The same chemical that helps turn people and lab mice into crack addicts may also cause locusts to swarm. A team of researchers from the UK and Australia has discovered that serotonin seems to trigger the swarms of desert locusts, devastating crop pests that span a fifth of the globe. Serotonin has been found in [...]
Β I love to write. And I love science. But so far, my attempt to combine these things in a style fitting for the modern age — by maintaining a blog — has been spotty. So I hereby challenge myself: 100 posts about science in 100 days, promoted as much as possible through other modern [...]
I enjoy writing about astronomy exactly for the reason I once feared it: there’s so much we don’t know. There’s rarely any shame in asking about the nature of a black hole, for example, because scientists are grappling with it too. Usually, if I get confused while writing an astronomy story, it’s because I’ve stumbled [...]
Bats are in the news twice this week for two very different reasons: more has been revealed about their endearing social graces, and more is now understood about their unique vulnerability to windmills. University of Maryland researchers announce in this week’s issue of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences that big brown bats [...]