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This Week in Science: GM Mockingjays, Gecko-Man, and Han Solo Psychology

Digging through the web this week, I uncovered all this geeky goodness. You can find the thousands of links from previous weeks here.


I have marked my favorite links with a ∞. Enjoy.


Science to Read, Watch

You probably haven’t heard about Ebola in awhile. But it hasn’t gotten better, it’s getting worse

Your body contains all the code necessary to sprout feathers

The bacterial aerosolization from bathroom air dryers

The anglerfish: The original approach to deep-sea fishing

Rushing to put on a condom makes it easier to misuse them

∞ The gliding colugo is about as close a mammal can get to being a bat without being one

What it looks like when a tapeworm is burrowing through your brain

Texting: Like hanging a bulldog from your head for 1,400 hours a year

Ebola is nearly the least of our tropical disease worries

Ants move their colonies all the time but we don’t know why

The 2 seconds of sound when Philae landed on Comet 67P

∞ Stanford made grad students climb a glass wall because we’ve figured out how to mimic the gripping power of geckos

Viruses aren’t always the disease. They might be cures too

No animal on Earth isn’t threatened by the sixth extinction, which we’ve basically caused

In search of the starfish killer: the quest to save the original keystone species

We are turning Canadian lakes into jelly

Glow in the dark larvae lure rainforest bugs to an illuminated doom

The USGS has a detailed photo blog of Kilauea’s push of lava across Hawaii

NASA’s ultra hi-res look at how CO2 moves in our atmosphere shows the huge impact we have

We got a great haul of data from Philae’s 64 hours of science

What lizards lung have revealed about where bird breathing comes from

∞ Hypnotizing timelapse of carnivorous plants growing and feeding

Gartnersnakes prefer to use their right-side double penis in hot weather

World’s largest earwig, probably that thing in TNG’s “Conspiracy,” has been declared extinct

A music video doesn’t need special effects to be epic. Science demos work just fine

To test if birds can count, we show them magic tricks with mealworms

∞ Very cool interactive from Quartz showing every satellite orbiting above us

Yes, you (and babies) can receive multiple immunizations at once. Our immune system deals with worse every day

We’ve successfully taken DNA from the fang marks of a snake bite and identified the snake

What is a “Cauliflower Ear” aside from a gross MMA-induced deformity?

An intimate kiss transfers ~80,000,000 bacteria to your partner

How our killers have changed in the last 100 years

Largest study to date adds evidence to the genetic component of homosexuality

How close are we to colonizing Mars?

∞ Your Facebook updates can reveal your introversion (and more)

Gasflame nudibranchs are exactly what they sound like, which is awesome

 

Extreme Nerdery

The candle…it’s beauuutifullll

∞ Han never wants to know the odds because of a psychological quirk we discovered decades ago

How does Iron Man’s arc reactor work?

xkcd’s What If? from a scary alternate universe

7 Star Trek technologies scientists are working on

∞ The XKCD Guide to the Universe’s Most Bizarre Physics

I volunteer as tribute to explain The Hunger Games’ GM jabberjays in my latest #BecauseScience!

Where are my GIF dragons?!

Nolan’s comic book explaining a “lost” chapter in Interstellar is quite good

 

Sciencey GIFs and Images

Forward time-travel is possible. Stuff orbiting above us is doing it right now

∞ The aerial dexterity of these birds is really impressive

The energy coming out of this rifle scares the crap out of me

The transfer of squirrel momentum

A cadaver pieced together slice by slice in MRI images

∞ Millipede and centipede

Are you impressed with my masterpiece, my love?

Mosquito, meet auto-targeting laser

Adam and Jamie capture the best slo-mo of a shattering Prince Rupert’s Drop I’ve seen yet

Submarine missiles are incredibly sophisticated

∞ When a tree is birds

Great white sharks aren’t always eating

Photos taken at the exact opposite sides of the Earth

You can use the Leidenfrost Effect to make water droplets race

A simulation of a jacketed bullet hitting a steel plate

There are no moving waves in this photo. C’mon brain you can do this

Japan’s maglev trains are now running at over 500km/hr

A spider hauls a snail shell into the air for shelter

∞ Incredible view of the Sun erupting with material that is soon drawn back inside itself

None of the dots are rotating, just moving up and down. C’mon brain you can do this.

Potential energy

The beautiful physics of the archer fish hunt

Hokuto Shinken “physics”

∞ How a rattlesnake tells you to back off in slow-motion

Evolution, stoner edition

Fire in the hole!

Based on the data, which dogs are inexplicably overrated?

We caught Philae mid-biggest-bounce-ever

 

Pop Culture Happenings

ESPN apparently suspends writer Keith Law for defending evolution on Twitter, denies the connection

24 Photographs Taken at the Exact Same Moment All Around the World

TARS was 200 pounds and cost $20,000

When a pipe bursts, it seeks out cars for food

∞ Sham Journal Accepts Totally Absurd But Completely Appropriate Paper

Words as images

This is what we know about A Prairie Home Companion

An archive of Kickstarters that didn’t receive a single dollar: Kickended

Which porn is most popular, based on tags alone? [NSFW, obviously]

People in Peru are drinking an endangered species for the (supposed) health benefits

Paleontologists Determine Dinosaurs Were Killed By Someone They Trusted

∞ Real-life checkers is weird

Kip Thorne and Christopher Nolan discuss their surprisingly robust back and forth on Interstellar’s script

Tyson Boop

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