(ryn413/Flickr)
Heading out of town for the weekend? Make sure you bring along some science!
- The Discovery Channel royally pissed off scientists and science writers alike this week with its line up for Shark Week, starting with a flimflam-filled “documentary” about a gigantic, extinct species of shark called Megalodon. (Megalodon really did exist, and really did go extinct 2 million years ago. Discovery decided to give it the Bigfoot treatment.) In response, there’s been a flurry of news pieces and blogs out there this week about the very real and cool science of sharks. Go on Google or Twitter, search for “Cooler than #SharkWeek,” and gorge your brain in a feeding frenzy of sharky goodness.
- It only took 62 years, but researchers finally obtained research consent from Henrietta Lacks’s family.
- Birds do it. Bees do it. But how did dinosaurs do it? No one really has any idea.
- We also still don’t know for sure what the advantages are to monogamy.
- It’s the other other white meat: in a press event in London on Monday, taste testers had their first bites of the first hamburger made from lab-grown meat. The cost of that burger? $330,000.
- Speaking of white meat, hold on to your pork and bacon: There’s a nasty virus circulating among pig farms that’s got pig farmers and veterinarians running scared.
- We may have a new weapon against tuberculosis — a compound that kills TB in a novel way: by starving it. But if it does make it to clinic, we have to be careful that TB doesn’t start resisting it.
- This is what it looks like inside your skin when a mosquito is poking around looking for some blood to drink:
- How should NASA go about testing how the next generation of space capsules would fare if it one of its parachutes failed on reentry? By actually making one of its parachutes fail on reentry.
- If you grew up in Boston, you’re probably heard about the Great Molasses Flood of 1919. The physics of fluids — thick, viscous fluids in particular — help explain the flood’s toll on people and property.
- African termites are so metal. At 11 times per second, they’re probably the fastest headbangers around. Why do that? To warn their moundmates of impending danger.
- Reduce, reuse, recycle…that’s the mantra, right? Scientists are working out a way to reuse coffee grounds by brewing them into booze.
- If you’re waking up tired, you can blame Thomas Edison. Because our reliance on electric lights to stay up and get up late can mean that we don’t get the natural light cues our body needs to stay in circadian sync.
- What’s the best way to euthanize a lab animal? That’s still up for debate.
- Women carry their babies for 40 weeks right? Turns out there’s quite a bit of wiggle room in that timing.
- Did Y-chromosome Adam and Mitochondrial Eve live in the same Genomic Garden of Eden? (And how far can we take the Biblical metaphors?). It looks more and more like they at least lived around the same time.
- For everyone to succeed, you need some cooperators, and some cheaters. That’s especially true of microbes.
- Cactus needles could be the inspiration for better ways of cleaning up oil spills.
- Now that I think about it, this seems like an obvious but still awesome idea…using Legos to explain cell biology:
