Amazing Sea Butterflies Are the Ocean’s Canary in the Coal Mine

Most climate change discussion focuses on the warmth of the air, but around one-quarter of the carbon dioxide we release into the atmosphere dissolves into the ocean. Dissolved carbon dioxide makes seawater more acidic—a process called ocean acidification—and its effects have already been observed: the shells of sea butterflies, also known as pteropods, have begun dissolving in the Antarctic.

But some pteropod species are proving to do just fine in more acidic water, while others have shells that dissolve quickly. So why do some species perish while others thrive? - Continue reading at Smithsonian.com.

Photo: © Karen Osborn

The Future is Here and the Future is STEM

Our May issue is out now and we’re excited to bring you features in each of the disciplines know collectively as STEM (science, technology, engineering and mathematics).

Richard Conniff reports on the trillions of microbes that dwell inside our bodies. Elizabeth Royte on the future of 3-D printing and Franz Lidz on how LEGO is constructing the next generation of engineers.

How Do You 3-D Scan a Dinosaur?

Using laser scanners and high-tech computer software, Vince Rossi and Adam Metallo are recreating a digital Dinosaur Hall before it’s dismantled.

Ed note: Ultimately, Rossi and Metallo dream of digitizing all 137 million of the objects in the Smithsonian’s collections. More on the “Laser Cowboys.”

Colorful Petri Paintings

Klari Reis has kept to her resolution. The San Francisco-based artist has posted a new petri dish painting—eye candy for any sci-art lover—to her blog, The Daily Dish.

Reis’ circular art pieces are explosions of color. The yellows, pinks, purples, greens, oranges, reds and blues in the paintings take on a smattering of different shapes, including amorphous blobs, radiating fireworks and wavy veins that resemble, quite intentionally on Reis’ part, what a scientist might see when gazing through a microscope. The artist gives her creations playful names, little quips, really, that spring to mind when she looks at the designs. Blueberry Pie. That One Time in the 80′s. Peachy Keen. Jellyfish with a Brooch. Absinthe on the Rocks. - Continue reading at Smithsonian.com.

Article by Megan Gambino

NASA’s Drawing Board - J R Eyerman

Via: wnycradiolab & propaedeuticist:

Scientists Figure Out What You See While You’re Dreaming

In today’s science-so-weird-it-absolutely-must-be-science-fiction contest, we have a clear winner: a new study in which a team of scientists use an MRI machine, a computer model and thousands of images from the internet to figure out what people see as they dream.

Unbelievable as it sounds, researchers from Kyoto, Japan, say that they’ve built something of a dream-reading machine, which learned enough about the neurological patterns of three research participants to predict their sleeptime visualizations with 60 percent accuracy. The study, published today in Science, is believed to be the first case in which objective data has been culled about the contents of a dream. Continue reading at Smithsonian.com.

Photo: Mark Sebastian

Ed note: A slew of new devices are helping people influence what’s going on in their heads while they sleep.

Amber Inclusions by Anders Damgaard

With all this discussion recently surrounding the ethics of manipulating DNA in an effort to resurrect lost species, it seems appropriate that we take a look back in time at the vessels for our future T-Rexes and (fingers crossed~!) Giant Ground Sloths. Until that glorious day when we will ride atop the backs of huge beavers (it was a thing! Science up), admire the beauty of these amber-encased insects, forever looking out at us through a layer of several million years.

Photog: Flickr / Website / Blog

via ianbrooks

(via pbstv)

Why Geckos Don’t Slip Off Wet Jungle Leaves or Hotel Ceilings

Anyone who lives in or has visited a tropical country is likely familiar with the chipper chirping of the gecko. These friendly little lizards inhabit homes and jungles stretching from Indonesia to Tanzania to the Dominican Republic. They emerge after sunset, taking advantage of their night vision eyesight—which is 350 times more powerful than a human’s—and are welcome guests in homes and hotels since they gobble up mosquitoes and other insect pests.

In addition to the locals, scientists also love these colorful lizards. Geckos possess the unique ability among lizards to run up flat walls and scamper across ceilings, even if the surface is very smooth. Researchers have been puzzling over this ability for years, and dozens of labs have tested gecko adhesion in the hopes of harnessing this superpower for potential use in everything from robotics to space technology to medicine to “gecko tape.”

Gecko toes, it turns out, contain hair-like structures that form a multicontact interface, meaning geckos grip with thousands of tiny adhesive structures rather than what appears to be a single uniform foot. Continue reading at Smithsonian.com.

Photo by Ethan Knapp and Alyssa Stark

Ed note: Scientists are harnessing this little trick to design Band-Aids that keep sticking when wet.

Michael Benson’s Awe-Inspiring Views of the Solar System

The photographer’s 40 large-scale photographs, on display in the AAAS Art Gallery, are remarkably crisp views of the rings of Saturn, moons in transit, a sunset on Mars and volcanic eruptions on Jupiter’s moon, Io (pictured above). Each image is in “true color,” as Benson puts it.

To make his photographs, Benson starts by perusing through thousands of raw image data collected on missions led by NASA—Cassini, Galileo, MESSENGER, Viking and Voyager, among others—and the European Space Agency. He has compared this process to panning for gold—the precious gold nuggets being beautiful sequences of images, rarely seen by the public, that he can piece together into one seamless photograph. It can take anywhere from tens to hundreds of raw frames to arrange, like a mosaic, one legible composite image. Then rendering the photograph in realistic colors adds another layer of complexity. See more photos and continue reading at Smithsonian.com.

Photo: NASA/JPL/University of Arizona/Michael Benson, Kinetikon Pictures

What Can Bees Teach Us About Gang Warfare?

In the 1920s, Alfred Lotka, an American statistician, and Vito Volterra, an Italian mathematician, observed that similarly sized rival groups of a species—from honeybees to hyenas—claim territories whose boundaries form a perpendicular line halfway between each group’s home base (a hive or den). The Lotka-Volterra equations, as the findings are known, became a staple of ecological theory.

P. Jeffrey Brantingham, an anthropologist at UCLA who uses statistics to study crime, has applied the equations to a decidedly different population. He and his colleagues identified 13 criminal gangs of roughly equal size in the Boyle Heights neighborhood of Los Angeles’ East Side. For each one, they drew upon police research to pick out an anchor point—a house or street corner—that func-tioned as the gang’s home base. Then, using Lotka-Volterra-based equations, they drew theoretical borders between the gangs’ turf.

“The model says that if you have two gangs that are equal in their competitive abilities, the boundary between them will be equidistant and perpendicular between their anchor points,” Brantingham says. “It’s a nice, simple, geometric organization.”

Viewing the rivalries in that light enabled the researchers to predict where violence between gangs was most likely to take place: 58.8 percent would occur less than a fifth of a mile from the borders, 87.5 percent within two-fifths of a mile and 99.8 percent within a full mile. Mapping the actual 563 gang-related shootings in the area from 1999 to 2002, the researchers found that their predictions were almost dead on: The distribution of real-life shootings was 58.2 percent, 83.1 percent and 97.7 percent, respectively. - Continue reading at Smithsonian.com.

Reference Photographs: Fotolia; Illustration by Cliff Alejandro