A Blog About the Weird Wonderfulness of Life on Earth
Ernst Haeckel around Christmas 1860, when he was 26, the year after he returned from Italy. 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...
Purple packages of pain: false colored (no, they're not purple in real life) transmission electron micrograph of human norovirus. CDC/Charles D. Humphrey.
Riftia pachyptila, the weird, iconic giant of hydrothermal vents. Creative Commons Sabine Gollner et al.; click image for link and license. 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)...
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.
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...
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)...
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...
The red tide dinoflagellate Karenia brevis. Public Domain, photo by Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission Last week as I sat in a beach-side open-air restaurant in southwest Florida, I started coughing...
https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/artful-amoeba/wp-admin/post.php?unfoldmenu=1Smooth Operator: the slinky placozoan Trichoplax adhaerans. Creative Commons Oliver Voigt.
Just days after Sci Am published my story on the "bleeding" bacterium Serratia marcescens , a friend sent me this video, in which the marketing department behind the film "Contagion" up north apparently decided to go super-geek and cook up something delightful...
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