headlikeanorange:

A male Darwin’s frog with a vocal pouch full of tadpoles. He carries them around until they develop into froglets and hop out of his mouth. (Natural World - BBC)

(via poptech)

sailorswayze:

AM I RIGHT LADIES

(via neil-gaiman)

jtotheizzoe:

The Adorable Biology of Snoring Hummingbirds

I think we’ve all felt like this on a Monday, right? This little hummingbird has just reserved a spot in my list of Top 10 Cutest Things I’ve Ever Seen, thanks to its snoozy little snore.

Of course, hummingbirds don’t really snore, do they? Maybe … sort of … but not for the same reasons we do. When humans (or my dogs) snore, it’s usually an obstruction l vibrating the back of the throat when we try to breathe in. Not that I ever snore or anything. So, this adorable little hummingbird is definitely sawing some logs, but the reason why is way cooler than the reasons we do.

Hummingbirds have incredibly high metabolic needs. To do all that buzzing around and to keep their tiny bodies warm, they eat the human equivalent of a refrigerator full of food every day, mostly in the form of high-energy nectar and fatty bugs. Because of their small size, they also lose a lot of body heat to the air. In order to preserve energy on cool nights, they have the ability to enter a daily, miniature hibernation called torpor.

Normally, if our bodies get cold, our muscles twitch (shivering) and we crank up our metabolism to create heat. That way we stay at our “set point” of 98.6˚F. In torpor, hummingbirds actually lower their bodies’ “set point”, powering down their brains and metabolism so far that their breathing is undetectable! This way, they aren’t burning calories on cold nights when they aren’t able to eat and recharge.

Just before morning, their natural circadian rhythms kick in and they start to thaw out, like heating a car engine on a cold day. What we see in the video is probably a bird coming out of torpor (which is what the scientists in the video were studying), starting to breathe in more oxygen to raise its body temperature, and making that adorable snoring noise.

Hummingbirds can do this on a daily basis if they get cold, regularly powering down on frozen tree branches around the world. Allegedly, you can even put them in the freezer for a while, but who would do such a thing?!

If only all science was this cute!

scienceineurope:

Are science comics a relevant tool to disseminate science? May science communication and education use efficiently comics as a mean, a tool, a media? It seems like it is worth a try. Enjoy the research work of M. Tatalovic.

Science Comics as tools for science education and communication : a brief, exploratory study from ggrenot

sciencecenter:

Breaking Dinosaur News!

Paleontologists discover that T-rex’s ate the well-protected Triceratops by ripping its head off. 

You may now return to your normal scheduled programming.

arcaneimages:

‎Susan B Anthony pummeled and arrested for attempting to vote in 1872. She was fined $100 for registering to vote.

(via motherjones)

sciencecenter:

This should give you a well-deserved Friday smile: librarians won’t file books about young-Earth creationism alongside books about actual science; instead, they’re classified as religion. If you’re interested, you should check out the article “Librarians decide what is reality,” which gives us this money quote:

The problem isn’t that young earth creationism might be wrong. The problem is that it isn’t scientific.

Stick it to ‘em, librarians! And while you’re at it, be sure to remove books about intelligent design from science sections too - it gives them legitimacy they don’t deserve. This isn’t an issue of censorship, it’s about having a meaningful definition of science. Intelligent design advocates fail a key test to determine if a theory is scientific, namely that they don’t put forth any testable hypotheses (they also heavily rely on undefined terms like ‘irreducible complexity’). I don’t think their books should be published or banned, they just don’t deserve the title and legitimacy of ‘science.’ 

staceythinx:

In his series Vanishing Spirits, photographer Ernie Button discovered that the fun wasn’t completely over once the Scotch was gone.

About the project:

The idea for this project occurred while putting a used Scotch glass into the dishwasher. I noted a film on the bottom of a glass and when I inspected closer, I noted these fine, lacey lines filling the bottom. What I found through some experimentation is that these patterns and images that you see can be created with the small amount of Single-Malt Scotch left in a glass after most of it has been consumed. The alcohol dries and leaves the sediment in various patterns. It’s a little like snowflakes in that every time the Scotch dries, the glass yields different patterns and results. I have used different color lights to add ‘life’ to the bottom of the glass, creating the illusion of landscape, terrestrial or extraterrestrial. Some of the images reference the celestial, as if the image was taken of space; something that the Hubble telescope may have taken or an image taken from space looking down on Earth. The circular image references a drinking glass, typically circular, and what the consumer might see if they were to look at the bottom of the glass after the scotch has dried.

(via freshphotons)

theatlantic:

The Fight for Service Dogs for Veterans With PTSD

Traditionally used for blind, deaf, or physically disabled patients, service dogs have only recently been trained to perform tasks that can improve PTSD symptoms, like wake a veteran from a nightmare or create a buffer in large crowds or public places.

Patients often experience dramatic improvement, say service dog experts. They feel renewed confidence in social situations, decrease medication use, and are less likely to startle. Some veterans say it’s the only treatment that ever worked so well.

Read more. [Image: Lucas Jackson/Reuters]