Females like the bad boys when they are young, we all know that colloquially - and even more so when they are ovulating, say a group of social and evolutionary psychologists.
A group of studies says that salmon raised in man-made hatcheries can harm wild salmon through competition for food and habitat. Salmon, which survived millions of years of evolution, are in danger from...salmon.
The studies provide new evidence that fast-growing hatchery fish compete with wild fish for food and habitat in the ocean as well as in the rivers where they return to spawn and even raises questions about whether the ocean can supply enough food to support future increases in hatchery fish while still sustaining wild salmon.
My very first mentor in cephalopod research was Eric Hochberg at the Santa Barbara Museum of Natural History. I think I was seventeen when he welcomed me into the museum's secret catacombs (at least, that's how I thought of them) of preserved specimens. Awe washed over me as I stared at shelves upon shelves of jarred octopuses.
Eric introduced me to the California pygmy octopus, Octopus micropyrsus, which would proceed to fascinate me for the rest of my undergraduate career. I saw more of them in jars than I ever did alive, though I kept doggedly digging through kelp holdfasts trying to find them. Reclusive little beasts.
A short while ago we carried a strange claim from a group of ethicists at Oxford. Not only should abortion be okay,
actual children should be aborted even after they are born.
They're ethicists so they can be dismissed rather quickly. Tomorrow they are just as likely to be arguing there should be no abortion at all if you can't abort newborns. Yet there is growing concern that the government doing more things for more people in the best interests of overall society is leading to a resurgence in the social authoritarian rationalizations that gripped the country (and really, the world) the last time progressives held any power.
Things would seem to be good in China. They are the only world economy not in a financial demilitarized zone, things are booming.
Yet more money is not making people there happier. They're actually less happy today than shortly after the Tiananmen Square protest in Beijing was crushed by the military, says economist Richard Easterlin, researcher in "happiness economics" and namesake of the Easterlin Paradox.
Researchers have uncovered a new way to stimulate activity of immune cell opiate receptors, leading to efficient tumor cell clearance - their pharmacological approach can activate the immune cells to prevent cancer growth through stimulation of the opiate receptors found on immune cells.
More than 150 years ago, immigrant Chinese fishermen launched sampans into the chilly waters of Monterey Bay to capture squid. The Bay also lured fishermen from Sicily and other Mediterranean countries, who brought round-haul nets to fish for sardines.
This was the beginning of the largest fishery in the western hemisphere – California’s famed ‘wetfish’ industry, named for the fish that were canned wet from the sea, that has remained imprinted on our collective conscience by writers like John Steinbeck.
Who doesn’t remember Cannery Row?
Understanding neurons - their shape, patterns of electrical activity even a profile of which genes are turned on at a given moment - remains as much art as science due to the complexity of research.
But that could soon change: Researchers at MIT and the Georgia Institute of Technology have developed a way to automate the process of finding and recording information from neurons in the living brain. The researchers have shown that a robotic arm guided by a cell-detecting computer algorithm can identify and record from neurons in the living mouse brain with better accuracy and speed than a human experimenter.
Riding into a black hole is a fun mental exercise. General relativity predicts* that an observer who falls freely into a large black hole will have no means with which she can establish whether she is at the event horizon, which is the radius below which there is no escape possible. I explained this more detailed in Black Hole Duality: Not noticing crashing with light speed. Nevertheless, many popular descriptions leave the feeling as if the event horizon is also locally, to the one who falls freely through it and his close surroundings that fall with her, a recognizable place. This can be misleading in interesting ways and a
A 1.5 metric ton block of engraved limestone at the Abri Castanet in southern France is the earliest evidence of wall art - approximately 37,000 years old and evidence of the role art played in the daily lives of Early Aurignacian humans.
The research team has been excavating at Abri Castanet for the past 15 years. Abri Castanet and its sister site Abri Blanchard are among the oldest sites in Eurasia bearing artifacts of human symbolism. Hundreds of personal ornaments have been discovered, including pierced animal teeth, pierced shells, ivory and soapstone beads, engravings, and paintings on limestone slabs.
