Paul Z. Meyers
pharyngula
Posts by this author
Little known fact: like Costa's hummingbird, the facial plumage has an iridescent underside that I can flash with muscle contractions.
Well, actually, Yoshinori Ohsumi has won the prize for his work on autophagy, a cellular process you may have never heard of before. The word means "self eating", and it's an important pathway that takes chunks of the internal content of the cell and throws them into the cell's incinerator, the…
It's called a Black-Waved Flannel, but none of us are fooled. We know where that came from.
It's probably finished consuming its brain meal and is looking for a new host.
The oldest evidence for microbial life has been found in Greenland, with fossilized 3.7 billion year old stromatolites (layered bacterial colonies) found in the rocks. Here's what they look like:
And here's the abstract of the paper:
Biological activity is a major factor in Earth’s chemical cycles…
It's a standing joke that creationists demand a complete time-lapse recording of evolution before they're going to believe it. Joke no more: we've got one. It's a movie of bacteria evolving antibiotic resistance. I don't even need to explain it, because the video explains everything that's going on…
In response to Neil Shubin's recent paper on the subject, and Carl Zimmer's summary, the creationist Michael Denton criticizes evolutionary explanations for the vertebrate limb. It's a bizarre argument.
First, here's the even shorter summary of the Shubin work. Ray-finned fish have, obviously…
It lives up to its name. Down to its name? Something, anyway.
"Well, Johnny, when a mommy squid and a daddy squid love each other very much…"
"But Mommy, did that one just bite the other one? And are those little bits of squid in the water?"
"Holy Mother of God, Johnny, don't look! Don't look! They're eating each other!"
"Yes, they are, Mommy, and there is no…
It's a quiet, lonely life for a squid in the deep, just drifting along, dangling a pair of lines, hoping to snag dinner.
There are two videos of this squid, one from 2014 and another from 2013.
I suggest an unholy hybrid of the two.
Tastefully Offensive
Australian Geographic
The Thorny Devil and I have exactly the same expression right now.
I mean, really. This team of 'scientists' hijacked a valuable research submersible, strapped their gadget to it, and sent it cruising to a depth of 900 meters in the Pacific Ocean just to catch this goofy-looking purple thing.
Listen to these people…buncha giggly teenagers.
I'm a bit annoyed…
Tridens flavus
It grows to 1 or 2 meters tall, and it blanketed the land one time, when Indians tried to fight the government.
We drove by fields of sunflowers the other day, which was a nice change from the usual endless fields of corn and soybeans.
NPR
And now I see that Caine also has sunflowers on her mind.
Because if you are, you might not want to watch this video of Bryan Fry collecting sea snakes. There's one scene where he's got a fist full of multiple venomous snakes all writhing about that might give you the heebie-jeebies.
In honor of the nomination of Donald Trump, the corpse flowers are blooming all across the country. It's actually a blessing; the stench of rotting flesh obscures the reek of the putrescence rising from the Republican party.
Perhaps we need to think more about human psychology. There's an interesting phenomenon that goes on all the time when people read about evolution: they shoehorn the observations into some functional purpose. There's just something so satisfying to our minds to be able to say "that thing exists for…
This is a pseudocolored image of nematocysts firing.
HHMI
In case you prefer the video…
He had several, because all the cool scientists like cephalopods, and they're still bottled up and preserved in museums.
Sophie Wiltshire
No word on the status of Darwin's pet cat.