Robbie Gonzalez

We Are All This Cat With An Octopus Stuck To Its Face

Round one goes to the octopus, round two to the cat. Watching this feels a like some kind of personality test. Do you relate more to the cat, or to the octopus? Which are you, in this zoological metaphor, and what does the other creature represent? Me, I feel like the cat, and the octopus…

Scientists Find a Paradoxical Explanation For The Munchies

A study published in this week’s issue of Nature sheds new light on why pot makes you really really hungry – even when you should feel full. Top image: Wollertz/Shutterstock.com In a study led by Yale neurobiologist Tamas Horvath, researchers injected cannabinoids into the brains of lab mice, activating a cannabinoid receptor called CB1R. Previous…

The Sexual Spectrum Is Way More Complicated Than “Male” and “Female”

It is becoming more and more difficult to define sex in binary terms. Photo Credit: Tom Magliery | CC BY-NC-SA 2.0. Scientific investigations performed over the last several decades have repeatedly observed that the process of sex-determination is a complex process that can give rise to a variety of genetic, cellular, and ultimately sexual outcomes.…

How To Hack Your Street Lamps Like An Astronaut

A bright street lamp can ruin a night of stargazing, saturating your retinas with light and washing out the comparatively faint glow of constellations and meteors. Here’s a handy hack you can use the next time you need to put one temporarily (and reversibly) out of business, courtesy of NASA astronaut Don Pettit. Pettit shows…

Caffeine Is Amazing And Terrible And Maybe Secretly Ruining Your Sleep

Are caffeinated beverages like coffee magical for fighting the symptoms of sleepiness, or are they evil for interfering with sleep and triggering symptoms commonly associated with anxiety disorders? The answer to both questions is a resounding yes! https://gizmodo.com/10-reasons-coffee-is-both-the-best-and-the-worst-bevera-5861402 Photo Credit: Susanne Nilsson | CC BY-SA 2.0 At Boing Boing, Murray Carpenter has written a sweeping…

Kale, Cauliflower, And Collards All Belong To The Same Species 

The species? Brassica oleracea. Its other varieties include cabbage, broccoli, savoy, kohlrabi and Brussels sprouts, to name just a few commercially relevant examples. How did one species of plant come to be so diverse? Selective human breeding and exceptional genetic diversity. Above: A garden plot with several varieties of the B. oleracea at the Jardin…

How Did Dinosaurs Become Birds?

Most paleontologists agree that birds are living dinosaurs, the distant evolutionary descendants of animals like Tyrannosaurus rex. Less clear, however, is how dinosaurs evolved into the birds we know today. https://gizmodo.com/more-proof-that-dinosaurs-live-among-us-1537054467 https://gizmodo.com/real-life-dinosaurs-are-way-scarier-than-the-movies-1608044920 Above: The claw of a Harpy Eagle, a modern day dinosaur. Audubon is currently running a feature by Michael Balter about the enigmatic…

An artificial molecule built according to our understanding of HIV infection may protect cells more effectively than the body’s natural antibodies. A study published in this week’s issue ofNature found the molecule kept four monkeys injected with large doses of the virus free of HIV infection.

Why So Many Species Are Discovered In Museum Storage

The latest episode of the American Museum of Natural History’s outstanding series “Shelf Life” is about the discovery of the olinguito, a ridiculously adorable species of mammal first identified in 2013 – ninety years after its remains were first collected, in 1923. The story of the olinguito’s discovery is common among newly identified species. In…

According To This Map, We Are The Loudest Americans In History

And tomorrow’s Americans will be louder, still. In 2011, researchers monitoring noise levels in remote regions of Oregon’s Crater Lake National Park declared that ambient human noise was all but inescapable in the U.S. New data corroborates their claim. This map, based on 1.5-million hours of noise-monitoring across the country, illustrates the extent of the…

The Truth Behind Interstellar‘s “Scientifically Accurate” Black Hole

You’ve probably heard that the black hole in Interstellar was a simulation of unprecedented scientific accuracy. You may also have heard that its creation led to an “amazing scientific discovery” having to do with the shape of its accretion disk, which loops over and under its dark, central shadow. Neither of these claims is true.…

Frank Drake: “It Would Be Silly” To Message Alien Life Today

Frank Drake, creator of the eponymous equation formulated to predict the probability of finding communicative extraterrestrial life in our galaxy, thinks that actively transmitting messages into outer space (as opposed to listening passively for extraterrestrial communication) is a silly, expensive, and inefficient idea. Photo Credit: Stephane Guisard/ESO Drake’s opinion contrasts with that of Douglas Vakoch,…

The Journal of Brief Ideas is an online scientific research journal of “brief ideas” that accepts submissions of, at most, 200 words. “This is an interesting experiment, but it’s not a sign of things to come,” astrophysicist Katie Mack tellsNature. “There is a risk of it being just a bunch of half-formed thoughts.”

Meet The New Face Of Marlboro: Jeff The Diseased Lung In A Cowboy Hat

On Last Week Tonight, John Oliver reports on Philip Morris International’s unsavory habit of suing countries over laws requiring health warnings on cigarette packaging, while proposing a compromise that preserves Big Tobacco’s marketing goals while protecting public health: Meet Jeff, the Diseased Lung In A Cowboy Hat. Oliver’s proposed mascot is a humorous coda to…

This Week’s Puzzle Has A Very Simple Solution. Can You Find It?

Sometimes, challenging puzzles have surprisingly straightforward solutions. This is one of those puzzles. Sunday Puzzle #20: The Monk And The Mountain At precisely 7:00 a.m., a monk sets out to climb a tall mountain, so that he might visit a temple at its peak. The trail he walks is narrow and winding, but it is…

Droughts in the latter half of the 21st Century could be even more severe than previously predicted, according to a study published in this week’s issue ofScience Advances. Analyses suggest the drying could be the worst in nearly 1,000 years. Scientific American has more.

City’s Owl Problem Got So Bad, It Had To Make This Awesome Sign

A spate of owl attacks in Salem Oregon’s Bush’s State Park has spurred park officials to install twenty signs that depict an owl with outstretched talons descending upon a hapless, terror-stricken stick figure. Photo Credit: Danielle Peterson, via The Statesman Journal The Associated Press reports that the signs were inspired in large part by MSNBC…

The FDA Is Hiding Scientific Fraud, And You Should Be Pissed

When the FDA encounters instances of scientific misconduct, it buries the evidence. A recent investigation sheds light on the extent of the problem. The U.S. Food and Drug Administration – the agency tasked with protecting public health via regulation of everything from food safety to prescription drugs – occasionally encounters serious instances of misconduct in…

What Happens To Your Body When You Drink Too Much Water?

The question How much water do I need to drink? is often followed with the related question Can I drink too much of it? We’re here to tell you that, while difficult to do accidentally, it is in fact possible to drink too much water – and the repercussions can be deadly. Photo Credit: Lora…

The Crew Portrait For ISS Expedition 45 Is Star Wars Themed

The official poster for the 45th expedition to the International Space Station is Star Wars themed, and features astronauts Scott Kelly, Mikhail Korniyenko, Oleg Kononenko, Kimiya Yui, Kjell N. Lindgren, and Sergey Volcov dressed in Jedi robes and weilding lightsabers. Previous posters have been set in the style of Firefly: The Hitchhiker’s Guide To The…