Category Archives: Science

The Color of the Carrot

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Researchers with the Agricultural Research Service may have found the best way to entice consumers to eat their veggies: Surprise them.

They’re breeding carrots that come in a palette of totally unexpected colors including yellow, dark orange, bright red–even purple.

Ironic, since carrots didn’t start out orange, but were originally purple. As Wikipedia notes: “The plant appears to have been introduced into Europe via Spain by the Moors in the 8th century. and in the 10th century, in such locations in the Middle East, India and Europe, the roots were purple.”

Photo by Stephen Ausmus. Courtesy of USDA / Agricultural Research Service.
Via ScienceDaily.

The Last Menagerie

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This year marks the 100th anniversary of the last year of the last known Passenger Pigeon known as Martha.

This marker inspired The Last Menagerie, a line of plates designed to commemorate, educate, and remind ourselves about that which is lost but not forgotten.The commemorative plate is such an odd and beautiful object. As it preserves and frames a fleeting moment or event–it also gives dimensional life to a wall.

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The Last Menagerie is a collection of six commemorative plates each featuring a different extinct animal:

  • The Dodo extinct since 1662
  • Pyrenean Ibex extinct since 2000
  • The Quagga extinct since 1883
  • The Passenger Pigeon extinct since 1914
  • Black African Rhino extinct since 2000
  • The Wooly Mammoth extinct since the Pleistocene epoch

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A healthy reminder, particularly the Black Rhino and Pyrenean Ibex, extinct only within the lifetime of anyone reading this.

Nicole Antebi on her Etsy page.

Four Acre Orb Weaver Spider Web

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We were unprepared for the sheer scale of the spider population and the extraordinary masses of both three dimensional and sheet-like webbing that blanketed much of the facility’s cavernous interior. Far greater in magnitude than any previously recorded aggregation of orb-weavers, the visual impact of the spectacle was nothing less than astonishing.

In places where the plant workers had swept aside the webbing to access equipment, the silk lay piled on the floor in rope-like clumps as thick as a fire hose.

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Four acres of web found in 2009 at the Baltimore Wastewater Treatment Plant consisting of 107 million orb-weaver spiders of different species.

I am sensing a Spider-Man reboot based on this…

Photos by the Entomological Society of America.
Study authors Greene, Albert; Coddington, Jonathan A.; Breisch, Nancy L.; De Roche, Dana M.; Pagac, Benedict B. in American Entomologist, Volume 56, Number 3, Fall 2010 via ingentaconnect via Huffington Post, where you can see additional photos and information.

Penguin Rover

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Scientists who study wild animals want to get as close as possible to their subjects without stressing them out or disrupting their natural behaviors.

[T]he researchers disguised the rover as a penguin chick and sent it into a colony of notoriously shy emperor penguins. The birds allowed it to approach and in one case even infiltrate a creche of chicks.

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I’m going to argue this qualifies as a parenting fail by said emperor penguins.

Photo by Frederique Olivier/John Downer Productions, Le Maho, et. al., Nature Methods.
Via Wired.

Penguin “Jaws”

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Penguins may lack teeth, but they have backward facing spines in their throats that grip and guide fish down.

This photo of a rockhopper penguin was taken by Will Burrard-Lucas on the Falkland Islands.

I think I may just have a line on the Syfy Channel‘s next cheesy movie…

Via Science Alert.