Where's the Science?

Looking for Science in all the wrong places.

[scavengerscience]

Bill Nye The Science Guy Tackles DeflateGate

with Funny Or Die

Worth trotting out again, because it’s baseball season and you might have forgotten about this while watching this year’s weak A’s lineup wrecking the Yankees.

[amnhnyc]

Today is World Book Day, and we’re celebrating with beautiful embossed natural history book covers from the Museum’s Research Library. 

Pictured clockwise from the top left:

Aitken’s The Tribes on My Frontier

Wood’s The Common Moths of England

Figuier’s The Ocean World

Miller’s Queer Pets at Marcy’s

Sowerby’s The Ferns of Great Britain

Stray Feathers, a Journal of Ornithology for India

See these and more in the Museum’s Digital Special Collections website.

[scavengerscience]

Great opinion piece about museums. Data matters to all science, and museums are where data comes from.

[scavengerscience]

Safety Fail.

[skunkbear]

Back when I was a studying biology, I noticed that a lot of anatomical terms sound like they come straight from Middle Earth. So, to celebrate the release of the last Hobbit film, I’ve created this INCREDIBLY nerdy quiz.

Do these words and phrases refer to parts of the human body, or reference people and places from J. R. R. Tolkien’s work?

Antrum of Highmore

Crypt of Morgagni

Caves of Androth

Lobelia

Loop of Henle

Scapha

Great Vein of Galen

Halls of Mandos

Groin

Gap of Calenardhon

Macewen’s Triangle

Canal of Schlemm

Gerontius

Islets of Langerhans

Meckel’s Cave

Chamber of Mazarbul

You shall not pass.

[scavengerscience]

Ebola likely more than 20 million years old "The researchers were able to trace the evolutionary lines of the two viruses by analyzing genetic material left behind by the virus in animal fossils."

No they weren't. Interesting paper, but these reporters didn't understand. Some viruses leave bits of their DNA in the animals they infect which can actually be passed on to those animal's children. This is often called "fossil DNA" even though it is found in modern animals, because it from a virus long dead. In this case that happened a long time ago, but they evidence was from a modern rodent, caught in New York State.

Actual article with no mention of fossil animals here:

https://peerj.com/articles/556/

[scavengerscience]

Shame on you, bird watchers.

[scavengerscience]

Batman gets schooled in Paleontology.

This story isn't exactly right, but at least Bats now knows there's no Brontosaurus.

[scavengerscience]

"India will become the first Asian country to have achieved this and if it happens in the maiden attempt itself, India could become the first country in the world to have reached distant Mars on its own steam in the first attempt," said K. Radhakrishnan, chairman of the Indian Space Research Organization

The fact that India still has steam-powered spacecraft is a feat, in and of itself.

[scavengerscience]

More inexplicable dinosaur anatomy! Following our previous post on dinosaur skulls, Amber from Illinois sent in this grape-loving saurian. Even ignoring the out-dated stance, why does it have a spinal abscess? 

[scavengerscience]

His Charms make Lucky Leprechaun incredibly powerful.

Too bad he doesn't know that trees are already alive.

[scavengerscience]

Dan Farber finds climate change denial hard to parody: turns out a lot of well-established facts have deniers. Check out his essay here.

[scavengerscience]

Please refer to the previous post to see what has got me all riled up!

This is so wrong I went down to the Museum of Vertebrate Zoology at the University of California and got an actual Wolverine skull to show you.

Their genus is Gulo from the latin for "glutton" because these hungry little guys will eat everything and a lot of it.

It is true that they eat frozen carcasses (even fighting bears for them). But no mammal can rotate its teeth. One of the things that makes us mammals is that we have teeth that fit together and we have sacrificed to have this feature, called occlusion. We had to give up on cool things like snake-like mobile teeth and shark-like tooth replacement to keep our teeth neatly in a row.

Bottom line Discovery: The teeth don't move. Here are the teeth, sitting at 90 degrees to each other, forever fixed that way. See I even tried to move them!

I think Discovery looked at this good webpage and got the biology wrong.

Shame on you Discovery for not fact-checking!

[scavengerscience]

Discovery has really cashed it in recently; lying to scientists to get them to appear on Shark Week is the worst example.

But this mistake is unforgivably dumb. On their North American Facts page they make many mistakes, and provide unchecked information - don't trust it!! In addition to nature info they also inexplicably provide lots of facts about Little Debbie snack cakes. WTF?

They claim the above: that Wolverines have teeth that "can rotate 90°". 

This is so wrong that I am dedicating two posts to it.

[scavengerscience]

Meet two Science Heroes from Texas! The McEwens found a nearly complete Woolly Mammoth in their gravel pit and donated it to the museum in Dallas. That's the kind of amazing find and responsible citizen science that we need oh so much more of. Three cheers! Click for more photos.

[scavengerscience]

Video game ChronoCross gets some biology wrong here. They are bipedal in the game too. And this is before the plot jumps the shark.

[scavengerscience]

Rio de Janeiro graffiti is awesome. The fenestrae in the back of the skull are missing though, and the mandibular fenestra is far too large. We'll give them the win and assume their model T. rex was just damaged. 

Or that the cops came.