On land, snails and slugs — the Gastropods — are confined to terrestrial prison, but in the ocean, they are free to shed their shells and fly. These are the sea angels, the sea butterflies, and the sea elephants — and probably quite a few more I’m not aware of. For instance, this slinky and [...]

When I was in North Carolina last month for the meet-and-greet-and-learn-exhausto-freneti-thon of ScienceOnline 2012, I procured for myself a sampling kit for a citizen science project being conducted by the lab of Rob Dunn, Sci Am Guest Blogger and author of the wonderful book The Wild Life of our Bodies. He’s doing a new study [...]

In July 1976, a convention of members of the American Legion — a veterans’ group — was meeting in Philadelphia at the Belleville Stratford Hotel in honor of America’s bicentennial. Soon, 221 attendees would be sickened and 34 dead of an illness it was believed no one had ever seen before. Swine flu was suspected, [...]

Ernst Haeckel had spent an unhappy year practicing medicine when his parents finally consented to pay for a year of scientific study and travel in Italy. It was 1859, and he was 25. He had discovered a passion for biology and a talent for art during his college years, but his parents had pushed for [...]

Purple packages of pain: false colored (no, they’re not purple in real life) transmission electron micrograph of human norovirus. CDC/Charles D. Humphrey. CDC Public Health Image Library ID 10708, click for link. If there is a central circle of hell, I now know what’s there: endless glasses of water spiked with norovirus that you must [...]

In 1977, scientists and the world were shocked to discover the first deep-sea hydrothermal vent community at the Galapagos Rift in the eastern Pacific (see a great story on this at NPR here). At this site, chimneys spewing black, superheated and chemically supersaturated water towered over fields of blood-red tube worms encased in white sheaths, [...]

If you live in the upper ocean, it pays to be transparent to avoid the gaze of Things Bigger and Hungrier Than You, since sunlight will pass right through. But if you live deep in the ocean, where predators often come equipped standard with searchlights, being transparent means  lighting up like a Christmas tree under [...]

When I was in Florida a few weeks ago, I visited the Audubon Society’s Corkscrew Swamp Sanctuary (highly, HIGHLY recommended should you be in southwest Florida), which features a two and a quarter mile boardwalk through old-growth cypress swamp. Bald and pond cypress towered over a swamp filled with alligators, snowy egret, and white ibis. [...]

In these hyperlinked days, one might reasonably guess that the subject of the first book of photographs may have been along the lines of the True Purpose of the Internet (ask someone who’s seen “Avenue Q” if you don’t know). Or if not that, perhaps cityscapes, or naval vessels, or still lifes, or battlefields. But [...]

Just when you thought the U.S. was safe from amoebas . . . it turns out it’s not. This summer saw a micro-burst of brain-eating amoeba attacks (well, only three, but that was plenty for the press to get its panties in a bunch over it. How could you not about “brain-eating amoebas”?) in people [...]