all about bubbles. Every cell in your body is a bubble, a membrane holding together a miniature world of organelles, ribosomes, and genetic material. Your body itself is another bubble, a skin wrapped around a wet, salty interior that carries a distant memory of the oceans in which our ancestors lived hundreds of millions of years ago. And our entire planet is a bu ...read more
Steamboat Geyser erupting in March 2018. USGS/YVO.
Over the weekend, USGS Volcanoes tweeted this:
Again? Yes. @YellowstoneNPS#SteamboatGeyser erupted at 7:33 PM MST. That’s 7 times since March 15. We’ve got a counter on our Yellowstone Volcano Observatory home page. See signal on this @UUSS_Quake_Info webicorder (continuous signal at the bottom). https://t.co/653XydhbWkpic.twitter.com/2c1BogpcbL
— USGS Volcanoes🌋 (@USGSVolcanoes) May 28, 2018
If you’re unfa ...read more
An Atlantic article from July 2017 has been widely discussed on Twitter over the past few days. It’s called Power Causes Brain Damage and I remember that it was fairly popular at the time of publication. Its recent revival was prompted I think by Harvey Weinstein’s arrest and more generally the abuses of power revealed by the #MeToo movement. The article itself, of course, dating to the pre-Fall of Weinstein era, isn’t specifically about this.
In my view, while power is certai ...read more
At my current count, there are at least 30 species named after David Attenborough. That's a ton.
23 posts in and I'm feeling the pinch, I'm not going to lie. Sometimes there just isn't enough information to put together a decent post, so I'm going to take a bit of a cop out here. Instead of one species, today we're gonna do five. Don't think of it as me selling out, think of it as a special bonus gift.
In this super-special edition of Your Weekly Attenborough we're gonna journey back t ...read more
(Credit: Ph.D. Candidate Thomas Onuferko, York University)
When I watch Planet Earth, what often comes to mind is the power of framing.
As the program jumps from species to species, I find myself siding with whichever creature currently holds the spotlight. I remember cringing as a horde of snakes overcame a newly hatched iguana in the Galápagos, and then cheering as a Komodo dragon tore limbs from its prey in Indonesia, all within the span of 20 minutes.
To veer so suddenly f ...read more
Humans have been captivated by Mars almost as long as we’ve been watching the night sky.
The ancient Greeks and Romans watched nightly as a reddish dot moved among the stars, growing dimmer and brighter in a two-year cycle. Each named it for the god of war; the Roman version, “Mars,” stuck. Renaissance astronomers became fascinated with the planet’s apparent backward movement, the so-called retrograde motion that could only be explained with the Sun, not the Earth, a ...read more
(Credit: pippeeContributor/Shutterstock)
There’s no escaping magnetic fields—they’re all around us. For starters, the Earth itself is like a giant magnet. A spinning ball of liquid iron in our planet’s core generates the vast magnetic field that moves our compass needles around and directs the internal compasses of migrating birds, bats, and other animals. On top of that, ever-industrious humans have produced artificial magnetic fields with power lines, transport system ...read more
Photo: flickr/Caden Crawford
Google Trends has become a productive source of data for social scientists, particularly those interested in when and where people search for the word “porn”. First, they discovered that porn searches peaked in winter and early summer, a result that lead them to believe that there actually is a human mating season. Now, they’ve looked at the results by state, and found some more interesting patterns.
Perhaps not surprisingly, &ldquo ...read more
