(Note: As always, click image for better versions – these are heavily compressed)
Emerald Isle, NC
Last weekend we had a short but nice going away get-away with some friends (psychology graduate students, a parole officer, and a lawyer/rockstar) in Emerald Isle, North Carolina.
My dorky goal was to find more fossilized shark teeth (see [...]

I hang out online sometimes with a bunch of like-minded fossil-enthusiasts (The Fossil Forum).
Tonight somebody posted this:
Just watched the new this evening and they were talking about a dig going on right now outside of Glen Rose, on the McFall ranch. The news showed the footprints of the therapod and the human prints together. It [...]

Spring is Here!
This Nature Walk edition continues from #4.2 – Birds.
I’ve broken this post up into four parts due to the large number of images:

4.1 – Arthropods

4.2 – Birds
4.3 – Reptiles, Amphibians, & Mammals (this post)

4.4 – Plants & Fungi

The images are highly compressed for bandwidth’s sake, but you can click on the images [...]

“Only a handful have ever been found before. But none like her. Her name is Lyuba. A 1-month-old baby mammoth, she walked the tundra about 40,000 years ago and then died mysteriously. Discovered by a reindeer herder, she miraculously re-appeared on a riverbank in northwestern Siberia in 2007. She is the most perfectly preserved woolly [...]

This weekend I heard an incredibly interesting story on NPR’s This American Life titled “Almost Human Resources” (Act 3). The story was all about the issues surrounding chimpanzees in the human world surpassing their usefulness and how we should care for them. Apparently this now includes retirement homes with TVs.
This story, along with a recent [...]

Ok, so this one is more of a nature drive than a nature walk.
Today I had a half an hour to kill while waiting for a Western blot to run at work, so I took a quick drive around the NIEHS campus, which is typically covered with wildlife (see my last Nature Walk).
I was fortunate [...]

Heart the size of a Mini Cooper.
Mouth big enough to hold 100 people.
Longer than a basketball court.
Weighing as much as 25 large elephants.
It is the largest creature ever to inhabit the earth.
But we know precious little about it.
Yes, I am now an advertising pawn of big media. But it’s a particular medium that I have [...]

“In the gloom it came along the branches towards me, its round, hypnotic eyes blazing, its spoon-like ears turning to and fro like radar dishes, its white whiskers twitching and moving like sensors; its black hands, with their thin fingers, the third seeming terribly elongated, tapping delicately on the branches as it moved along.”
- Gerald [...]

Happy 200th birthday, Charles Darwin!
Happy 200th birthday, Abraham Lincoln!
Happy 150th anniversary, On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, or the Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life!
And here’s to a happy Darwin Day and upcoming Valentine’s Day to everyone else.
As a part of my own contribution to the Blog for [...]

One of the most fascinating lines of research within the field of evolutionary biology is the search to find the genes that changed at the split between ancestral mammals and our own closer ancestors, the great apes.
In a fascinating new study in the August 8th edition of PLoS Genetics, Lia Rosso and colleagues have [...]

I grew these mouse embryonic stem cells on a plate, and through various molecular trickery, I made them turn in to the crazy cell types you see here. (Click for larger images)

Check out the next two images. They are the same cells viewed in two different ways (normal light, and epifluorescence).

Long neuronal axons stretch [...]

These are mouse embryonic stem cells that I coerced to differentiate into brain cells. The neurons are green, red represents the radial glia (they proved a scaffold for the neurons), and the blue are the nuclei of the cells (that houses the DNA).

I just had an immensely weird and mildly amusing experience, and I thought I’d share it.
I was just outside the lab sitting under this short tree. I was kneeling down leaning against the tree. There was a chipmunk (Alfonzo – I’ve seen him about once a day for two years) digging for nuts and whatnot [...]