Here's a really fascinating example of the interconnectedness of life and the importance of viewing things as systems, rather than individual events. The Bahamas are, underwater, giant mounds of calcium carbonate, part of the even larger Great Bahama Bank. That Bank, as it turns out, is not the result of local coral growth, but, instead, owes its existence to a chemistry experiment that begins in Africa's Sahara desert.

In short the authors show that when Sahara dust arrives in the Bahamas cyano-bacteria, what we used to call blue-green algae, bloom. As they bloom their photosynthesis removes CO2 from the water making the pH locally rise, alleviating ocean acidification. That blooming rise of ocean pH to a slightly more alkaline state results in what the Bahamanian's have long called "Ocean Whitings" where the ocean becomes white like milk.

The whiting of the ocean is the result of white calcium carbonate precipitating out of solution as a solid mineral which sinks to the sea floor and accumulates in massive amounts. On the sea bed it looks like tiny pellets. That's because it's been reprocessed by marine worms.

I'm about to start a year-long fellowship at Harvard, immersing myself in geeky science awesomeness, and you can follow along with my newsletter The Fellowship of Three Things.

(more…)

Photographer Lucian Perkins documented the thousands of Virginians who camped out in cars and waited in the rain earlier this month to get access to basic dental, vision, and medical treatment at a traveling clinic.

Two doctors are pushing for the FDA to add information to drug packaging that explains how the medication compares to placebo.

Dr. Sheik Umar Khan, a hero who has treated hundreds of people in the recent deadly outbreak, is in a Doctors Without Borders isolation ward after working at a hospital where three nurses had previously died of the virus.

We have lots of new information about Mars, writes Alexandra Witze at Nature, but scientists are still struggling with what that information means and how all the parts work together.

An execution in Arizona turned torturous yesterday, with convicted murderer Joseph Wood taking almost two hours to die after he was injected with a secret mixture of drugs.

(more…)

The Center for Biological Diversity has distributed hundreds of thousands of free condoms in endangered species-themed wrappers, with the message that more humans means more extinctions.

Remember that upper Midwest mayfly apocalypse that Xeni wrote about? Here's how those flies are born. The female dies while laying her eggs. The babies hatch within seconds.

(more…)

In a story at National Geographic, bush firefighter Gabriel d'Eustachio describes multiple fires where the leading edge of flame was preceded by an invertebrate "wave of creepy-crawlies".

(more…)

This is scientist Zack Jud, posing with a lionfish he caught in a estuary river in 2010 — four years before 6th grader Lauren Arrington, who is now being credited with the discovery.

(more…)

Blogger Mikki Kendall is black, female, and receives a daily deluge of violent, threatening invective. When she temporarily "became" a white man, all that changed.

Is "brain eating" a metaphor or exaggeration of how the amoeba works? No, actually. It really does literally eat brains. Here's how.

From the Wellcome Image Collection, this is how you pumped your breasts 150 years ago. Via the fantastic Twitter feed of Dr. Lindsey Fitzharris.

Open science advocate Michael Nielson writes about how scientists can infer causation in situations where it's not possible to do a randomized controlled trial.

It holds a singular place in the American imagination today, but there was a lot of opposition to the Apollo program as it was happening.

It's not caused by erosion. Instead, the rock, itself, forms the arch and the erosion just washes away everything else around it.

(more…)

Grist has an interview with activist and writer Paul Kingsnorth, a former environmentalist who has decided that the right way to deal with the end of the world is to just accept its inevitability.

(more…)

In a rare complication of being a metalhead, a 50-year-old Motorhead fan developed a brain bleed after combining enthusiastic headbanging with a benign cyst.

When George Lucas was filming scenes of Luke Skywalker's home planet of Tatooine for the original Star Wars, his cast included an Asian elephant named Mardji. Although her species is adapted to hot, tropical environments in Laos, Thailand, and Sri Lanka, Mardji wasn't ready for the heat (and, more significantly, the dryness) of Death Valley. Dressed in heavy shag to play a furry beast of burden called a Bantha, she was clearly uncomfortable. So uncomfortable that she kept trying to remove her costume.

This anecdote about filming a sci fi movie in the pre-CGI era becomes a lot more important if you're trying to take Star Wars semi-literally, as an accounting of alien worlds and the animals and sentient beings that live there. From this perspective, there are at least 15 animal species native to desert-covered Tatooine plus another five whose origins are either otherworldy or unclear. (The two most-famous beasties — the Rancor and the Saarlac — aren't actually natives.) Most of these animals are megafauna, big enough that a human could ride them. And you can probably guess what I'm going to say: This is scientifically unrealistic. But not necessarily because of the heat. Get too hung up on whether big animals can survive under hot and dry conditions, and you'll miss the major reason scientists raise an eyebrow at Tatooine's fauna.

(more…)