Nerdly News Curated from Interesting Sites
Imagine youre a bumblebee queen in England. Its February and youve just woken up from your winter hibernation. Youre hungry, pregnant, and ready to find the most promising spot to start a new colony.
So, where do you choose to build your nest? Should it be near rural farmland, in a suburban…
It began as a routine call for Long Beach firefighters: A fire alarm had gone off before dawn Monday at an 11-story housing complex for seniors.
As crews made their way to Covenant Manor, more details started to come in. There had been an explosion and a fire. People smelled gasoline. When firefighters…
There arent many people whove had to impress a gorilla for a job interview, but Mary Lee Jensvold is one of them.
The interviewer in question was Koko, the western lowland gorilla who made a name for herself by learning American Sign Language and demonstrating for the world that animals have…
Koko the gorilla doted on her pet kitten as if it were her own child. To the amazement of her human handlers, she seemed able to capture the joys and annoyances of maternal love in strings of simple words.
Soft, Koko said in sign language while cradling the kitten, which she named All Ball because…
It may have taken thousands of generations of hunting, gathering, farming and cooking to get here. But in the end, the genius of humankind has combined fats and carbohydrates to produce such crowning culinary glories as the doughnut, fettuccine Alfredo, nachos and chocolate cake with buttercream…
Paul Boyer, a UCLA biochemist who won the Nobel Prize for discovering the “three-cylinder engine” that powers all life as we know it, has died at his home in Los Angeles. He was 99 years old when he passed away on June 2, and would have celebrated his 100th birthday on July 31.
Compared to brains in the rest of the animal kingdom, the size of the human brain is way out of whack.
Our brains are roughly six times larger than what you would expect for a placental mammal of our stature, scientists say.
And no other animal has a brain as large as ours relative to body size.
…
In the 1966 science fiction classic Fantastic Voyage, a submarine crew is miniaturized so it can squeeze inside a human body and travel to a hot spot where medical assistance is needed.
A team from MIT has adapted this idea for real life, replacing the shrunken squad with specially engineered…
It took years of activist campaigns to turn the plastic bag into a villain, and hard-fought legislation to reduce its presence in oceans and waterways. Now, environmentalists and lawmakers are deploying similar tactics against a new generation of plastic pollutants.
There are drinking straws, which…
Triclosan, an antimicrobial agent found in toys, toothpaste, cosmetics and more than 2,000 other consumer products, has been found to wreak havoc on the guts of mice whose blood concentrations of the compound are roughly equivalent to a typical level for humans.
One group of mice who were fed a…
This video demonstrates scientists’ best guess about how Pluto wound up with methane dunes despite having such a thin atmosphere.
If youre like most people, you probably havent given krill much thought.
Youve heard of them, of course. Theyre the small, shrimp-like animals that live in great swarms in most of the worlds oceans.
You probably know that theyre the primary food source of the largest animal on Earth, the…
This video demonstrates scientists’ best guess about how Pluto wound up with methane dunes despite having such a thin atmosphere.
Compared to the rest of the animal kingdom, the human brain is way out of whack.
Our brains are roughly six times larger than what you would expect for a placental mammal of our stature, scientists say.
And no other animal has a brain as large as ours relative to body size.
So why did humans evolve…
With any luck, a screening mammogram that shows no sign of breast cancer means you wont have to think about the disease until its time for your next exam. But about 15% of breast cancers turn up in that interval between regular screenings.
These cases are troubling and not just because the…
What do shivering and exercise have in common?
More than you might think.
Both shivering and exercise cause you to contract your muscles and expend energy thats pretty obvious.
But less obvious is a new discovery, published Tuesday in Cell Metabolism, that they both release a molecule into the…
You know that getting exercise, eating vegetables and quitting smoking are good for you. A new study shows just how good they are, in terms of the number of years they can add to your life.
American women who followed five healthy lifestyle factors lived about 14 years longer than women who followed…
Could a clump of interlocking brain cells in a Petri dish ever experience self-awareness? Can you make a mouse or a monkey partly human by implanting human stem cells in its brain? If pieces of a dead persons brain are reanimated in a lab, is the patient still completely dead?
Questions like these…
Its a cosmic pileup in the far reaches of the universe and nothing like it has never been seen before.
Using the most powerful telescopes on Earth, astronomers have spotted 14 burning-hot galaxies hurtling toward each other on an inevitable galactic collision course at the edge of the observable…
Heres one way to tackle the dreaded task of assembling your Ikea furniture: Get a robot to do it for you.
With some off-the-shelf robotics hardware and a substantial amount of programming, researchers at Nanyang Technological University in Singapore built a machine capable of assembling the Swedish…