Tag Archives | Science

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Mystery of the Red Tide

I stood with my feet buried in sand, staring at the ocean waves as they touched the beach. It was mid-October. To my untrained eye, the Monterey Bay shoreline looked like a child’s bubble bath. To California Fish and Wildlife scientists, it was a terrible déjà vu. Nine years ago, an algal bloom wreaked havoc—and…

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Olive ridley sea turtle hatchlings on the Osa Peninsula, Costa Rica. Photo by Sukee Bennett.

How does one turtle’s tale promote ocean conservation?

I watched nearly 2,000 baby olive ridley sea turtles hatch while working on a sea turtle conservation project in Costa Rica. Most of them were born in our human-made hatchery from wild eggs we had relocated— each hatchling crawled and tumbled upon dozens of siblings in a sheltered plot, eager to be free. Others were…

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A fog collector waters chard on top of a campus building at California State University, Monterey Bay. Photo: Dan Fernandez

Trees Capture Fog — So Why Can’t We?

[This is cross-posted from Bay Nature. Thanks to Alison Hawkes for editing assistance.] A gauzy marine layer regularly envelops California’s Central Coast, wafting waves of misty air over the landscape. Even during a crippling drought, all that water, albeit airborne, is all around us. What if you could capture it? It’s an idea that’s been…

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Diver Ryan Brennan hangs with a Mola mola off the coast of Southern California

Credit: Bradley Beckett

Face to Face with the Ugly, Marvelous Mola Mola

It’s been described as a “swimming head,” and can weigh as much as an adult rhinoceros—and it also turns out to be one of the most fascinating fish in the sea With a final breath of air, I descend beneath the surface among swaying kelp and flying sea lions. I’m in search of a creature that…

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Courtesy of Adam Kleifield

Plenty of Pheromones in the Sea

As we sat in my car outside a silent movie theater in Los Angeles, my friend anxiously opened a plastic bag containing a white T-shirt she’d slept in for the past three nights. “Does it smell like me?” she asked nervously, gesturing the open end toward my face. I stuck my nose into the bag and inhaled….

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A still frame of Steven Ward's computer simulation of the 2004 Sumatra tsunami. Credit: Steven Ward

From disaster to outreach

Sharing science in the days of YouTube Steven Ward has a pretty good trick. He can drop you right into the heart of a natural disaster and you’ll come out unscathed. Guaranteed. Tsunami? Earthquake? Volcanic explosion? He’ll even take requests. (more…)

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Top 5 Science Stories of 2012 According to Reddit

2012 was a big year for science. From tiny particles to worlds millions of miles away, there were a lot of science stories worth reading. Here is a compilation of the top five of the year, according to the point-score given by users of Reddit.com. For each major story I’ve made a useful infographic to…

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Scientists learn about fear by scaring rats with Lego 'Robogator' Credit: Kim Lab

Learning about fear with rats and Legos

As I wrote in my last post, fear can be a real problem for writers. So much so that there’s actually a book on how writers can overcome it, called The Courage to Write by Ralph Keyes. But fear isn’t all bad. It’s a crucial evolutionary response that keeps us away from danger, and scientists…

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