(NASA/Wikimedia Commons)
Can I get a grande cup of science please?
- Happy hurricane season, East Coasters! (Ok, it doesn’t really start until tomorrow). Here’s the list of names you’ll hear meteorologists shouting about this summer.
- That didn’t take long: The new H7N9 bird flu strain making the rounds of China is already showing signs of drug resistance. This after the news that it can spread between ferrets (one of the best animals for modeling flu) through close contact.
- The fact that researchers are already scrambling to find ways to control H7N9 flu and the new MERS virus that recently emerged in the Middle East is a testament to the fact that the tools for detecting new viruses are getting much better.
- Some glaciers melting in the heat of climate change would appear to be load-bearing glaciers. As they melt, they’re taking chunks of the Swiss Alps with them.
- But the melt isn’t just freeing rocks. It also freed 400-year-old Greenland mosses that then started growing again. Those are some tough mosses.
- Doctors in Europe and the Middle East are testing a new kind of artificial heart, one that’s part machine, part cow.
- We get hot, we sweat. Dogs get hot, they pants. Starfish gets hot, they lose an arm. It’s how they cool off. And as New Scientist notes, “[T]his is the first time researchers have shown that [starfish] arm loss can be related to thermal regulation.”
- Have tuberculosis? Eat your citrus. Scientists trying to find ways to circumvent drug resistance in TB accidentally found that vitamin C might be able to kill TB bacteria all on its own.
- Yeah, you could probably get to Mars and back. But the radiation exposure is going to hurt you.
- If you’re a paleontologist, make sure you add the new Atlas of Vertebrate Decay to your Christmas list. The rest of you might want to avoid it. (I tip my hat to the scientists who wrote this book.)
- How do invasive marine species hop from port to port? And which ports are most likely to get unwanted visitors? There’s a new model for that.
- The air in New York’s subways is a soup of bacteria and other microbes; some of the ingredients come directly from us. That’s just one part of a larger effort by ecologists and others to start to understand “the great indoors.”
