iNaturalist: The Trouble with Angels

It is only through shadows that one comes to know the light.

— Catherine of Siena, born around this date in 1347 It's Onion Saturday! Friendship has its burdens.... The Boss Bruce 

 "What I love about our home is the past that's revealed itself along the way and its warm invitation to create new memories and add to its already rich history." 

- April Lawrence

This tree lures birds with a free lunch and then kills them WaPo

Squid and octopus can edit and direct their own brain genes New Scientist

This is Australia - Man has legs amputated after being bitten by whitetail spider in Victoria

Scientists finally figured out why whales leap into the air Quartz

This Photographer Photographs Farm Animal Like No One Else Bored Panda

Nivea’s ‘White Is Purity’ ad campaign did not end well Chicago Tribune. Regionally targeted ads do not stay regional! But sadly, for instance, Japanese and Indian models are (or are shot and made up to look) more pale faced than is typical for their countries.

With Floating Farm, New York Looks to the Future of Public ParksBloomberg. Permaculture makes the big time. For good or ill

Need someone to frame a house, glaze a window, build a fence, plow a field, butcher a hen, call a square dance, explain your soul? Jozef Imrich Is Your Man ... aMEn 

SO THE EARLY WILD BEARD IS LIKE TEEN GIRLS WEARING TOO MUCH MAKEUP? Why beards are like makeup for men.

Honey bees navigate using magnetic abdomens Physics World “[D]on’t miss the penultimate paragraph.”

Get Lost in Mega-Tunnels Dug by South American Megafauna Discover

How pharmacy benefit managers morphed from processors to predators Dave Dayen, American Prospect

WILL ROBOTS REPLACE HUMAN DOCTORS? JSTOR. This is nuts. Interaction with doctors has major placebo effects. And I would not consent to being treated by a robot.

Writers Look, Whereas Painters See. But There’s A Link

“Of all the arts, writers most envy music, for being both abstract and immediate, and also in no need of translation. But painting might come a close second, for the way that the expression and the means of expression are coterminous—whereas novelists are stuck with the one-damn-thing-after-another need for word and sentence and paragraph and background and psychological buildup in order to heftily construct that climactic scene.”

  WHEN THE DESERT BLOOMS JSTOR

 

THE SCIENCE IS SETTLED: Scientific Studies Show Women Really Do Like Guys With Dad Bods More.

'Earth-shattering' study reveals the best exercise for anti-ageing

 

Malchkeoun: World's biggest dinosaur footprint discovered in 'Australia's own Jurassic Park'

Why a group of scientists grew human heart tissue on spinach

Tracy Moffatt Is The First Indigenous Australian To Exhibit At The Venice Biennale

Photographer and filmmaker Moffatt never wants to repeat herself. The pavilion “will feature two new large-scale photographic suites and two films. Commissioned by Naomi Milgrom and curated by Natalie King, the exact nature of the works in this exhibition is still a tightly guarded secret, but Moffatt says she used a lot of natural light – often shooting directly into the sun.”

RECOVERY: Tiny fish with a funny name could help with opioid crisis.

The fang blenny, a fish found in the Great Barrier Reef, has potent venom that acts the same way as opioid drugs for killing pain. It could represent a new way to look at our most effective — and problematic — pain drugs.

Why do we need new opioid drugs?

Mostly because the ones currently on the market aren’t that good. We have potent opiods that are incredibly addictive and have lots of other side effects, including constipation, dizziness, nausea and altered mental condition. Or we have weak ones that simply aren’t that helpful for deep and chronic pain.

As things stand, we can go into the lab and tinker with existing drugs, and hope we can decrease addictiveness while maintaining potency. But so far, that hasn’t exactly been very successful.

Another approach is to look to nature. Nature has had millions of years to tinker with biologically ...

“iNaturalist is a place where you canrecord what you see in nature, meetother nature lovers, and learn about the natural world.  From hikers to hunters, birders to beach-combers, the world is filled with naturalists, and many of us record what we find. What if all those observations could be shared online? You might discover someone who finds beautiful wildflowers at your favorite birding spot, or learn about the birds you see on the way to work. If enough people recorded their observations, it would be like a living record of life on Earth that scientists and land managers could use to monitor changes in biodiversity, and that anyone could use to learn more about nature. That’s the vision behind iNaturalist.org. So if you like recording your findings from the outdoors, or if you just like learning about life, join us…We wouldn’t be able to make iNaturalist without many, many wonderful open source projects, open datasets, and public APIs, including (in no particular order): Catalogue of Life, uBio, Ruby on Rails, jQuery, Google Maps, Mark James’ Silk Icons, and many more we’re probably forgetting. We’ve also been ...

Survival of the Friendliest It’s time to give the violent metaphors of evolution a break – By studying the phylogenetic history of related species, we can begin to correlate the interplay of behaviors with evolutionary dynamics in the real world. This year scientists from Lund University, in Sweden, analyzed the breeding strategies of 4,000 bird species, tracking their movements into new ecosystems using known genetic relationships between the birds. It’s long been known that cooperative-breeding strategies...

© Maximilian Conrad, Germany, Shortlist, Open, Nature, 2017 Sony World Photography Awards

SHOCKING NEWS FROM THE WORLD OF SCIENCE: Sex may be key to a happy marriage, study finds.

Hey, “maintenance sex” has saved many a marriage. Including, as you can see, some InstaPundit readers’.