Researchers At King’s College London Found That The Drug Tideglusib Stimulates The Stem Cells Contained

Bumblebees Leave 'Smelly Footprints' Behind on Flowers

Bumblebees mark the flowers they've visited with smelly footprints, and they can tell the difference between odors from family members' feet and those of strangers.

Bumblebees mark the flowers they’ve visited with smelly footprints, and they can tell the difference between odors from family members’ feet and those of strangers, researchers have found.

By sniffing out these dainty footprints, bumblebees can locate good food and steer clear of flowers whose nutrients have been depleted, the scientists reported in a new study.

“Bumblebees secrete a substance whenever they touch their feet to a surface, much like us leaving fingerprints on whatever we touch,” Richard Pearce, a scientist at the University of Bristol in the United Kingdom, said in a statement.

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Seer of Seers Sage of Sages Prognosticator of Prognosticators Weather Prophet Extraordinary

So reads the official title of Punxsutawney Phil, the world’s most famous weather-predicting groundhog/woodchuck/marmot/whistle pig (yes, they are, in fact, all the same animal… surprises abound in the world of meteorological mammals). 

Phil hails from the town of Punxsutawney, PA, where every year on February 2, a group of grown men sporting top hats and waxed mustaches pull him out of a box and ask him when winter will end. I can never keep straight whether seeing the shadow means spring will come early or if we’ll have a long winter, but this doesn’t really matter, since rodents are not good weather prediction tools.

Despite being about as reliable as a coin flip, Phil is joined in this annual tradition by more than a dozen North American groundhogs like Shubenecadie Sam, General Beauregard Lee, and Wisconson’s humbly-named Jimmy the Groundhog, seen here:

Surprise! Groundhogs can bite! And I would too, if you forcibly removed me from my warm, comfy house, held me aloft in the frigid air in front of thousands of gaping onlookers and flashing lights and asked me about a subject in which I have no expertise.

Rodents might not be real educated in the fields of meteorology and astronomy, but humans are! We’ve got Earth’s orbital mechanics and their corresponding effect on annual temperature cycles down to a literal science. We smart. Just look…

I dug into the science of seasons this week, and I discovered that our system of defining “winter” and “summer” and “spring” and “autumn”, at least the way that most of us non-meteorologists think of them, doesn’t really make sense when you compare it to the weather. 

You might already know that we define “winter” or “summer” based on Earth’s position in relation to the sun, namely the solstices. This makes the seasons easy to keep track of, but for most of us these dates are unreliable, illogical, and remarkably disconnected from the actual weather. The little boxes on your calendar that say “First Day of Winter”, “First Day of Spring” and so on don’t line up very well with how cold or hot it is outside.

Unfortunately, that’s what happens when you try to apply a single calendar to an entire planet… could there be a better way?

You can learn the rest of the story by watching this week’s It’s Okay To Be Smart up at the top of this post. Enjoy!

The First Galaxies: What We Know And What We Still Need To Learn

“As we look farther back in time, we find that younger galaxies formed stars at faster rates than galaxies do today. We can measure the star-formation rate, and find that at earlier and earlier times, it was more intense. But then we find it hits a peak when the Universe is about two billion years old. Go younger than that, and the rate goes down again.”

We’ve come incredibly far in our quest to learn how the Universe came to be the way it is today. We can see out in space for tens of billions of light years, to galaxies as they were when the Universe was only a few percent of its present age. We can see how galaxies evolve, merge and the stars inside change. And we can see to even before that, when no stars or galaxies existed at all. But how did we get from there to here? There are still plenty of gaps in the story. We’ve never seen the first stars or galaxies; we’ve never witnessed the start of cosmic reionization; we’ve never seen the star formation rate jump from zero to a real, finite number. Yet with James Webb and WFIRST on the horizon, these gaps in our knowledge may – if we’re lucky – all disappear.

Come get the story on what we know about the first galaxies, and what we hope and have left to still learn!

Researchers Invent Sponge That Could Transform Oil Spill Cleanup

It can soak up 90 times its weight in oil.

Researchers have designed a new material that could completely revolutionize the way oil spills are cleaned up.

When the Deepwater Horizon spill happened in 2010, the cleanup presented an unexpected challenge. Millions of gallons of oil didn’t collect on the surface, where it could be skimmed off or burned, but instead was drifting through the ocean below the waves.

Scientists at the U.S. Department of Energy’s Argonne National Lab have invented a material that could prevent a similar situation in future spills.

The foam, called Oleo Sponge, can soak up 90 times its own weight in oil before it needs to be wrung out to be reused — and the oil can be recovered.

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Old but gold 💛

VLT image of the cometary globule CG4

js

Drunk Science is HERE!!! Our first episode explains the mystery of slime. It also makes drunken attempts at humor and references super heroes. It's literally everything you could ever need. Click link in bio to watch! #drunkscience #stem #blerd #funny #science #drunk #labcoat #youtube #experiment http://ift.tt/2mQUVL1