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Search Results for: label/white whale mimc

  • NOC: A whale of a mimic

    Listen to this: What does it sound like to you? (Recording courtesy of the BBC.) If you thought it sounded human, you’re right. It does. But that’s not a human making the sound–it’s a beluga whale named NOC. Shh. The beluga is listening.Credit: via Wikimedia Commons. Dolphins have been trained to mimic people, but the fellow in this recording apparently picked up human-sounding lingo on his own. Researche…

    Authored by on October 22, 2012

  • Biology Explainer: The big 4 building blocks of life–carbohydrates, fats, proteins, and nucleic acids

    …ll selection of different materials: bricks, mortar, iron, glass, and wood. Arranged in different ways, these few materials can yield a huge variety of structures. We encountered functional groups and the SPHONC in Chapter 3. These components form the four categories of molecules of life. These Big Four biological molecules are carbohydrates, lipids, proteins, and nucleic acids. They can have many roles, from giving an organism structure to be…

    Authored by on June 8, 2012

  • Unicorns and Brainbows

    orite, shown below: A cerebellar flocculus, a lobe in the cerebellum, from the original Brainbow paper (Source) Since its original description, researchers have used the Brainbow concept extensively — it has been cited 361 times, according to the Web of Science – and extended it into zebrafish and fruit flies, both species that researchers frequently use in experiments to trace gene expression and how animals develop. But though Lich…

    Authored by on May 6, 2013

  • Friday Roundup: Arsenic in juice, self-medicating chimps, science tattoos, Guinness Record-setting science cheerleaders, and more!

    …wering the standard it’s set for how much arsenic exposure is OK in apple and other juices. Cutoffs are usually set in what are known as “parts per billion” (ppb). That means what you think: if the cutoff is 3 ppb, that means, for example, three drops in a billion drops. Right now, the cutoff for arsenic in drinking water is 10 ppb, and consumer groups are asking the EPA to drop that to 3 ppb. Deborah Blum has addressed the fact…

    Authored by on December 2, 2011

  • Dominants, alphas, and queens: Happy Mother’s Day!

    …mammoths. Here are a few examples: The Queen, surrounded by her supportive workers. Honey bees: Bee colonies are giant matriarchal societies ruled by a single queen—quite literally the “queen mum.” Her offspring (as many as 25,000 at a time) make up the entire clan of female workers and male drones. The queen spends her life tended to by her worker daughters. These workers have underdeveloped reproductive systems, so the queen is the only femal…

    Authored by on May 13, 2013

  • African-American and female, doing field research in Africa

    …at Oklahoma State University. She is currently studying African-Pouched Rats, Cricetomys gambianus, an interesting yet largely mysterious animal whose keen sense of smell serves in the detection of landmines. She spent summer 2012 in Morogoro, Tanzania, studying the animals in the wild and in captivity….

    Authored by on January 23, 2013

  • Why is the sky pink?

    On Mars, the sky is pink during the day, shading to blue at sunset. What planet did you think I was talking about? On Earth, the sky is blue during daytime, turning red at as the sun sinks toward night. Scattering light Well, it’s not quite as simple as that: if you ignore your dear sainted mother’s warning and look at the Sun, you’ll see that the sky immediately around the Sun is white, and the sky right at the horizon (i…

    Authored by on March 12, 2012

  • After Newtown missteps, journalists get guidelines

    …almost twice as likely to say that they don’t want to live or work near a person with mental illness if they read an article about a person with mental illness involved in a mass shooting, according to a study published March 20 in the American Journal of Psychiatry. Interestingly, this tendency is the same even if the article avoids any mention of mental illness. This may be because this link between violence and mental illness is deeply engrain…

    Authored by on March 27, 2013

  • Why blueberries won’t turn you blue and other blueberry facts

    …ge. While almost all the vitamins and minerals nutrition gurus like to report on are present to some amount, for the 2000-calorie diet, that one cup of blueberries will provide the recommended daily value of 24% of Vitamin C, 36% of Vitamin K, and 25% of manganese. The remaining values range from 0-4%. (Values obtained from Nutrition.com and verified through multiple sources.) The Wikipedia entry is quite good and well researched (as of August…

    Authored by on September 3, 2012

  • Friday Roundup: Land-walking octopus, he’s having a baby, defining veggies, & lots for the ladies

    …’s efforts to perform a butt injection on a woman using “Fix a Flat.” It’s probably best to just love your butt for what it is, which isn’t Fix a Flat. In smarter news, NASA is rolling out Aspire 2 Inspire, targeting girls interested in science. Know a girl who’s interested in science? You can start with the Aspire 2 Inspire video below about women in science: Speaking of women in science, former dean of th…

    Authored by on November 25, 2011

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