A Bizarre New Species Of Marine Worm Lacks A Number Of Internal Features Common To Other Animals —

Listening To Music Releases Dopamine In The Brain

Have you ever been listening to a piece of music and experienced   intense pleasure, even chills? Valorie Salimpoor and team (2010)   conducted research that shows that listening to music can release the   neurotransmitter dopamine.

A wide range of music — The researchers used PET   (positron emission tomography) scans, fMRI, and psychophysiological   measures such as heart rate to measure reactions while people listened   to music. The participants provided music that they said gave them   intense pleasure and chills. The range of music varied, from classical, folk, jazz, elecronica, rock pop, tango, and more.

Keep reading

Back in the 1960s, the U.S. started vaccinating kids for measles. As expected, children stopped getting measles.

But something else happened.

Childhood deaths from all infectious diseases plummeted. Even deaths from diseases like pneumonia and diarrhea were cut by half.

“So it’s really been a mystery — why do children stop dying at such high rates from all these different infections following introduction of the measles vaccine,” says Michael Mina, a postdoc in biology at Princeton University and a medical student at Emory University.

Scientists Crack A 50-Year-Old Mystery About The Measles Vaccine Photo credit: Photofusion/UIG via Getty Images

I hate when people get all snobby like “uhm, humans didn’t EVOLVE from apes, humans and apes share a common ancestor”

Yeah well guess what shitlips, that common ancestor? an ape. By every taxonomical definition, it would be considered an ape.

.. I mean shit, by taxonomical definition, humans still are apes. They fall under the family Hominidae. We didn’t ditch that branch when we put pants on.

For more posts like these, go to @mypsychology​

A reminder that NASA isn’t the only space agency

I have seen many “Space achievements 2015” articles and posts leaving international accomplisments completely out, so here are some of them: 

1. A new type of basaltic rock on the moon was found by Chinese robotic lander.

China National Space Administration’s Chang’e-3 landed on the Moon on 14 December 2013, becoming the first spacecraft to soft-land since the Soviet Union‘s Luna 24 in 1976.

2. On February 11, the European Space Agency, ESA, successfully launched on a suborbital trajectory and recovered an experimental wingless glider, IXV.

It became the first true “lifting body” vehicle, which reached a near-orbital speed and then returned back to Earth without any help from wings.

3. On December 9, Japan’s Akatsuki spacecraft succeeded entering orbit of Venus.

Japan Aerospace eXploration Agency’s Akatsuki is the first spacecraft to explore Venus since the ESA’s Venus Express reached the end of its mission in 2014.

4.  ESA’s Rosetta spacecraft detected oxygen ‘leaking’ from comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko, the first time these molecules have been seen around a comet.

Rosetta spacecraft, the first to drop a lander (named Philae) on a comet, entered orbit around 67P in 2014 and continues to orbit the body. On June 13, European Space Operations Centre in Darmstadt, Germany, received signals from the Philae lander after months of silence.

5.  The Canadian Space Agency has provided NASA with a laser mapping system that will scan an asteroid that could potentially hit the Earth in about 200 years

6. The high-resolution stereo camera on ESA’s Mars Express captured this sweeping view from the planet’s south polar ice cap and across its cratered highlands and beyond.

find Sci-Universe on Tumblr, Instagram & Facebook

The complete ‘Women Who Changed Science - And The World" collection in honor of the 95th Women’s Equality Day.

Purchase Here!

Graphene-spiked Silly Putty picks up human pulse

'G-putty' is so sensitive that it can track even the steps of a small spider.

A dash of graphene can transform the stretchy goo known as Silly Putty into a pressure sensor able to monitor a human pulse or even track the dainty steps of a small spider1.

The material, dubbed G-putty, could be developed into a device that continuously monitors blood pressure, its inventors hope. It also demonstrates a form of self-repair that may herald smarter graphene composites.

Since graphene was first isolated in 2004, researchers have added these atom-thin sheets of carbon to a panoply of different materials, hoping to create composites that benefit from its superlative strength and electrical conductivity. But there have been surprisingly few attempts to blend it with ‘viscoelastic’ materials such as Silly Putty, which behaves as both an elastic solid and a liquid. Leave a lump on top of a hole, for example, and it will slowly ooze through.

Conor Boland, a researcher working in Jonathan Coleman’s nanotechnology lab at Trinity College Dublin, wondered what would happen if he brought the two materials together. “I’d like to be able to say it was carefully planned, but it wasn’t,” laughs Coleman. “We’ve just got a tradition in my group of using household stuff in our science.” (In 2014, his team found that they could make graphene by blitzing graphite in a kitchen blender2).

Continue Reading.

Uhmm, how exactly were all of those megafauna able to grow that large and function??? And how the fuck was that giant bird actually able to fly????????

Realistic answer?  Mostly because humans hadn’t come around and hunted them all to extinction yet.  Dinosaurs are exempt from this because they vastly predated us, but almost anything that coincided with our timeline, we killed.

We are, for our relatively small size and frail, sometimes clumsy physical characteristics, a TERRIFYING species.

Evolution has produced all kinds of Big Shit.  Ever seen a Paraceratherium?

Or a size chart for Sauropods that wasn’t produced before 1970?

Evolution likes to make things big.  It tries this all the time.  Whenever there’s a plentiful food source and enough space, things just get bigger and bigger.  

The largest animal to have ever lived is alive right now.  It’s the blue whale.  And it’s truly a masterpiece of evolution’s drive to Go Bigger.

HOW THIS HAPPEN.

Basically, because they live in the ocean, space isn’t really an issue for them, and thanks to buoyancy, neither is their frankly ALARMING weight.  The only real limit to their size is chemistry – whether they can possibly metabolize enough energy fast enough to stay alive at their size.  Blue whales are estimated (having, for obvious reasons, never been measured in one piece) to be able to reach over 200 tons.  As an average weight.  Fluctuating with their feeding season.  This was for a 98 foot long whale.  The longest whales ever measured were 110 feet and 109 feet, both females.  (Males tend to be slightly shorter, but heavier at any given length).

A blue whale can hold over 90 tons of food and water in its mouth.

They need 1.5 million kilocalories of food per day.

Blue whales are MASSIVE.

They are not the LONGEST animal in the world, though, just the heaviest.  The longest is likely one of two things: the Lions Mane Jellyfish or the Bootlace Worm.  The longest recorded Lions Mane Jellyfish washed up on shore with tentacles measuring 120 feet.  It is unknown if they can be longer than this, but certainly possible given how fragile they are and the fact that this is just one that happened to get washed up on a beach.

The longest recorded bootlace worm SMASHES this record, but because of its stretchy body and the date of the recording (1864), the scientific accuracy is disputed.  It also washed up on shore and measured 180 feet.

How far off topic am I this time?

Anyway yes animals get big sometimes.  It helps deter predators when you’re too big to be hunted by anything.  The only natural predator of the blue whale is killer whales.  Regarding bears specifically, Brown Bears are in far more trouble than Black Bears because the Brown Bear line trends toward going bigger, which makes them easier targets for humans, while Black Bears have evolved to be shy and stealthy and avoid human contact.  As a result, Brown bears are far larger, but far more likely to be driven to extinction by humans.  Nature functions just fine if it’s left alone.  We just ruin everything we touch.  That’s why the largest individual crocodiles still living right now are the ones that have learned to avoid humans at all costs: conservation laws have not protected crocodiles from poaching long enough for them to get really, really big, even though we have significant historical records of crocodiles larger than what we generally see now.  At least some of those records are considered to be reliable and put a couple extant crocodile species well over 20 feet – some over 22.  The largest reliably measured crocodile was Lolong, a Saltwater crocodile in the Philippines who measured 20 feet 3 inches and died a few years ago.

And Argentavis magnificens was able to fly because it was designed to.  Even with a massive 24 foot wingspan, it only weighed around 175 pounds, because birds have very lightweight skeletons.  As impressive as the size was,

a living bird of that size probably weighed about as much, if not a bit less, than the man standing next to it.  The surface area of its wings would have been sufficient to keep it in the air, mostly by gliding the way you see large modern birds of prey do.  It would have resembled a condor or vulture, just much larger.

My tummy is blushing now. 

People Were Asked: ‘What’s The Coolest Thing Most People Don’t Know About Their Own Body?’

Bonus comic!

Yahoo! Einstein was right again! :D We now have our first detection of gravitational waves! 

http://www.nytimes.com/2016/02/12/science/ligo-gravitational-waves-black-holes-einstein.html?_r=0

http://www.space.com/17661-theory-general-relativity.html