Archive: Feb 2016

by Nathan Schauer figures by Daniel Utter Zika virus (ZIKV) has recently transformed from a relatively unknown tropical disease to a worldwide public health emergency. This crisis is due to emerging evidence that ZIKV causes microcephaly and…

  Ticks are small, but potentially dangerous arachnids that can spread Lyme disease to humans [Image: ‘Tick’ from John Tann under a CC BY 2.0 license]The already thorny process of diagnosing Lyme disease may have just gotten even hazier.…

by Emily Kuehn figures by Kaitlyn Choi When you think about your five senses what is the one you most fear to lose? Informal polling of my friends and family shows that most people don’t want to lose their vision. To be fair, we rely heavily on our…

LIGO has discovered ripples in spacetime, generated by the inspiral and merger of two massive black holes – Credit Caltech The Twitter rumors are true! In what some scientists are calling the discovery of the century, LIGO (Laser Interferometer…

by Tauana Junqueira Cunha If we could travel back in time 540 million years, what would the first animals look like? This is one of the longstanding questions scientists aim to answer in the study of how animals evolved and became distinct from their…

Colonies of Burkholderia pseudomallei on Ashdown agar after 96 hours incubation at 37ºC [By Gak (Own work) [CC BY-SA 3.0 or GFDL], via Wikimedia Commons]Melioidosis is so unknown and underfunded that to call it a “neglected tropical disease” would be an…

by Jordan Wilkerson figures by Michael Gerhardt When someone asks you to consider the impacts of climate change, what do you think of? There’s a good chance that melting ice sheets comes to mind pretty quickly. For that reason, a recent finding…

    Bovine Pulmonary Artery Epithelial (BPAE) cells have been featured several times in the gallery and on our Instagram; incase you missed them, check out Kaleidoskeleton, Plumotion, and Cytoskeleton Four Ways. In this stunning collage, BPAE…

The warm winter has been hard to miss. January temperatures were higher than average, and a little over a month ago most the Northeast was turning off the heat, opening windows, and wearing shorts in December. The strange weather hasn’t been confined to…

by Marie Siwicki figures by Anna Maurer At this time of year, researchers, doctors, and recreational nerds alike turn to the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) for the list of the past year’s most important scientific…