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Items tagged with: science
Geological Deep Time – new blog series available in English now!
It's about our relationship with Earth's deep time – illustrated with my own photographs from the Black Forest and the Vosges. The first 3 parts are now online.
Start here : silberspur.de/blogs/read/116
#DeepTime #BlackForest #Vosges #LandscapePhotography #Photography #Nature #EarthSciences #Science #Fotografie #Schwarzwald #Vogesen #Palynology #Science #ScienceCommunication #Geology #NaturePhotography #ScienceForEveryone #Time
The very first image from the surface of Mars, transmitted to Earth from NASA's Viking 1 lander, 50 years ago today.
nasa.gov/image-article/our-fir… #science #nature #history #tech
Our First View of the Surface of Mars - NASA
“Touchdown, we have touchdown!” At 5:12 a.m. PDT, July 20, 1976, mission controllers at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory erupted in cheers as they learnedNASA
🕷 A newly discovered spider in Australia builds spring-loaded traps that launch ants faster than a bullet.
The ballista spider in Cape York rainforests weaves silk snares and waits. When a green tree ant bites the trigger, the trap launches them at 1,367 m/s - over 1.5x the speed of a rifle bullet.
Gram for gram, these tiny traps store more power than any known biological catapult. The spider may even coat them with pheromones that only attract its prey.
Published in Current Biology (July 2026): nationalgeographic.com/animals…
Watch this new spider species launch ants right into its web
The ballista spider builds sophisticated spring-loaded snares to catapult its prey.Annie Roth (National Geographic)
💁🏻♀️ ICYMI: 🌳🪨 A large-scale field #experiment in #Wales shows that adding crushed volcanic #basalt rock dust to #soil accelerates native woodland growth.
The #nature-based method boosted #carbon capture by up to 27% in the first four years, providing an urgent tool for global #climate restoration efforts.
👉 Learn more: seethis.tv/post/how-does-magic…
#biology #calcium #chemistry #climatechange #conservation #ecology #forest #iron #magnesium #minerals #plants #research #rocks #science #silica #solutions #trees #uk #womeninstem #tksst #video
How does ‘magic’ basalt dust help plants grow faster and lock up more carbon? | The Kid Should See This
In Llandovery, Wales, a large-scale nature research project is proving that there's a way to help trees grow faster and stronger, and store more carbon.Rion Nakaya (The Kid Should See This)
Trump administration allows killing of species threatened with extinction – The Washington Post
Trump administration allows killing of species threatened with extinction The Washington PostWhy Trump’s move to gut the Endangered Species…
#NewsBeep #News #US #USA #UnitedStates #UnitedStatesOfAmerica #Wildlife #Science
newsbeep.com/us/769467/
The state of the world summarized in two news headlines. 😔
#news #GlobalWarming #environment #ClimateChange #climate #ClimateCrisis #ClimateDiary #ClimateAction #pollution #future #nature #Earth #world #international #humanity #science
🐙 Scientists drilled 1.3 km into the Atlantic seafloor and found the hidden plumbing system powering the "Lost City" - a field of hydrothermal vents where life thrives without sunlight, fueled by chemical reactions between seawater and mantle rock.
Huge implications for finding life on ocean worlds like Europa.
🌿 A small Finnish daycare experiment found that changing a play yard's biodiversity can change children's microbial exposure and immune-regulation markers.
Researchers added forest floor, sod, plants, and peat blocks to parts of four urban daycare yards. After 28 days, 3- to 5-year-old children showed changes in skin and gut microbiota, along with shifts in IL-10, IL-17A, TGF-β1, and regulatory T-cell measures.
A later placebo-controlled study found similar immune-related changes after children played with microbially diverse soil. The evidence is promising, but it does not yet prove that dirt prevents allergies or autoimmune disease. Nor does it show that recycled-rubber playgrounds are poisoning children.
Primary studies:
doi.org/10.1126/sciadv.aba2578
doi.org/10.1016/j.ecoenv.2022.…
🧪 The placebo-controlled trial wasn't invented by doctors. It was invented by medieval witch hunters.
In 1423, Jean Gerson proposed testing religious claims with consecrated vs unconsecrated objects that looked identical - the same logic behind modern placebo controls.
His method ended up in the Malleus Maleficarum (1486). In 1599, a French physician used it to prove a "possessed" girl wasn't really possessed - she reacted the same to real and fake holy water.
That trick-trial design reached Lavoisier and Franklin, who used it to debunk mesmerism in 1784 - the direct ancestor of every clinical trial.
Source: journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/…
🧬 Scientists just discovered a completely new type of immune cell that kills by literally exploding like a biological grenade.
Ruptoblasts, found in planarian flatworms, flood with calcium when they detect a distress hormone and erupt a broad-spectrum killing cocktail that destroys bacteria and even human cancer cells in minutes.
Published in Cell (June 2026) by Ben-Gurion and Stanford researchers.
A Deadly Ebola-Like Virus Is Spreading. Are We Ready?
BU virologist Nancy Sullivan says the Bundibugyo outbreak in the Democratic Republic of the Congo underscores the need for broader outbreak preparedness.Vincent L (SciTechDaily)
I am happy to announce our latest paper! "Surprising cryptic cavefish diversity in a long-studied karst cave ecosystem of northern Alabama"
I absolutely love our name for it too, an entire new genus, not just species: Demogorgonichthys arcanus
Why did it take so long to find, in a highly monitored cave? Well just take a look at the mud with water channels and low ceilings, and we cannot typically even get into the water because of other protected and highly endangered species. So visual surveying is difficult, and limited. The paper is an excellent read even for not-biologists, and the images are *amazing*. So proud of our lab!
#cave #caves #biology #fish #nature #speleology #science #animals
🧬 A marine alga just rewrote biology's textbook rule
For decades, students learned only bacteria can fix nitrogen from the air. In 2024, scientists found a tiny ocean alga has a real organelle - the "nitroplast" - that does it too. Only the 4th organelle born from endosymbiosis in 4 billion years of life.
news.ucsc.edu/2024/04/nitrogen…
Scientists discover first nitrogen-fixing organelle - News
In two recent papers, an international team led by UC Santa Cruz scientists describe the first known nitrogen-fixing organelle within a eukaryotic cell.Erin Malsbury (News)
A global science project is asking volunteers to search Arctic satellite images for the animals, which are threatened by climate change.
yaleclimateconnections.org/202…
#Environment #Climate #Science #Yale #ClimateDiary #ClimateCrisis #Nature
Some guy collected whale poop in his freezer for years before a researcher was interested to study them
“Samples of whale feces collected by a man from South Australia have contributed to what is described as a “groundbreaking” study of diets and microbiomes of southern right whales, according to researchers.”
🪐 Raspberry sugar found floating in deep space, 26,745 light-years from Earth
Scientists just detected erythrulose (a sugar in raspberries and kiwis) in a giant molecular cloud near our galaxy's center - the first sugar ever found in interstellar space. It may have rained down on early Earth via meteorites and helped seed life.
Published today in Nature Astronomy.
🕳️ There's a 500-km-wide impact crater hidden under two kilometers of Antarctic ice, and it might be connected to the worst mass extinction in Earth's history.
#PPOD: This image is quite extraordinary, and it's not the big disk that's attracting the most attention. Although the planet PDS 70c (just inside the disk) is newly formed and, interestingly, similar in size and mass to Jupiter, it's the fuzzy patch around it that's causing the commotion. That fuzzy patch is thought to be itself a dusty disk that is now forming into moons -- and that has never been seen before. Credit: ALMA (ESO/NAOJ/NRAO)/Benisty et al.
Je découvre qu'il y a un observatoire des vers luisants et des lucioles, où on peut signaler qu'on a vu un insecte bioluminescent 🥰
C'est là : asterella.eu/observe
#Insecte
#Science
#Biologie
#ScienceParticipative
#Nature
Signaler une observation
Utilisez le formulaire ci-dessous pour signaler votre observation de vers luisants et de lucioles. Si vous avez des difficultés à remplir le formulaire, n'hésitez pas à nous contacter à l'adresse ovl.france@gmail.com.asterella.eu
☄️ For the first time ever, astronomers have caught a "dark comet" sprouting a tail.
Dark comets look like asteroids but mysteriously speed up as if pushed by invisible jets. Now a team using the Very Large Telescope in Chile has finally photographed a tail on one, confirming they really are comets.
This is huge because it likely solves the 'Oumuamua mystery from 2017 - that weird interstellar object that accelerated for no obvious reason. Turns out it was probably just venting gas from hidden ice, not aliens.
Nearly 20 dark comets are now known, and scientists think there could be far more hiding in plain sight. Since comets may have delivered Earth's oceans, finding a hidden population of them could reshape our understanding of how our planet became habitable.
Published in Nature Astronomy this week.
scientificamerican.com/article…
‘Dark’ comets sprouting tails could help solve interstellar mysteries
A strange class of comet could explain the enigmatic behavior of ‘Oumuamua, the first known interstellar object—and even shed light on how Earth became habitableDarryl Z. Seligman (Scientific American)
👶 Why do men have nipples? Because milk evolved over 100 million years before nipples did. A 300-million-year story in four parts: sweaty-bellied synapsids hydrating eggs, a lysozyme gene accidentally inventing lactose, monotremes dripping milk through belly fur, and a PTHrP mutation that finally pulled ducts into a bud.
"Beyond the limit": one million satellites and mirrors in space pose grave threat to the night sky
A new European Southern Observatory (ESO) study has found that current proposals to launch over 1.7 million satellites into orbit, including extremely bright ones, would have “devastating consequences for astronomy.www.eso.org
🦗 In 1875, a single swarm of Rocky Mountain locusts covered 198,000 square miles - bigger than California - with an estimated 12.5 trillion insects. It was the largest concentration of animals ever recorded.
Within 30 years, the species was completely extinct. Not hunted. Not poisoned. Farmers just plowed over its breeding grounds in Rocky Mountain river valleys without realizing that was the whole species' reproductive core.
The locust ate crops, clothing, wooden tool handles, even wool off living sheep. Then it simply vanished - the only major agricultural pest in history to go extinct on its own.
Same era, same lesson: the passenger pigeon, once billions strong, collapsed to a single bird named Martha who died at the Cincinnati Zoo in 1914. Both proved that sheer numbers don't guarantee survival when critical habitat is hidden.
Sources: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rocky_Mo… | pubs.usgs.gov/bul/0222/report.…
