Toxic Pufferfish Invade Eastern Mediterranean, Killing People and Irking Fisherman | 80beats
Updated: 2011-10-31 14:08:33
In the Eastern Mediterranean, the pufferfish has arrived. And nobody’s too happy about it. The fish, also known as the silverstripe blaasop or Lagocephalus sceleratus, was first confirmed in Turkey in 2003 and has been spreading throughout the area. The problem with this unassuming fellow is that it contains tetrodotoxin, a neurotoxin that can be deadly to humans [...]

Some interesting new additions to the exoplanet family were announced last week by astronomers from Penn State University. While finding exoplanets these days may be considered “just another day at the office,” astronomers discovered three very unique planets and an additional “mystery” object. What’s unique about these planets is the fact that the stars they [...]
Curiosity’s clamshell has been closed. And it won’t open up again until a few minutes after she blasts off for the Red Planet in just a little more than 3 weeks from now on Nov. 25, 2011 – the day after Thanksgiving celebrations in America. The two halves of the payload fairing serve to protect [...]
Yesterday, October 30, 2011, the Russian space agency Roscosmos successfully launched a new Progress spacecraft on a Soyuz rocket, the same kind of rocket that failed in August and caused such worry. This means it looks like the Russians have indeed figured out what went wrong in the previous launch and fixed the issue. I’ll [...]
When it comes to Halloween, there are some very creative people out there. Unfortunately, I’m not one of them, but I’ve been enjoying some incredible space-themed Jack-O-Lanterns that people on Twitter have been sharing. Above is an amazing re-creation of the Moon by astronomer and science writer Will Gater (@willgater) which shows the maria, craters [...]
Some people might consider this a sin, but hey: I’m no angle. This comic is from Luke Surl, who has some pretty funny geek comics on his site. … and if you don’t get it, this might help. Or you could try searching on it; secant you shall find. Tip o’ the sunscreen lid to [...]
Life is pretty simple for a zombie. You just wander around and try to eat people’s brains. But it wasn’t always so. In the uncorrupted early years of zombie narratives, zombies were typically the undead slaves of voodoo priests, and their primary motivation was to cast off the yolk of dark magic and rebel against their [...]
The nuclear disaster at the Fukushima Daiichi power plant this spring may have released twice as much radiation into the atmosphere as the Japanese government estimated, a new preliminary study says. While the government estimates relied mostly on data from monitoring stations in Japan, the European research team behind the new report looked at radioactivity data [...]
The first episode of Frozen Planet – the BBC’s new mega-series on life at the poles, fronted by the peerless David Attenborough – aired on Wednesday. It exceeded my already lofty expectations, and I’ve written a comment piece for the Guardian that’s a bit of a love letter to the makers of the show, the [...]
“Disgust is an emotional response that helps to maintain and protect physical and spiritual purity by signaling contamination and motivating the restoration of personal cleanliness. In the present research we predicted that disgust may be elicited by contact with outgroup religious beliefs, as these beliefs pose a threat to spiritual purity. Two experiments tested this [...]
When Pooping Babies Become More Appealing: The Effects of Nonconscious Goal Pursuit on Experienced Emotions. “In this report, we argue that the intensity of the emotions people experience is partly determined by the goals they nonconsciously pursue, and that this effect is functional in nature: Emotions are modulated in ways that may increase the probability [...]
After meticulously stitching together images that were gathered over six years by a NASA spacecraft in orbit around Saturn, astronomers have created a global map of the surface of Titan, the ringed planet’s largest moon, and it features some surprisingly Earth-like geological features. An international team of astronomers, led by the University of Nantes in France, created the striking mosaic of ...