My friend Steve is hoping this will "go viral" to bring attention to a cetacean crisis in New Zealand. It's interesting to see, but not for the faint of heart/stomach if you're grossed out by internal organs and such.

Whale strandings are a strange phenomenon... are they caused by confusion, suicide, or something else entirely? Leave a comment

If you, like me, have always wondered how Ridley Scott and crew did the special effects for Blade Runner before the days of computer graphics, this article has some of the details:

http://www.popularmechanics.com/science/mythbusters/articles/4218376

This is an interesting article on how we've got a labor glut of scientists in dead-end postdoc positions and the like, and how this is misusing our young researchers and discouraging young people from careers in science: http://www.miller-mccune.com/science/

It's amazing that this webcam survived:

http://www.altadenablog.com/2010/06/forest-cam-captures-the-horror-of-station-fire.html

http://news.sciencemag.org/sciencenow/2010/04/scienceshot-animals-that-live-wi.html

http://www.uc.edu/news/NR.aspx?id=11558

http://www.pnas.org/content/107/10/4516.abstract

An interesting overview of why global environmental changes might be rapidly catastrophic rather than just incrementally bad:

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2009/12/091209193728.htm

http://www.georgehart.com/bagel/bagel.html


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When I was on jury duty, one of my fellow jurors was a lab tech at USC working on a very impressive project. They use a mouse model to study a genetic condition that causes the photoreceptors (rods and cones) in the retina to degenerate. Where it gets fascinating is that they are able to inject a virus into the cells just below the photoreceptors ( Read more... )