flickering pictures

The New Scientist reports that over 20 years and 44,000 generations in the lab, a particular population of Escherichia coli (or E. coli for short) bacteria have evolved the ability to metabolize citrate, a nutrient that the bacteria normally can’t use. This is a big deal — something akin to humans developing the ability to [...]

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From Science News: You bite into a piece of candy and find a cricket leg. Eewwww. Or notice that raisin in a bowl of cereal has legs and wings. Bam, down the disposal it goes. Such filth in foods is supposedly illegal, but the Food and Drug Administration’s actual tolerance is far from zero. FDA [...]

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The folks at Damn Interesting have done it again — this time with a great piece by Alan Bellows on the origins of eugenics, the practice of selectively breeding humans for the purpose of improving the gene pool. From the article: In 1865, Darwin’s half-cousin Sir Francis Galton pried the lid from yet another worm-can [...]

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In the spirit of uncovering weird and wonderful things, here’s a link to Divine Caroline, which features pics and tidbits on some of the world’s strangest plants. Up top is welwitschia mirabilis, which apparently has only two leaves in that entire writhing mass of foliage. The one at right is amorphophallus, which translates from the [...]

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British Columbia’s forests are being ravaged by a scourge of tiny pine beetles, which are turning lush green trees into rotting pulp at an alarming rate. The beetles are killing so many trees that the greenhouse gases released by decomposing wood are expected to outweigh all similar gases emitted by BC’s 4.5 million residents next [...]

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I’ve started making National Geographic one of my regular online stops, and I’m starting to realize just how fantastic this magazine is. A few days ago it reported that in 1971, five pairs of Italian wall lizards were moved onto a small Croatian island. Today, they’ve taken over, and their bodies have adapted to their [...]

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I admit it, I like lists. List of strange things, cool objects, bizarre coincindences, you name it. Usually I spare you guys the full extent of my geekiness, but this one was too neat to pass up. The good people at the aptly named List Universe have compiled images, descriptions and causes of some of [...]

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The end of the World War II in 1945 gave birth to another war — one that was “colder” but just as terrifying. US-Soviet tension and the arms race it caused had much of the world in a panic, and WWII’s victors were falling all over themselves to test nuclear weapons and build arsenals meant [...]

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I think one day my love of alliteration is going to get me into trouble. Ten tons of terrible trouble. Here’s a first-hand account from Puerto Rico’s Mosquito Bay, “one of the most bioluminescent bodies of water in the world,” with an eerie blue glowing effect created by tiny dinoflagellates. It was posted on Curious [...]

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