I am a meme-lover. Tumblr is a godsend. “So I was thinking.” “Great, evolution.” “Nobody really needs eyeballs and limbs and all that, right? When you get down to it, all you really need to be alive is an opening for stuff to go in and an opening for stuff to come out.” “Well, yeah, […]
Category Archives: biology
Lithopedion
The human body is a weird and fascinating thing. A lithopedion Ancient Greek: λίθος = stone; Ancient Greek: παιδός = child, or stone baby, is a rare phenomenon which occurs most commonly when a fetus dies during an abdominal pregnancy,[1] is too large to be reabsorbed by the body, and calcifies on the outside, shielding […]
Spider That Builds Its Own Spider Decoys
The test of advanced animal intelligence is tool use. More and more animals are joining the primates in this group. This artistic spider has even learned how to make decoys. In September, Torres was leading visitors into a floodplain surrounding Peru’s Tambopata Research Center, located near the western edge of the Amazon. From a distance, they […]
Artichoke + MRI = Awesomeness
About two years ago, Andy Ellison needed to test one of the MRI machines he works with at his job at Boston University Medical School. He reached for an orange. The result was stunning: An artichoke explosions. These are all great but this one’s my favourite. via Artichoke + MRI + GIF = Awesomeness – […]
“Mommy Gene”
I’ve joked about lacking a “mom gene” for years, turns out it might have a basis in fact. While this is some pretty controversial and not-yet-fully-fleshed-out information, if your mom is a total asshole, this might solve a few mysteries for you! Researchers at the Rockefeller University in New York have been studying female mice […]
Inside of a Shark
… it’s too dark to read. Luckily we have this fantastic documentary to enlighten us. A team of scientists dissects a Great White and give some fascinating facts about the much maligned White Death. I became a huge fan after watching this one, and have burned through most of the other episodes in this series. […]
Pan sapiens
Initial genetic studies characterised the DNA of chimpanzees (common chimpanzee and bonobo, collectively) as being as much as 98% (99.4 in one study) identical to that of Homo sapiens… In the seminal Nature paper reporting on initial genome comparisons, researchers identified thirty-five million single-nucleotide changes, five million insertion or deletion events, and a number of […]
Honeycomb – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Honeycomb I attended a beekeeping seminar tonight, and got to hold a frame full of capped honeycomb. The smell was one of the most amazing things I’ve ever experienced: Not as sweet as a jar of honey – almost like a perfume. It’d be worth the stings and the sweat of cracking open a hive […]
(Untitled)
http://www.eyeofscience.com/eos2/index2.html I just Stumbled independently onto two macrophotography sites, and as usual I’m blown away by Mother Nature’s wonderful eye for detail. First up is a science-centred site – the picture here is of kidney glomeruli (also known to me as those little bastards that don’t work properly…)
Distributed Computing – Active Projects – Life Sciences
http://distributedcomputing.info/ap-lsciences.html Distributed computing projects worldwide, categorised by project scope, for-/non-profit status, and (ahhh) computer platform compatibility. For a while now, I’ve been searching for a non-alien-related project that’s open to the Mac.