by Patricia Waldron | Feb 28, 2014 | Posts
Stacy Lopresti-Goodman, a psychologist the Marymount University in Arlington, Virginia, studies individuals who have lived in solitary confinement, and who suffer from posttraumatic stress disorder. But these individuals aren’t human – they’re chimpanzees who lived in...
by Molly Sharlach | Feb 27, 2014 | Posts
Remember playing “The Oregon Trail” computer game in middle school? As a pioneer leading your family westward in a covered wagon, you hunted virtual deer, rabbits and bison—but not too many. You had to leave enough game animals alive to sustain your party until you...
by Cynthia McKelvey | Feb 26, 2014 | Posts
If feet gross you out, skip this post. As I peeled the skin off the arch of my foot, its texture reminded me of plastic wrap. Only it was softer and made a slightly different ripping sound as I separated it from the pink flesh underneath. My boyfriend was not...
by Becky Bach | Feb 19, 2014 | Posts
As pressure mounts to extract minerals from the deep sea, a growing group of scientists is calling attention to the gap between mining momentum and scientific know-how. Dozens of mining projects have been proposed, but the regulatory and scientific framework to...
by Jyoti Madhusoodanan | Feb 18, 2014 | Posts
Watch a trail of ants march off bearing morsels of food, and you might think the insects are experts at gathering prey. But sometimes the makeup of a food can confound a particular species of supersized ants, new research shows. Bullet ants – giant tropical ants named...
by Nsikan Akpan | Feb 12, 2014 | Posts
He’s grown bigger since the last video. Chico chopped off his own tail a few months back (I think maybe he was upset about being in his cage). Such is a life in captivity for a sailfin dragon as retold on YouTube, where there are over 1,400 videos of Hydrosaurus...
by Patricia Waldron | Feb 10, 2014 | Posts
A version of this post can be found at the AGU GeoSpace blog. The polar vortex dropped the jet stream and made large parts of the country miserable this year with freezing cold Arctic air. But, air temperatures over much of the Arctic were above average, and...
by Julia Calderone | Feb 7, 2014 | Posts
“Don’t you dare lick that seal!” screamed a bikini-clad young woman flicking the salty waves with her toes. As I glanced across the Santa Cruz Dog Beach toward the base of a succulent-covered cliff, a brown mutt the size of a footstool was fondling a lifeless pinniped...
by Matt Davenport | Feb 5, 2014 | Posts
The first clue that I was wrong was that I had a knee-jerk reaction. Nu uh, Temple Grandin, I thought, you can too learn algebra! Sitting inside a gigantic fancy tent at the Hyatt Regency in Monterey, Calif., I soon learned that my impetuous disagreement was based on...
by Molly Sharlach | Feb 3, 2014 | Posts
Reader, be proud. You’re a perceptual expert. As you read, your eyes alternately focus and move along each line of text in a seamless sequence honed over years of practice. Reading, recognizing faces and distinguishing colors or musical tones are all forms of...
by Cynthia McKelvey | Dec 20, 2013 | Posts
The term “living fossil” carries far more weight than Grandpa’s 80th birthday card. The world is supposedly full of animals, plants, even bacteria that—depending on who you ask—have barely evolved in millions of years. Alligators, sharks, gingko trees all bear the...
by Cat Ferguson | Dec 13, 2013 | Posts
We stand at a strange moment in human history, when lawyers and corporations wage war amongst each other over one question: who owns your body? Off to the side, biohackers—the freaks, geeks, rebels, and punks who do biotechnology experiments in garages and...
