How fickle my heart and how woozy my eyes

wnycradiolab:

discoverynews:

Animals Inside and Out and Frozen In Time

From the same team that created “Bodies: the Exhibition,” a new exhibition at the Natural History Museum of London peels away the skin of hundreds of species to reveal their anatomies.

“Animal Inside Out” opens in London on April 6, 2012 and runs until Sept. 16, 2012. It features about 100 specimens displaying the structure of many creatures.

The animals were preserved using the technique of plastination which was used by Gunther von Hagens in the “Body Worlds” exhibit.

Here, a woman examines a plastination of a shark.

more images here

Booking my ticket to London in 3…2…1…

WHAT WHAT WHY WAS THIS NOT THERE WHEN I WAS THERE. WHY. WHY. 

jtotheizzoe:

Girls in STEM

It’s not a secret that women (and pretty much any minority group) have uphill battle after uphill battle facing them when it comes to succeeding in math, science and engineering fields. Some of these are explicit (like the tilted playing field of the tenure system, which could take 100 years to level out), and some are more obscured (like the quiet social pressures that push them away from science). But what is clear is that it does not have to be the case.

I was really struck by this infographic’s ability to capture how quickly and precipitously women drop out of many fields of science once social pressures begin to take over. 

I hope that projects like ScienceCheerleader, IAmScience, DoubleXScience and This Is What A Scientist Looks Like (<- bonus points if you can find me on that one) can continue to make this image a relic of the past and not a picture of the future.

(ᔥ EngineeringDegree.net, click here for enlargification)

 what a great infographic.

(via scishow)

scientificillustration:

n298_w1150 by BioDivLibrary on Flickr.

405. Corynolophus reinhardtii 406. Melanocetus johnsonii (Humpback anglerfish)

407. Liocetus murrayi (Murray’s abyssal anglerfish)

Oceanic ichthyology. v.22 atlas.
Cambridge, U.S.A. :Printed for the Museum,1896.
biodiversitylibrary.org/item/25480

ANGLERFISH INSTA-REBLOG!! 

(via crookedindifference)

thisworldisamazing:

Watched this in biology class the other day, had it stuck in my head all day.

On the plus side, if I get an exam question on it then I should be able to answer it pretty easily!

Somewhat unrelated, but Dr. Kary Mullis seems like an interesting character. I looked him up to see if he was the guy my lab prof talked about going to a lecture he gave at her University where he talked to a bunch of excited, PCR-enthusiast biologists about the art he was doing. 

According to his wikipedia page, he claims he once spoke to a glowing green raccoon and once wanted to sell jewelry with the DNA of dead famous people in it. 

Oh, and he doesn’t believe in climate change. Or AIDS being the result of HIV.  

Which just goes to show that  scientists definitely aren’t boring, and even Nobel Prize winning ones definitely aren’t always right about everything. 

(via thisworldisamazing-deactivated2)

wnycradiolab:

staceythinx:

Susana Soares’s design work is as fascinating as the science behind it:

Scientific research has demonstrated that bees have an extraordinarily acute sense of smell and can be trained to perform health checks by detecting a specific odour in peoples’ breath.

The project consists in a series of alternative diagnostic tools that use bees to diagnose accurately at an early stage of a vast variety of diseases.

Could this revolutionise medicine as we know it?

Oh gosh, I don’t know about this.  I just feel like someone’s going to end up with a bee in her windpipe.

bee doctors!

mad-as-a-marine-biologist:

Why deep-sea anglerfish have such extra-ordinary jaws

NICE fangs, shame about the bite. The oversize fangs of some anglerfish may help them to snap their weak jaws shut around prey, improving their odds of bagging a meal.

The dragonfish family (Stomiidae) go after large prey, and so have jaws that open wide. Closing them quickly is not easy, says Christopher Kenaley of Harvard University, since drag increases exponentially with jaw length, and rises even more if bulky prey are sticking out the front. What’s more, dragonfish jaw muscles are very weak.

Kenaley built a computer model of the jaws and found that shutting them around prey lying on its side took up to 1 second - more than enough time to allow it to get away. However, that dropped to just 125 milliseconds when the prey was lodged upright between the teeth.

Kenaley says the results suggest the fangs may not just impale prey as previously thought but help keep it in the best orientation to reduce drag on the jaw when it shuts. He presented the findings earlier this month at the Society for Integrative and Comparative Biology meeting in Charleston, South Carolina.

(via mad-as-a-marine-biologist)

wnycradiolab:

Guys, remember the edible cell?  Truly the most delicious of all elementary school science projects.  Looking at these is making me so nostalgic, I want to plan an edible cell party where everyone has to bring one.

(Full disclosure: one of these is a professional job.  Don’t feel bad if yours looked more like this.)

The water boatman is the loudest animal for its size! AND IT IS TINY. Also, check out that figure. 

We are also apparently louder than elephants for our size. I think that deserves a pat on the back. 

from: http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2011/07/110701121519.htm