Boars gone wild: Chernobyl edition
For wildlife, earth’s worst nuke disaster site continues to prove safer than living anywhere in range of humans. Ever since the 1986 Chernobyl accident, people have been almost entirely excluded […]
Category Archives: nature
What turtles looked like before the evolution of shells
This one is 240 million years old, from the Triassic period, collected in Germany. The discoverers named it Pappochelys, which is derived from Greek words for ‘grandfather’ and ‘turtle’. These […]
Candid camera trap
These images, which I’ve edited a bit in Lightroom, are some of the gems from Snapshot Serengeti, a project that amassed 1.2 million sets of photographs from motion-sensor activated camera traps […]
Washington gets a tyranosaur
Not many dinosaur fossils turn up in the Pacific Northwest, but Washington’s finally got one – and wouldn’t you know, it’s a tyranosaurid. The scientists who collected it are pretty […]
Maze runner: what an oversized bug penis reveals about evolution
“We then experimentally shortened the penis using scissors, without harming the male. We show that the shorter the penis after cutting, the lower a male’s reproductive success.” – Dougherty et. al. […]
A salmon retires
I am so happy to know that some salmon get to retire from the whole “epic migration” thing. In one species – the Dolly Varden char – the oldsters actually […]
Organic, 100% natural GMOs
The legendary scientist Jane Goodall came through my town recently and made headlines by talking about the dangers of genetically modified organisms, in her words, a “shocking corruption of the […]
200 years after the largest volcanic blast in history
Some 10,000 died in the immediate catastrophe of raging pyroclastic flows and tsunami waves when Tambora erupted on the island of Sumbawa, Indonesia on April 10, 1815. Croplands were so […]
Gecko-vescence
geckovescence /ˈɡekōˈvesəns/ noun: the self-propulsion of water droplets off the skin of gecko lizards “…when dew forms on the gecko skin it takes the form of tiny water drops which, […]
A snail’s weapon of mass destruction: insulin
That’s a new finding by biologists at the University of Utah, where I work. Cone snails are abundant in most tropical marine waters, especially around coral reefs. Each species makes a […]
