There should be a Youtube version of the Oscars, and if there was, this short clip by Bamberg C, Rademacher G, Güttler F, et al “Human birth observed in real-time open magnetic resonance imaging,” would be in contention for the science and education categrory.
No one knows his exact age, but the giant tortoise Lonesome George passed away quietly in his enclosure at the Charles Darwin Research Station in the Galapagos Islands: [Read more…]
Remember the mystery blobs that had been found washed up on beaches or caught in nets here and there? Well, this may solve the mystery and it’s a pretty cool answer: [Read more…]
Didn’t think of this, but it makes sense. The warmer it gets, the more salt gets concentrated or removed depending on which way the water to vapor cycle has been trending: [Read more…]
PZ may have his colorful mollusca, aka cephalopods, but here at the Zingularity we’re talking giant prehistoric snake evolution like something right out of a b-movie! Meet Titanoboa, 50 feet long and weighing over a ton. It could have gulped down an adult with room left over for the rest of the family and its close cousins were even larger and more bizarre! [Read more…]
In the video below the fold from the new nature special Frozen Planet, time lasped photography captures a deadly growing brinacle. What is a brinacle you ask? [Read more…]
An artist's impression of a 300-million-year-old peat forest in northern China, based on plant fossils preserved in a huge volcanic ash-fall. PNAS
Paleobiologists of all kinds are used to dealing with frustrating scraps. Occasionally they get entire bones and once in a blue moon a nearly complete skeleton or fossil of an extinct plant or animal. But scientists working with remains below a Mongolian coal mine have done one better, they found a 300 million year old forest preserved in volcanic ash and have brought it to virtual life in what is being called the Permian Pompeii:
Yes, that’s really a squirrel and its really, severely, purple. No one seems to know why, could be a hoax, or something else. Put on your skeptic hats and offer some ideas.
The earth’s north pole won’t always be an iced over ocean and I don’t mean (just) because of climate change. We’re talking Pangea II here and in geological time, it’s not even that far off. At least that’s what some secular scientists at an elite east coast university claim: [Read more…]
It seems a Dr Howard Lang was in the archives of the British Geological Survey when he found some drawers marked Unregistered Fossil Plants. Inside were hundreds of fossils that have not seen the light of day for a smuch as 165 years. Museum curators soon realized that some of the material was actually collected or analyzed by Charles Darwin himself and during his most scientically formative time; see the piece of fossil wood below found by Darwin in 1834 while sailing on the HMS Beagle, and thinking about how biological diversity could arise over time, an idea he would later call evolution. [Read more…]