This is a majorly cool piece by Becky Crew on the Scientific American blog network. It details the slow, incremental progress toward a scientific consensus on a truly weird anatomical feature exhibited by some prehistoric chimaeras (fish that share a relatively recent common ancestor with the modern shark). It’s a great scientific problem. “We’ve discovered what… Read More »The chimaera with the wheel of teeth
My friends and I all have vivid mental pictures of the Tunguska Event, probably because of Carl Sagan’s retelling of it in the original Cosmos series. Recently, another region of Russia—the Urals—was jolted awake by a similar, though smaller, event.
Read More »The Chelyabinsk eventWhether you’re putting together a permanent exhibit or a last-minute powerpoint, it’s all but inevitable that you’ll encounter a point at which the most sensible option is to use material that someone else created. This is more frequently the case with images since they’re usually harder to recreate yourself. And in the age of Google Images and instant screenshots, there’s almost nothing in practical terms that can stop you from using any picture you want. Here at Talk Science however, we recommend being careful with your media usage—and we negotiate image permission for many of our clients.
Read More »Image permission: Doing it rightOf late, some people have really hit it out of the park when it comes to articulating the obstacles women face in science. In what seems to be an effort to restore symmetry to the universe, the Guardian’s Emma G. Keller recently did her best to hit it right back in. The piece is a… Read More »Science, the gender gap, and how to make it worse
One of the things I love about science is the appreciation it can inspire for things I might otherwise consider horrifying, or just gross. One great example of this is Cymothoa exigua, also known as the tongue-eating sea louse. I should mention that the animal in question doesn’t necessarily “eat” the host’s tongue in the conventional sense: It latches on and consumes blood and mucus until the tongue completely shrivels up. Then the isopod crustacean stays right where it is and switches to just grabbing part of whatever the fish eats and slowly growing larger, before eventually detaching and swimming away. A few things about this before we go back to the whole wonder and fascination part…
Read More »Treasures: The tongue-eating sea louse