Articles in the Category: Animals
Posted by Michael Bradbury in Animals, Backyard Science, Biology, Citizen science, Consumer Safety, Diseases, Health and Medicine, Video on 09 28th, 2011 | No Comments
Snail Invasion Poses Health Risks
It may be the fastest invasion of a slow-moving creature but people in Miami-Dade County are taking care not to mess with the new snail in town.
The east African land snail is making a home in south Florida and causing all sorts of problems. They reproduce at an exponential rate and grow fast. They...
Lost Penguin Loses Signal
A three-year-old Emperor penguin nicknamed Happy Feet washed onto a New Zealand beach in June after taking a wrong turn and heading away from his home in Antarctica. After a public rehabilitation, the zoo caring for the bird attached a tracking device to him and released him back into the wild on September...
Posted by Michael Bradbury in Animals, Backyard Science, Biology, Marine Science, Scientainment, SciLebs, Video on 08 31st, 2011 | No Comments
Nature’s Deadliest Animal Wrangler
It’s not your average Top 10 list. In fact there are a lot more killer creatures on adventurer Steve Backshall’s World’s 60 Deadliest Animals list. And he is traveling the world in search of the creative ways critters kill each other.
The Nat Geo Wild channel airs the show, which follows...
Posted by Michael Bradbury in Animals, Backyard Science, Biology, Citizen science, Discoveries, Diseases, Endangered Species, Environment, Marine Science, Math, New Species, Video on 08 25th, 2011 | No Comments
Millions of Species Yet to be Discovered
According to a new study it could take 1,200 years, 300,000 researchers and $364 billion to identify and catalog all the species on Earth.
New research in the online journal PLoS Biology, a publication of the Public Library of Science uses a new way of calculating just how many plants and animals inhabit...
Posted by Michael Bradbury in Adaptation and Extinction, Animals, Climate Change, Endangered Species, Environment, Evolution, Genetics, Plants, Video on 08 22nd, 2011 | No Comments
Climate Change Pushes Species Up and North
A meta-study in the journal Science says – changing global temperatures are pushing species towards the poles and higher altitudes.
A meta study is a study that rounds up all the other related studies (in this case 54) and analyzes them for trends or patterns that emerge. After looking at the...
Posted by Michael Bradbury in Biochemistry, Discoveries, Diseases, Environment, Health and Medicine, New Species, Physics and Chemistry, Plants, Video on 08 18th, 2011 | No Comments
Yale Undergrads Find Plastic-Eating Fungus
The growing garbage problem may have a new solution–fungus that eats plastic. For years mounting mounds of plastic have been choking landfills and polluting the ocean. Now an annual undergraduate trip to the rain forest may have found a solution to the plastic problem.
Unleashing creativity in...
Posted by Michael Bradbury in Animals, Biology, Economics, Evolution, Marine Science, Video on 07 28th, 2011 | No Comments
Dolphins Develop a New Sense
We all know that dolphins are smart. And we know they have more senses than people, adding echolocation to the senses of sight, sound, smell, taste and touch. Now scientists have tested and confirmed a seventh sense in at least one species of dolphins.
The Guiana dolphins, which live in the muddy coastal...
Posted by Michael Bradbury in Animals, Discoveries, Endangered Species, Video on 07 26th, 2011 | No Comments
Endangered Species Found in Multiple Conservation Efforts
After an 87-year absence the Borneo rainbow toad has been discovered or rather rediscovered. A group of 126 researchers have scoured the rainforests and mountains of 21 countries on 5 continents in 2010 in search of lost amphibian species.
After three months of night-long expeditions, one of Dr. Indraneil...
Posted by Michael Bradbury in Animals, Consumer Safety, Health and Medicine, Marine Science, Oceanography, Video on 07 14th, 2011 | No Comments
Tiny Shark Packs Big Bite
Few people have ever heard of the cookiecutter shark. They are prevalent in the deep, tropical ocean but they are not very large predators. In fact, the fish measures just a couple of feet long. But don’t be fooled by its size. This is a saw-toothed fish that bites dolphins, whales, nuclear submarine...
Posted by Michael Bradbury in Animals, Biology, Discoveries, Marine Science, New Species, Video on 07 12th, 2011 | No Comments
Science Prospectors Find 300 New Species
Biologists from the California Academy of Sciences and its counterpart in the Philippines have found over 300 new species of animal life, both on land and in the sea.
Ranging from a starfish that only eats sunken driftwood to an inflatable shark, scientists say that over 90% of the world species have...
Posted by Michael Bradbury in Animals, Biochemistry, Biology, Diseases, Genetics, Health and Medicine, Physiology, Plants, Space, Video on 07 11th, 2011 | No Comments
Last Shuttle Crammed with Science Experiments
When the final mission of the U.S. space shuttle program blasted off flawlessly on Friday, over one million onlookers gathered in Florida for the launch. Tens of millions more watched on television. But what they couldn’t see amid the liftoff fire and smoke was all the science that was en route...
Crows Hold Grudges, So Watch Out
Crows have a remarkable way of remembering people — especially ones they think have wronged them. And now new research shows they pass on this scolding behavior to other birds so the grudge can carry on, sometimes for years.
University of Washington bird biologist John Marzluff discovered about...
Posted by Michael Bradbury in Animals, Anthropology, Biology, Discoveries, Geology, Marine Science, Museum, Physics and Chemistry, SciArt, Scientainment, Space, Video on 07 1st, 2011 | No Comments
Beauty of Science
When Alex de Voogt couldn’t get a crumbling sheath to release an early 20th Century Egyptian knife, he turned to a cutting-edge, high resolution, computed tomography (CT) scanner for help. Using the advanced x-ray technology he was able to see inside the knife covering and reveal writing on the...
Posted by Michael Bradbury in Adaptation and Extinction, Animals, Climate Change, Endangered Species, Environment, Marine Science, New Species, Oceanography, Plants, Video on 06 27th, 2011 | 2 Comments
Northwest Passage Opens for Whales, Plankton Not Just People
This video from May 2010 tells the tale of a gray whale lost, half a world away from home. Biologists immediately thought it was a hoax but after studying the 43-foot whale more closely they discovered that it must have gotten off it’s north-south Pacific Ocean migration track thanks to an ice-free...
Posted by Michael Bradbury in Adaptation and Extinction, Animals, Climate Change, Endangered Species, Environment, Marine Science, Oceanography, Video on 06 22nd, 2011 | No Comments
Ocean under Siege
For decades fishermen have been saying there’s no future in fishing. Environmentalists have been warning about overfishing and pollution harming the ocean’s delicate ecosystem. But so far the ocean has been able to absorb everything humans have thrown at it.
The summary of a new international...
Elusive Shark Behavior Caught on Camera
For all the shark movies and popular interest in the big predatory fish, science really knows surprisingly little. When large numbers of tiger sharks began populating waters off of Kona on the island of Hawaii, they began planning just how to get a glimpse at what drives them.
After more than a year...
Posted by Michael Bradbury in Animals, Anthropology, Dinosaurs, Museum on 05 26th, 2011 | No Comments
Paleontologists Race Against Time
A clock started ticking the minute a bulldozer driver discovered a fossil dating back more than 50,000 years last October. He was clearing an area for a reservoir above Snowmass Village, high in the Colorado Rockies. What Jesse Steele discovered could be the biggest high-elevation Ice Age fossil preserve....
Posted by Michael Bradbury in Animals, Ecology, Endangered Species, Environment, Food and Nutrition, Health and Medicine, Video on 05 25th, 2011 | No Comments
Girl Scouts Lobby Kellogg’s to get Palm Oil out of Cookies
Two feisty 15 year olds are pushing Girl Scouts of the USA to remove palm oil from their popular cookies. Rhiannon Tomitshen and Madison Vorva learned that palm oil plantations are used to grow a key ingredient in all girl scout cookies and that ingredient requires farmers to destroy rainforests to...
Posted by Michael Bradbury in Adaptation and Extinction, Animals, Climate Change, Endangered Species, Video on 05 11th, 2011 | No Comments
Polar Bear Single Mothers
ABC’s Neal Karlinsky takes a look at the special bond between Polar Bear mothers and their cubs. Outside of Churchill, Manitoba in the high Canadian Arctic, the most well-studied polar bears emerge from their winter dens.
Every year wildlife photographers flock to the frozen north in late spring...
Posted by Michael Bradbury in Animals, Diseases, Health and Medicine, Physiology, Video on 05 4th, 2011 | 2 Comments
Armadillos Source of Leprosy in the South
After a mysterious outbreak of leprosy began a few years ago, researchers began looking for a cause. In a recent article in the New England Journal of Medicine, scientists discovered that the armadillo is one of the few animals that carries the bacteria that causes leprosy.
Every year, there...
Posted by Michael Bradbury in Animals, Consumer Safety, Diseases, Food and Nutrition, Health and Medicine, Video on 04 25th, 2011 | 1 Comment
Staph Bacteria Found in Half of Grocery Store Meat
A new report estimates that half the meat and poultry sold in the supermarket may be tainted with the staph germ.
A study published in the journal Clinical Infectious Diseases recently found a startling amount of staphylococcus bacteria in grocery store meat. The study included 136 samples from 80 different...
Posted by Michael Bradbury in Animals, Anthropology, Environment, Video on 04 22nd, 2011 | No Comments
Earth Day Celebrates People
For over 50 years, human audiences have been fascinated by natural history television shows and big screen movies. From Disney Nature to Mutual of Omaha’s Wild Kingdom, we have explored every crack and crevice of the planet in search of weird, wonderful and unexpected creatures that share the...
Posted by Michael Bradbury in Animals, Ecology, Environment, Horizon Oil Spill, Marine Science, Oceanography, Physics and Chemistry, Video on 04 21st, 2011 | No Comments
Fish Ear Bones Hear Chemical Secrets of Water
Fish ear bones are just like tree rings. The otolith bone inside a fish’s ear records the creature’s growth. Micro slices of sliver-sized ear bones can give scientists clues to the chemistry of the water in which fish swim. They can measure carbon dioxide levels and one year after the Deepwater...
