tingilinde

about 3,000 miles a year

A wolf's travels through Northern Minnesota

 

 

rockworms

Like shipworms, but they go for rock rather than wood and can potentially change a river's course.

a tip of the hat to Sukie

 

 

kids brains use a lot of energy

The energy fraction going to the brain peaks at about age five with half the caloric needs going to the brain.

a tip of the hat to Sukie

 

taming the wild almond

Why you can eat more than a few without dying.

a tip of the hat to Sukie

 

can cwd strike people?

Chronic Wasting Disease is spreading among deer.  Can it make the leap to people?

...

CWD is a transmissible spongiform encephalopathy, another of which did jump species: mad cow disease. In humans, mad cow disease is known as variant Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease, and it has killed more than 220 people worldwide since the 1990s. Some experts say that in a nation with an estimated 10 million deer hunters harvesting 6 million deer a year and eating many of them, it may be just a matter of time before chronic wasting makes its way to us.

Both CWD and mad cow are thought to be caused by proteins that malfunction and misfold, called prions. There is no known cure or treatment for prion diseases.

...

 

a tip of the hat to Sukie

 

reality

This is from the Northwest coast of Greenland on the 14^th of June.  A Danish team racing to retrieve some expensive monitoring kit on the ice.  In this area they usually don’t have to worry, but the heat is extreme with very thin ice. Note the hills are snow-free.  The water runoff from the melt on the ice and on the land has formed a shallow lake on top of the already thin ice. (via a friend at the Woods Hole Oceanagrpahic Institute who noted it is being passed around with some horror.)

back in time

estimates of what the Earth must have looked like in the past

also - dinosaurs!

 

 

metabolism is poorly understood

And the microbes in your gut may impact how your medicine works.

A tip of the hat to Greg

 

crispr in the gene pool

A very nice talk by Carl Zimmer

 

a hard limit on human endurance

For "short" periods of a few hours or less some athletes can push to about five times their basal metabolic rate. Now an upper limit is found for extreme events.

a tip of the hat to Sukie