A new NASA satellite that will record measurements on soil moisture all over the world for three years has just been successfully launched. Its full name is the Soil Moisture Active Passive (SMAP) observatory, and it has radar and radiometer equipment that can penetrate vegetation and clouds to two inches into the soil to create …
Who knew a grassy field in Maine would have so much to offer? Scientists have discovered a brand-new antibiotic called Teixobactin from the soil there, which could be great news because bacteria have so far shown no resistance to it in mice. Soil is actually a rich source for our antibiotics – scientists isolate and …
Bar-headed geese migrate annually between Mongolia and Tibet or India, which means they have to cross the high-elevation Himalayas. Scientists used to believe they flew at a constant, high altitude before coming down to land. However, after implanting tracking devices in migrating geese, scientists found out that they fly up and down to follow mountains’ …
90% of all types of plastic, including styrofoam, can now be recycled using half the energy formerly required and not using any water! Traditionally, plastic was recycled by washing plastic, grinding it, heating it and cooling it with water, which wasted a lot of water and energy. The new technology makes higher-quality plastic pellets, the …
I have gotten busy enough with the start of a new semester that I haven’t posted all the science news I have saved in over a week. For now, I will do some briefer entries just so I can get through some of them. The California Condor used to be so close to extinction that …
Lakes made of asphalt (commonly known as tar or pitch) are found around the world in areas where oil deposits seep up through sedimentary rock. (See my previous post on tar lilies for descriptions and technical details on different components of oil and how they come to the Earth’s surface.) AtlasObscura’s article provides some fascinating …
It is quite amazing to consider that scientists may have only discovered 10% of the Earth’s species. Of course, many of the unknown species are small (insects, microbes) or in remote or extreme environments (deserts, the deep sea), which provides some explanation for why we have not found or identified them yet. Luckily, certain research …
Pretty much all graduate students struggle with work-life balance, and how to best be productive with their research and other obligations while staying healthy and having time to de-stress and spend with friends, significant others and family. It seems like there are not enough hours in the week to get everything done, and it is …
A Canadian company called Protec-Style is growing the first industrial crop of milkweed in Quebec in order to manufacture absorbent socks to absorb oil from oil spills. A division of the company called Encore-3 is taking advantage of unique properties of common milkweed seeds to develop this product. Milkweed fruits are called follicles, and they …
You know those bedbug epidemics from apartments and hotels in big cities you have heard about, or perhaps unfortunately experienced? Soon bedbug outbreaks can be treated quickly, easily and affordably. Biologists have developed a new, effective bedbug trap through a painful process – by allowing bedbugs to feed on their own skin! The researchers started …
Scientists, beekeepers and farmers have been very worried recently about the sharp declines in bee populations. Native bees and bumblebees are being affected, and not just non-native honeybees. Researchers recently examined pinned bees from insect collections in the Northeastern U.S. Naturalists and entomologists have been collecting bees in the region (that are now kept in …
Merry Christmas! I thought today’s post deserved a Christmas theme, so I will write about the Christmas Tree Worm. Photo credit: By Nhobgood Nick Hobgood (Own work) [CC BY-SA 3.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0) Christmas tree worms (Spirobranchus giganteus) live in coral reefs worldwide, and live in tubes. Their pretty tree-shape is made of appendages they use to …
One reason that traditional solar panels found limited use is because they are bulky, heavy, and large (and not to mention expensive, though their cost has been decreasing quickly), so it only made sense to put them on flat, stationary structures such as roofs. However, a postdoc at the University of Toronto named Illan Kramer …
This article I am describing is more of an opinion piece than a scientific study, but I think it does cover some important points head-on for why non-scientist members of the general public may have false assumptions about scientists being smarter than non-scientists. I have had people tell me before that I must be really …
Some lakes in Ontario have experienced greatly-altered water chemistry in the past decades due to acid rain and human impacts. This acid reacts with calcium in soils surrounding the lakes, reducing the amount of calcium that makes it from the watershed into the lakes. This is impacting Daphnia, a kind of zooplankton that incorporates calcium …
In this post, I will be sharing two articles that both relate to what could be considered works of art from the ocean involving small, unassuming creatures. Corals and sponges can have very interesting and eye-catching structures, but most people tend to think of them as static and unmoving. A PhD student from Australia named …
Yesterday, Orion, a spacecraft built by NASA to hold up to six crew members, was successfully launched from Cape Canaveral in Florida, orbited the Earth twice, and landed in the Pacific Ocean off of Baja California. After the disastrous news during the past two months from Virgin Galactic, whose rocket-fired space plane to be used for …
Well, I’m back. It is much harder to stay on top of this blog than I thought during busy times of the semester. There is a week and a half until my grades are submitted and hopefully I am a little less busy. I do have a lot of articles saved up to share, though, …
Most bats use echolocation to find food by bouncing the sounds they make off of any objects nearby to detect where flying prey may be located. This is a very effective technique for them because they are nocturnal and hunt at night, when they would not be able to see most or any of the …
People have been worried about the decline in honeybees over the past few years, and one factor that has not helped their situation has been their sometimes-constant exposure to pesticides. Pesticides are sprayed by gardeners on their flowers, by farmers on their flowering crops, and beekeepers use certain pesticides in beehives to keep harmful mites …
All that vanilla and cinnamon that people use in their Thanksgiving and Christmas baking can be detected in treated sewage that is released into local water bodies. Scientists first discovered this in Puget Sound in Washington state, when they found increased levels of vanilla and cinnamon in treated sewage being released into the sound between …
A curator at the Smithsonian wrote a piece in a newsletter describing how many botanical institutions in the U.S. and around the world are firing their researchers and curators, changing their focus away from systematics and taxonomy, or closing down altogether. I wrote a blog post a few months ago about the research crisis at …
A 19-year-old African-American college student from Chicago has already made some major breakthroughs in colon cancer research and is determined to find a cure. Keven Stonewall started an internship in a university lab while he was still in high school and developed an experiment to test a colon cancer vaccine after seeing his close friend’s …
Before I read this news article, I did not know that there was such a thing as the Kashmir musk deer, with thin fangs hanging down on both sides of its mouth. These are, in fact, very rare animals that live in forested slopes of Afghanistan. The males use their fangs to fight other males …
Scientists found 700-year-old caribou dung frozen in ice cores removed from icy patches on the Selwyn Mountains in Canada. To some people, dung may be the last thing they think of as useful for study, but food that animals eat can have tons of viruses in them, including plant matter eaten by caribou. These viruses …
Middle-of-semester busyness (catching up on grading and research, recovering from a two-week cold, and yardwork before the first big cold spell) has made it hard for me to stay on top of the blog, even though there has been a lot of big science news. When I can, I’ll try to post something short and …
Postdoctoral researcher (or postdoc) positions have greatly changed the past few decades. Postdocs are meant for people to gain additional research experience after completing their PhD before applying for their next job (they often have goals of becoming a professor). They usually are not paid well (with average salaries in the $40,000s, which is …
An important and timely blog post by Carrie Glenny at the University of Washington was published this week about the necessity of available lactation rooms at workplaces. New mothers that choose to breastfeed need to pump milk every few hours, and this can be very hard to do in workplaces without private offices. Take a …
Sorry my posts have been somewhat sporadic recently. I might not post the next week because I am grading my students’ project proposals, so here’s some cool monarch butterfly research to keep you entertained in the meantime! You probably know (especially as a reader of my blog) about how eastern North American monarch butterflies undergo …
This news is two weeks old now, but I still think it’s worth sharing for its food production implications, and to showcase the success of young women in science. At the 2014 Google Science Fair, which showcases science projects from teens around the world that are 13 to 18 years old, three Irish teenage girls won …
Walruses in Alaska have started to gather in huge numbers on Alaska’s shorelines the past few years because their sea ice that they usually rest on and hunt from has been disappearing from climate change. This is alarming scientists because walruses would normally gather in smaller groups of less than 100 individuals on sea ice, …
What is it about nasty animals that still fascinate us so much we can’t turn away, and even click the link for what is sure to be a gross, squeamish video? Human curiosity, I guess. A brand-new leech species, one of the largest in the world, has been discovered in Borneo’s forests. As luck would …
Have you ever heard of the Aral Sea in Central Asia? It used to be the fourth-largest lake in the world. Now it has almost completely dried up. In the 1960s it started shrinking when the lake’s waters were diverted for irrigation. The satellite photos in this link show how the lake has changed, superimposed …
Alright, time for some comedy with our science today. This clip from The Daily Show shows clips from a climate change protest in New York City, but what is most interesting is footage from last week of the U.S. House Committee on Science, Space and Technology’s meeting with Presidential Science Advisor John Holdren. It is …
Over the next 15 years, it may only cost 5% more than new transit systems, power plants, and other infrastructure already in the works would cost in order to limit emissions contributing to climate change. If we consider the health savings and fuel savings we could have that are included in this, we may actually …
This article is one of those stories that is interesting to read in the author’s words, and describes the discovery and final determination of a new species of wildflower on the California coast. What makes this story unique, however, is that there only exists one population of this plant in a farm field. I don’t …
A glowing patch of the Indian Ocean the size of Connecticut was not known to science until 2005, even though it has been seen by sailors and even mentioned in a novel. Scientists had ignored accounts of this glowing patch because they believed it would be impossible to have bacteria at such dense concentrations over …
You may have heard about the little issue that the United States has with Russia right now because of what they are doing in Ukraine. U.S. space shuttles stopped running in 2011, so although we still have American astronauts on the International Space Station, we have been paying Russia $60 million PER PERSON to transport …
On the Seychelles Islands in the Indian Ocean, the Aldabra Banded Snail, which was thought to be extinct for the past seven years, was found by researchers. The terrestrial snails are quite pretty, with a spiral shell and pink and purple stripes. Scientists don’t know how they originally got to these isolated islands. The snail …
At least right now in Michigan, the monarch butterflies are out and about, and I see one or more pretty much daily! This is very good news compared to last summer, where I only saw a few of them the entire summer, and I did not see any in September preparing for their flight to …
I feel very behind on my posts, but have a lot to share, so hopefully I’ll be updating close to daily for a while! In the hills around Altamont Pass on the edge of the San Francisco Bay Area, a new type of wind turbine used for producing wind energy will be tested for at …
In the past, scientists did not think that turtles communicated with each other, seeing that they had internal ears and no vocal cords. However, giant South American River turtles were so organized in some of their behaviors that it seemed odd to scientists that they weren’t communicating somehow – such as when 16 turtles leave …
A group of physicists have discovered that they can make objects move against the direction of waves by using a tractor beam on water, which generates waves. This has important real-world applications, including confining oil spills. The physicists do not yet know mathematical theories explaining how it works. Dr. Horst Punzmann said ” . . …
These are the cup plants (Silphium perfoliatum) in my front yard. (If recent downpours didn’t weigh them down so much, they would all be upright and about eight feet tall). They are a native prairie plant in Michigan, and are called cup plant because their opposite leaves fuse at the base around the stem and …
Pikas are adorable little relatives of rabbits that live on high, rocky mountaintops, where they eat grasses, forbs (other non-woody flowering plants), moss and lichen. A graduate student was studying pikas on Mt. Hood in Oregon and did not realize a wildfire had raged through her study site until she returned to it the next …
Post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) has been getting a lot of press the past few years, especially regarding the number of active military personnel that are coming home from deployments with PTSD. Scientists recently discovered how certain people can be susceptible to PTSD after experiencing severe trauma while others are not susceptible. Scientists introduced a trauma …
Although California is having an extreme drought this year, that is not as large of a threat to California’s redwoods, sequoias, and bristlecone pines as an increasingly drier, warmer climate for the next few decades as a result of climate change. Sequoias are some of the world’s most voluminous trees, and if there isn’t enough …
Have you ever heard a story where a child has a genetic disease but neither of the biological parents, and none of the more distant relatives, have the disease? How does that work? Well, even though our cells make identical copies of themselves through mitosis, if there is a mutation that is copied into many …
Although scientists had known in the past that butterflies could evolve new colors if it helped them have higher fitness in their environment, they didn’t know what mechanism they used to create the new colors. After some scientists raised and bred the African brown butterfly Bicyclus anynana in the lab for about a year (6 …
A new citizen science project called Floating Forests was just started a few days ago to help scientists study the effects of climate change on kelp forests in the world’s oceans. It turns out that computers are not effective at distinguishing giant kelp sitting below the ocean’s surface in satellite photos, but the human eye …