Swans on Tea

What’s with the plush toys? John at Cosmic Variance displays “The Particle Zoo” and then Chad at Uncertain Principles goes all squishy with some animal toys, presumably for futurebaby.
I gotta say, the fundamental particles creep me out a little — x-ed out eyes signifies “dead” in cartooning, and it upsets my sensibilities that you [...]

Cow farts collected in plastic tank for global warming study
In a bid to understand the impact of the wind produced by cows on global warming, scientists collected gas from their stomachs in plastic tanks attached to their backs.

Extraordinary Tongues and the Animals That Use Them
The tube-lipped nectar bat from Ecquador has a tongue one and a half times its own body length. It shoots it out with amazing accuracy while feeding at night. This huge tongue (in proportion to the 5.5cm bat) is not stored in the mouth. It is attached to [...]

A reminder that the submission deadline for “classic” science posts is coming up on the 15th, and the inaugural compendium of The Giant’s Shoulders will be hosted at Blog Around the Clock

Coffee Grounds Perk up Compost Pile With Nitrogen
About 2 percent nitrogen by volume, used coffee grounds can be a safe substitute for nitrogen-rich manure in the compost pile, explained Cindy Wise, coordinator of the compost specialist program at the Lane County office of the Oregon State University Extension Service.
“A lot of people don’t want [...]

The Quantum Pontiff on Occupational Arrows of Time
Time goes up, damnit, and that’s all there is to it. Or so say the physicists writing on their blackboards.
Oh I hear you. Yes there are physicists for which time doesn’t always go up, but which can also go up but also in a circle. Yes, Virginia, general [...]

In silliness.
Now it’s the biologists’ turn. Curiosities of Biological Nomenclature
An, um, taste of the offerings
Dorcus titanus Boisduval, 1835 (stag beetle)
Doryctes fartus Provancher, 1880 (braconid)
Enema pan (Fabricius), 1775 (rhinoceros beetle)
Eremobates inyoanus Muma and Brookhart, 1988 (solpugid) Inyo is the county where it was first found.
Fartulum Carpenter, 1857 (tiny caecid gastropod) It is rather like a [...]

Researchers tug at molecules with optical tweezers
MIT researchers have developed a novel technique to measure the strength of the bonds between two protein molecules important in cell machinery: Gently tugging them apart with light beams.
They don’t really go into what’s novel about this. The optical tweezers technique has been around for a while.

Science nabs lying fisherman
And he was found out without the need to pee in a cup. (Though it’s possible he may have done so anyway, for other reasons.)

THE ITCH by Atul Gawande from the New Yorker
Fascinating article, albeit with occasionally disturbing imagery, on itching and phantom pain.
Now various phenomena became clear. Itch, it turns out, is indeed inseparable from the desire to scratch. It can be triggered chemically (by the saliva injected when a mosquito bites, say) or mechanically (from the mosquito’s [...]

Photochrome
You give us those nice bright colors
You give us the greens of chemistry
Makes you think all the world’s a funky lab, oh yeah!
You need to a flashplayer enabled browser to view this YouTube video
Zap the molecule with UV and it turns green. This is due (as I understand it) to the molecule changing to [...]

Don’t you see the joker laughs at you?
Over at Physics and Physicists, a followup to an earlier post, to which I had added my two cents.
In an earlier post, I responded to a writer who called professional scientists the “most scientifically illiterate group in the US” and pointed out several fallacies of that statement. The [...]