Poisonous Birds Prove That Nature Wants You Dead by Megan Cartwright at Slate:
Scientists discover that male and female mice process pain differently by Arielle Duhaime-Ross at The Verge:
Insects may be able to feel fear, anger and empathy, after all by Carla Clark at Quartz:
And if that is not enough, more readings for later this weekend:
How Math Can Defeat Bullies by Conor Friedersdorf at The Atlantic
Will Shark Week Get Back to Reality This Year? by Andy Dehnart at Vulture
Why is this mountain goat hanging out on a rooftop? by Jason G. Goldman at Earth Touch News
The fuzzy thinking of John Parrington: The Central Dogma by Larry Moran at Sandwalk
Why are Gulf of California seabirds heading north? by Jason G. Goldman at Conservation
Why Fireworks Displays Can’t Include a Perfect Red, White, and Blue by Shannon Hall at Nautilus
Why Wikipedia + Open Access = Revolution at MIT Technology Review
What If Ancient Romans Had Invaded America? by Steve Mirsky at Scientific American
Get this: spiders can “sail” on water by Henry Nicholls at Animal magic
How City Living May Be Harming Your Mental Health, And What You Can Do About It by Carolyn Gregoire at The Huffington Post
In Defense of Ethnography by David D. Perlmutter at The Chronicle of Higher Education
Can Dogs Finally Keep It Together This 4th of July? by Julie Hecht at Dog Spies
Plants prepare to defend themselves when they “hear” threatening sounds by Cynthia Graber and Nicola Twilley at Quartz
Summer Terrors: Brain Eating Amoebae! by Judy Stone at Forbes
New report: the chance to rescue the world’s oceans from climate change is drifting away by Ove Hoegh-Guldberg at The Conversation
Why does scientific discourse gets vicious? by Timothée Poisot at Medium
Checking DNA Against Elephants Hints At How Mammoths Got Woolly by Nell Greenfieldboyce at NPR
Mark Zuckerberg says the future of communication is telepathy. Here’s how that would actually work. by Caitlin Dewey at The Intersect
3 factors are brewing the perfect storm for shark attacks by Tanya Lewis at Business Insider
The Great Moon Hoax Was Simply a Sign of Its Time by Sarah Zielinski at Smithsonian
Revealed: why GM food is so hard to sell to a wary public by John Hudson at The Conversation
Going to the Strip Club With Sociologists by Francie Diep at Pacific Standard
From Roman candles to Catherine wheels: the chemistry of fireworks by Puff the Mutant Dragon at Puff the Mutant Dragon
The myth of the breastfeeding diet by Naomi Schon and Sally Adee at The Last Word On Nothing
Rods and Cones are Not Alone by Cheryl G. Murphy at The Huffington Post
Solar power still needs to get much cheaper. Are perovskites the answer? by Brad Plumer at Vox
Collinsium Was One Prickly Invertebrate by Brian Switek at Laelaps
The Five Most Gruesome Dinosaur Injuries Ever Discovered by Shaena Montanari at Forbes
What mice tell us about the effects of jet lag by Les Horvitz at Digital Journal
The case against the journal article by Heidi Laine at THE HONEST BROKER
The Rube Goldberg Machine That Mastered Keynesian Economics by Siobhan Roberts at Facts So Romantic - Nautilus
Panthers be pantherin’—but some Floridians have turned on their once-beloved state symbol by Kim Tingley at onEarth
Tricolored Blackbirds: The Delta's Passenger Pigeon by Chris Clarke at KCET
How Your Brain Knows When It's Summer: Circadian Clock Linked To Seasons And Length Of Day by Lecia Bushak at Medical Daily
Amazon tribe creates 500-page traditional medicine encyclopedia by Jeremy Hance at Mongabay
The 1872 Equine Influenza Epidemic That Sickened Most U.S. Horses by Tara Smith at Mental Floss
Spacecraft Will Reach Pluto in July, Revealing Last Face in Solar System by Nadia Drake at National Geographic
Twenty-one was “the perfect wolf”: He was a legend — he never lost a fight, and he never killed a vanquished rival by Carl Safina at Salon
Animals Leave Their Skeletons Behind In These Stunning Dark Drawings by Paul Jackson at 9GAG
Coyotes ensure cat-free refuges for birds by Sarah DeWeerdt at Conservation
Genetically Modified Mosquitos Massively Reduce Dengue Fever Risk by Alexandra Ossola at Popular Science
Etching the Neural Landscape by Greg Dunn at American Scientist
Bethe's Dictum: "Always work on problems for which you possess an unfair advantage" by Ashutosh (Ash) Jogalekar at The Curious Wavefunction
Marie Curie’s Research Papers Are Still Radioactive 100+ Years Later by Ted Mills at Open culture
Painting the Town Purple by Jeff Turrentine at onEarth
Why Can’t We Fall Asleep? and Why We Sleep by Maria Konnikova at The New Yorker
When Photographers Are Neuroscientists by Jonathon Keats at NautilusSnark Week: Sand, Sea, and Family-Oriented Flesh-Ripping Aliens by Jennifer S. Holland at The Last Word On Nothing
After Measles Outbreaks, Parents Shift Their Thinking On Vaccines by Nancy Shute at NPR
Could We Terraform the Moon? by Fraser Cain at Universe Today
Avoiding a Climate Inferno by ANDREW C. REVKIN at Dot Earth
Mount Spock? New Horizons' Pluto Name List Will Please 'Star Trek' Fans by Alan Boyle at NBC News
The Pain That is Back Pain – Part Two by Doctor Ramey at David Ramey, D.V.M.
Why small talk is so excruciating by David Roberts at Vox
The Reasons Why Scientists Get Angry at Shark Week by Benjamin Freed at Washingtonian
L.A.’s Back-Yard Entomologists by Nicola Twilley at The New Yorker
Mammography Doesn’t Save Lives by Lucy E. Hornstein MD at Musings of a Dinosaur
Lazy ants sit around doing nothing while their nest mates work by Karl Gruber at New Scientist
To make a mushroom cloud by Jennifer Hackett at Scienceline
The Lazarus Plants: Why 3 Million Seeds Are Being Sent to Cold Storage for 50 Years by Sarah Laskow at Atlas Obscura
It Turns Out We Really Didn't Know What People Are Dying From by Amy Costello at Goats and Soda
Why Some Civil War Soldiers Glowed in the Dark by Matt Soniak at Mental Floss
Why Childhood Memories Disappear by Alasdair Wilkins at The Atlantic
Do dreams have meaning? The great divide by Richard Smith at BMJ Blogs
What are the top 5 “Grand Challenges” in biology? by Meghan Duffy at Dynamic Ecology
Goannas Dig the Deepest, Twistiest Burrows of All by Darren Naish at Tetrapod Zoology
Previously in this series:
FieldNotes: a view to spotted horses in the morning
FieldNotes: The Word For World is Blue (or is it Gold?)
FieldNotes: Golden Mean, polite middle-ground, and optimal numbers of legs.
FieldNotes: speeding up and slowing down time
FieldNotes: from Captain Ahab to Jeff Goldblum, chasing the giants
FieldNotes: this is not your grandparents' neuroscience!
FieldNotes: Brontosaurus in, Food Babe out.
FieldNotes: Rogue Microwave Ovens Call Home
FieldNotes: Let the sleeping apes lie
FieldNotes: one thing leads to another leads to another
FieldNotes: Seductive Allure of Seductive Allure of Neuroscience Explanations
FieldNotes: do African horses do flehmen at the sight of Derby hats?
FieldNotes: How The Bird Got Its Beak
FieldNotes: When Snakes Had Legs...
FieldNotes: Only before the bicameral mind evolved could people fall for Bohannon's cheap stunts
FieldNotes: Water, fire, origin of life, origin of cooking.
FieldNotes: Jurassic World, and other strange animals...
FieldNotes: Honey Badger Don’t Care!
FieldNotes: Hallucigenia is back on its head again.
Images: European quail at the Warsaw Zoo, October 2008. Guérin Nicolas/Creative Commons. Drawing of an early 19th century attempt at a mammoth restoration. WikiCommons/Public Domain.
Image may be NSFW.
Clik here to view.![]()
Image may be NSFW.
Clik here to view.![]()
Here’s a forensic riddle: Ten people eat an autumn dinner of roasted quail in Turkey. Hours later, four diners start to vomit. They grow weak. Their muscles ache. At the emergency department, they’re diagnosed with rhabdomyolysis—a life-threatening syndrome that afflicted people who survived being crushed under rubble during the London bombing raids in World War II. Except this is 2007 in Turkey. And instead of Luftwaffe raids, these four men are the victims of a poisonous bird. The European quail has been killing some—but not all—of its human predators for millennia. But only in the past three decades have researchers looked for other poisonous birds in the Americas, Australia, and New Guinea. These are birds that possess unfamiliar toxins and should, biologists say, be explored and understood for their medical potential. These are birds that can tell us about our genetics. And they are birds that, biologists caution, “are being lost by the minute, as each hectare of felled rainforest may be taking with it the jewels of toxinology.”.....Do Gambel’s Quail Experience Grief? by Susan E. Swanberg at The Tenacious Telomere:
Morning and evening, our yard is full of Gambel’s quail, known in scientific circles as Callipepla gambelii. We keep our bird feeders full, luring the ubiquitous house finch, sparrows of several species, the gray and red Pyrrhuloxia and our favorite, the Northern cardinal, Cardinalis cardinalis. As the perching birds quarrel over the best seats on the feeder, seed often spills to the ground, drawing the ground-feeding quail.....What's In A Name? The Reclusive Ridgway's Rail by Chris Clarke at Rewild | KCET:
Formerly known as the California clapper rail, the Ridgway's rail isn't just dependent on salt marshes in general: it requires a certain configuration of salt marsh, namely edges -- "ecotones," in the jargon -- between cordgrass and mudflat or slough. Gray-brown chicken-sized shorebirds with long, downward-curved bills, California Ridgway's rails (Rallus obsoletus obsoletus) use the open mudflats and sloughs, and low stands of pickleweed as a larder, foraging for clams, crabs, mice, lizards, small fish; just about anything they can fit down that downward-curved beak. When they're feeling a little bit too exposed, they head into the adjoining cordgrass to hide out. ....Thomas Jefferson Built This Country On Mastodons by Cara Giaimo at Atlas Obscura:
On July 4th, 1776, Thomas Jefferson had a lot on his mind. At 33, he was the youngest Virginia delegate at the Second Continental Congress. The War of Independence was raging all around him, and its resolution would either see him helping to lead a brand new nation or dragged back into a monarchical regime he detested. And now the greatest minds of all the thirteen American colonies were poring over his draft of the Declaration of Independence, preparing to vote on whether to make his vision a reality. It was a full day. However, the odds are pretty good that somewhere underneath that powdered wig, Jefferson was also thinking about mammoths. ....Kircher's giants by John McKay at Mammoth Tales:
Athanasius Kircher is perhaps the most interesting mind of the Seventeenth Century. The German born Jesuit wrote over forty books on comparative linguistics, volcanoes, music theory, magnetism, China, diseases, and anything else that crossed his path. He claimed to be able to read Egyptian hieroglyphics, he used the newly-invented microscope and suggested that the tiny "animacules" caused plague and other diseases, he was the first European to publish Sanskrit, he coined he word "electromagnetism", he built a museum of mechanical gadgets, and he designed the cat piano. A recent collection of conference papers about him was entitled "The Last Man Who Knew Everything."....Decoding the Remarkable Algorithms of Ants by Emily Singer at Quanta Magazine:
Ants are capable of remarkable feats of coordination. They can forge complex paths through the jungle, build sophisticated structures, and adapt foraging patterns to fit their environment, all without orders from a centralized source. Deborah Gordon, a biologist at Stanford University, hopes to uncover the simple rules that produce complex patterns from simple individual actions. Ants in particular excel at collective search, automatically tailoring their search strategy to efficiently cover large areas of ground. Gordon has found parallels between the algorithms ant colonies use for foraging and the man-made ones that underlie the Internet. Given how long ants have been solving these kinds of problems, Gordon hopes that she will uncover new algorithms that will ultimately make large-scale computing networks cheaper and more efficient.......
Scientists discover that male and female mice process pain differently by Arielle Duhaime-Ross at The Verge:
The nervous system's dials for communicating chronic pain to the body work differently in male and female mice, according to a study published today in Nature Neuroscience. If this difference is also found in humans, it could lead to chronic pain treatments that are better tailored to the patient. But the most immediate impact might be in basic research — the earliest stages of work — since right now, the mice being used are almost exclusively male.....What Do Snails Think About When Having Sex? by Robert Krulwich at Curiously Krulwich:
It starts with a light, soft touch, one tentacle gently reaching out, hesitant, hopeful, hanging lightly in the air. There’s a pause. Skin touches skin. One softly strokes the other and slides closer, and then, carefully, they wrap themselves together, stroking, probing, entwining. They glisten as they move, and because they are snails, everything happens very slowly. The rubbing, the rapture, the intensity of it all—snail sex is extraordinarily lovely to look at. (If you aren’t at your office desk or on a train where people can see your screen, I’ve got one about a garden snail named Chip who’s trying to lose his virginity, or take a quick peek—30 seconds will do—of this coupling in a garden.)....Polarised light and the super sense you didn’t know you had by Juliette McGregor at The Conversation:
Ever fancied having a superpower? Something you can call upon when you need it, to hand you extra information about the world? OK, it’s not X-ray vision, but your eyes do have abilities that you might not be aware of. We are all familiar with colour and brightness, but there is a third property of light – the “polarisation” that tells us the orientation in which light waves are oscillating. Animals, like bees and ants, use the polarisation patterns in the sky as a navigation aid. But few people, even in the scientific community, are aware that humans can perceive the polarisation of light with the naked eye.....Scientists in Flying Telescope Race to Intercept Pluto’s Shadow by Nadia Drake at National Geographic:
Christchurch, New Zealand—The Boeing 747’s engines roared to life a few minutes after 10 p.m. Monday, blades slicing through the frigid winter air. It was time to rise above the clouds to see Pluto slide across the face of a distant star—a rare celestial alignment that scientists around the world had been anticipating for years......
Insects may be able to feel fear, anger and empathy, after all by Carla Clark at Quartz:
A recent survey suggests that, for most of us who have ever had a pet companion, it’s a no-brainer that mammals and birds are emotional creatures, sharing emotions with multiple species and not just their own. Yet despite the thousands of YouTube videos and hundreds of recent scientific studies presenting easily accessible evidence and examples, not everyone thinks so. It was only in 2012 that scientists finally agreed that nonhuman animals are conscious beings. Meanwhile, in the laboratory, we have only just discovered that dogs display immensely complex, human-like emotions like jealousy, and we are only just deciphering how cows express positive emotions through the whites of their eyes. But what about insects?.........Louis Agassiz and a brief history of early United States marine biology by David Shiffman at Southern Fried Science:
In today’s world, the United States of America is a leader in scientific advancement, but this wasn’t always the case. The story of early American science is a story of fascinating personalities, backroom political bargaining, triumph, and heartbreak. It is also a story about studying the oceans and the animals that live in them.....
And if that is not enough, more readings for later this weekend:
How Math Can Defeat Bullies by Conor Friedersdorf at The Atlantic
Will Shark Week Get Back to Reality This Year? by Andy Dehnart at Vulture
Why is this mountain goat hanging out on a rooftop? by Jason G. Goldman at Earth Touch News
The fuzzy thinking of John Parrington: The Central Dogma by Larry Moran at Sandwalk
Why are Gulf of California seabirds heading north? by Jason G. Goldman at Conservation
Why Fireworks Displays Can’t Include a Perfect Red, White, and Blue by Shannon Hall at Nautilus
Why Wikipedia + Open Access = Revolution at MIT Technology Review
What If Ancient Romans Had Invaded America? by Steve Mirsky at Scientific American
Get this: spiders can “sail” on water by Henry Nicholls at Animal magic
How City Living May Be Harming Your Mental Health, And What You Can Do About It by Carolyn Gregoire at The Huffington Post
In Defense of Ethnography by David D. Perlmutter at The Chronicle of Higher Education
Can Dogs Finally Keep It Together This 4th of July? by Julie Hecht at Dog Spies
Plants prepare to defend themselves when they “hear” threatening sounds by Cynthia Graber and Nicola Twilley at Quartz
Summer Terrors: Brain Eating Amoebae! by Judy Stone at Forbes
New report: the chance to rescue the world’s oceans from climate change is drifting away by Ove Hoegh-Guldberg at The Conversation
Why does scientific discourse gets vicious? by Timothée Poisot at Medium
Checking DNA Against Elephants Hints At How Mammoths Got Woolly by Nell Greenfieldboyce at NPR
Mark Zuckerberg says the future of communication is telepathy. Here’s how that would actually work. by Caitlin Dewey at The Intersect
3 factors are brewing the perfect storm for shark attacks by Tanya Lewis at Business Insider
The Great Moon Hoax Was Simply a Sign of Its Time by Sarah Zielinski at Smithsonian
Revealed: why GM food is so hard to sell to a wary public by John Hudson at The Conversation
Going to the Strip Club With Sociologists by Francie Diep at Pacific Standard
From Roman candles to Catherine wheels: the chemistry of fireworks by Puff the Mutant Dragon at Puff the Mutant Dragon
The myth of the breastfeeding diet by Naomi Schon and Sally Adee at The Last Word On Nothing
Rods and Cones are Not Alone by Cheryl G. Murphy at The Huffington Post
Solar power still needs to get much cheaper. Are perovskites the answer? by Brad Plumer at Vox
Collinsium Was One Prickly Invertebrate by Brian Switek at Laelaps
The Five Most Gruesome Dinosaur Injuries Ever Discovered by Shaena Montanari at Forbes
What mice tell us about the effects of jet lag by Les Horvitz at Digital Journal
The case against the journal article by Heidi Laine at THE HONEST BROKER
The Rube Goldberg Machine That Mastered Keynesian Economics by Siobhan Roberts at Facts So Romantic - Nautilus
Panthers be pantherin’—but some Floridians have turned on their once-beloved state symbol by Kim Tingley at onEarth
Tricolored Blackbirds: The Delta's Passenger Pigeon by Chris Clarke at KCET
How Your Brain Knows When It's Summer: Circadian Clock Linked To Seasons And Length Of Day by Lecia Bushak at Medical Daily
Amazon tribe creates 500-page traditional medicine encyclopedia by Jeremy Hance at Mongabay
The 1872 Equine Influenza Epidemic That Sickened Most U.S. Horses by Tara Smith at Mental Floss
Spacecraft Will Reach Pluto in July, Revealing Last Face in Solar System by Nadia Drake at National Geographic
Twenty-one was “the perfect wolf”: He was a legend — he never lost a fight, and he never killed a vanquished rival by Carl Safina at Salon
Animals Leave Their Skeletons Behind In These Stunning Dark Drawings by Paul Jackson at 9GAG
Coyotes ensure cat-free refuges for birds by Sarah DeWeerdt at Conservation
Genetically Modified Mosquitos Massively Reduce Dengue Fever Risk by Alexandra Ossola at Popular Science
Etching the Neural Landscape by Greg Dunn at American Scientist
Bethe's Dictum: "Always work on problems for which you possess an unfair advantage" by Ashutosh (Ash) Jogalekar at The Curious Wavefunction
Marie Curie’s Research Papers Are Still Radioactive 100+ Years Later by Ted Mills at Open culture
Painting the Town Purple by Jeff Turrentine at onEarth
Why Can’t We Fall Asleep? and Why We Sleep by Maria Konnikova at The New Yorker
When Photographers Are Neuroscientists by Jonathon Keats at NautilusSnark Week: Sand, Sea, and Family-Oriented Flesh-Ripping Aliens by Jennifer S. Holland at The Last Word On Nothing
After Measles Outbreaks, Parents Shift Their Thinking On Vaccines by Nancy Shute at NPR
Could We Terraform the Moon? by Fraser Cain at Universe Today
Avoiding a Climate Inferno by ANDREW C. REVKIN at Dot Earth
Mount Spock? New Horizons' Pluto Name List Will Please 'Star Trek' Fans by Alan Boyle at NBC News
The Pain That is Back Pain – Part Two by Doctor Ramey at David Ramey, D.V.M.
Why small talk is so excruciating by David Roberts at Vox
The Reasons Why Scientists Get Angry at Shark Week by Benjamin Freed at Washingtonian
L.A.’s Back-Yard Entomologists by Nicola Twilley at The New Yorker
Mammography Doesn’t Save Lives by Lucy E. Hornstein MD at Musings of a Dinosaur
Lazy ants sit around doing nothing while their nest mates work by Karl Gruber at New Scientist
To make a mushroom cloud by Jennifer Hackett at Scienceline
The Lazarus Plants: Why 3 Million Seeds Are Being Sent to Cold Storage for 50 Years by Sarah Laskow at Atlas Obscura
It Turns Out We Really Didn't Know What People Are Dying From by Amy Costello at Goats and Soda
Why Some Civil War Soldiers Glowed in the Dark by Matt Soniak at Mental Floss
Why Childhood Memories Disappear by Alasdair Wilkins at The Atlantic
Do dreams have meaning? The great divide by Richard Smith at BMJ Blogs
What are the top 5 “Grand Challenges” in biology? by Meghan Duffy at Dynamic Ecology
Goannas Dig the Deepest, Twistiest Burrows of All by Darren Naish at Tetrapod Zoology
Previously in this series:
FieldNotes: a view to spotted horses in the morning
FieldNotes: The Word For World is Blue (or is it Gold?)
FieldNotes: Golden Mean, polite middle-ground, and optimal numbers of legs.
FieldNotes: speeding up and slowing down time
FieldNotes: from Captain Ahab to Jeff Goldblum, chasing the giants
FieldNotes: this is not your grandparents' neuroscience!
FieldNotes: Brontosaurus in, Food Babe out.
FieldNotes: Rogue Microwave Ovens Call Home
FieldNotes: Let the sleeping apes lie
FieldNotes: one thing leads to another leads to another
FieldNotes: Seductive Allure of Seductive Allure of Neuroscience Explanations
FieldNotes: do African horses do flehmen at the sight of Derby hats?
FieldNotes: How The Bird Got Its Beak
FieldNotes: When Snakes Had Legs...
FieldNotes: Only before the bicameral mind evolved could people fall for Bohannon's cheap stunts
FieldNotes: Water, fire, origin of life, origin of cooking.
FieldNotes: Jurassic World, and other strange animals...
FieldNotes: Honey Badger Don’t Care!
FieldNotes: Hallucigenia is back on its head again.
Images: European quail at the Warsaw Zoo, October 2008. Guérin Nicolas/Creative Commons. Drawing of an early 19th century attempt at a mammoth restoration. WikiCommons/Public Domain.
Image may be NSFW.
Clik here to view.
Clik here to view.