Earth Science
Picture of the Week—Portuguese Man o'War
What is it? A beaded necklace? Red blood cells? No, it's the Portuguese Man o'War (Physalia physalis), magnified 30 times. Though it resembles a jellyfish, the Portuguese Man o'War is a siphonophore, a colony of organisms that work together. The sting of the venom in the tentacles' nematocysysts is...
November 20, 2009 |
By Sarah Zielinski
Watching Coral Sex
My colleague Megan Gambino visited the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute earlier this year to watch coral spawn. A report appears in the December issue of the magazine, and she also blogged about the experience over at Around the Mall. We asked her if anything interesting got left out of her ...
November 19, 2009 |
By Sarah Zielinski
What You Should Read -- Sesame Street and the Environment, Smart Pigs, Vaccines, the Amazon, and more...
Here's a roundup of the best of what I've been reading in the past couple of weeks:Are global warming and deforestation too scary for Sesame Street?: A couple of years ago Sesame Workshop named these as adult topics too scary for young children. Instead they focus on teaching kids to respect the Ea...
November 12, 2009 |
By Sarah Zielinski
Picture of the Week—Young Fish Dart by a Jellyfish
Thomas Vignaud of Marseille, France took this photograph, labeled Young fish dart by a jellyfish in the sea, in the Mediterranean Sea in September 2007. With it, he won the Natural World Category of Smithsonian magazine's 5th Annual Photo Contest.Have you taken an amazing photograph? Hurry up and e...
November 06, 2009 |
By Sarah Zielinski
Half of U.S. Water Use Goes to Power Generation
The American population is getting more efficient at using our water supply. We used 410 billion gallons of water per day in 2005, according to new estimates from the U.S. Geological Survey, and this hasn't changed much since the USGS first started reporting on the topic in 1950, despite a 30 perce...
November 05, 2009 |
By Sarah Zielinski
Picture of the Week--Open-pit Copper Mine
Splatter of colorsSeen high up from outer spacePretty like a rainbow--Natalie, age 8, IllinoisMining doesn't generally result in a prettier landscape, but it seems when you view the landscape through NASA's ASTER instrument on the satellite Terra, beauty easily emerges. The image above is the Moren...
October 23, 2009 |
By Sarah Zielinski
Tiny Cameras Show Albatrosses on the Hunt
Scientists from Britain and Japan used sophisticated techniques to study the feeding behavior of the black-browed albatross (Thalassarche melanophrys) at sea. A lot of useful information came out of this study, but the single item you will likely hear most about is a really cool photograph, taken ...
October 07, 2009 |
By Greg Laden
The Eastern Pacific Black Ghost Shark
I'm Greg Laden, and I usually blog at here at Scienceblogs.com and Quiche Moraine. I'm a biological anthropologist interested in human evolution, the biologies of race and gender, human hunter-gatherers, science education and African prehistory. I've been asked to fill in here at Surprising Scien...
September 28, 2009 |
By Greg Laden
Picture of the Week—Autumn Color, Estonian Bog
The National Science Foundation and the journal Science have held the International Science & Engineering Visualization Challenge each year since 2003. They award images in five categories (photographs, illustrations, informational graphics, interactive media and non-interactive media), and the...
September 25, 2009 |
By Sarah Zielinski
Red Sky in the Morning (and All Day)
Australia is a strange but beautiful place. The continent is full of odd plants and animals—many of which can kill you, or at least hurt you a lot—in some of the most gorgeous scenery on the planet.But it got even stranger in Sydney and much of eastern Australia this week as a powerful dust storm h...
September 23, 2009 |
By Sarah Zielinski
Living Car Free
I walked to work yesterday morning and back home in the evening. The weather was beautiful—sunny and in the 70s. The path is only about two miles long and takes me past some of the most glorious bits of Washington's architecture. Most days, though, I'll take Metro to work. Sometimes I take the bus ...
September 22, 2009 |
By Sarah Zielinski
Picture of the Week—Art and the Environment Meet
Humans have a huge impact on our environment, but visualizing the extent of that impact is rarely easy. Artist Chris Jordan, though, has attempted to depict it by creating beautiful images out of specific quantities of ordinary things, such as thirty seconds' worth of U.S. aluminum can consumption ...
September 18, 2009 |
By Sarah Zielinski
Amazing Living Root Bridges in India
In the United States, the lowly ficus sits quietly in the corners of our homes and offices, providing some much needed greenery and oxygen to our indoor spaces. But in the northeastern Indian state of Meghalaya, where Ficus elastica are large, native outdoor trees that live near water, the local pe...
September 17, 2009 |
By Sarah Zielinski
A Swim Through the Ocean's Future
Can a remote, geologically weird island in the South Pacific forecast the fate of coral reefs?
September 17, 2009 |
By Christopher Pala
Picture of the Week—Indonesian Mud Flow
On May 29, 2006, hot mud began to erupt within the city of Sidoarjo, in eastern Java, Indonesia. The mud volcano (also known as the Lapindo mud flow, or Lusi) hasn't stopped since then, spewing thousands of cubic feet of material every day. Nearly 2,000 acres of land have been covered with mud, bur...
August 28, 2009 |
By Sarah Zielinski
The End of the World as We Know It
Yes, I'm being a bit melodramatic in the headline, but every time that I read about the bad things that are predicted to happen—or already are happening—due to climate change, I worry. (And if you're about to leave a comment saying that climate change isn't real, please read this post about weather...
August 27, 2009 |
By Sarah Zielinski
The World Won’t End in 2012
Someone is always predicting the end of the world, it seems. The latest popular theory says that the world will end on December 21, 2012, when the Mayan calendar will reach the end of its 5,126 year cycle. That alone is fairly nuts, as USAToday wrote two years ago:"For the ancient Maya, it was a hu...
August 25, 2009 |
By Sarah Zielinski
Picture of the Week—Project Pebble
The University of Cambridge Department of Engineering hosted a photography contest earlier this year, and the winners have just been announced. The photo above, Project Pebble, won first prize. Two engineering students, Ben Sheppard and Robbie Howshall, set out to design a low-cost, deep-sea photog...
August 14, 2009 |
By Sarah Zielinski
The Ten Most Spectacular Geologic Sites
Smithsonian picks the top natural wonders in the continental United States
August 07, 2009 |
By Laura Helmuth
Was the Ancient Incan Empire Fueled by Warm Climate?
In 1532, when the Incas first met a European, their empire stretched from what is now northern Ecuador to central Chile. The largest empire of the Americas numbered more than eight million people. But the Incas didn’t exist until about A.D. 1100. Before than, the Wari and Tiwanauku occupied the cen...
August 05, 2009 |
By Sarah Zielinski
