Mutualism of the month: A farming fish
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This month's mutualism is on the relationship between a farming damselfish and its garden of delicious algae.
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Healthy Habits: touching your face
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How often do you touch your face? In this installment of 'Healthy Habits', we ask whether or not reducing how often you touch your face can actually help prevent your next cold.
Read MoreMolecule of the Month: The Most Dangerous Game.
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What better way to start off the year than with a Molecules of the Month theme of poison/venom. In this article, I break down [literally] the distinction between poison and venom, down to the chemical components.
What does it take for an organism to be poisonous/venomous? Why are some organisms more deadly than others?
Gather los niños!: Understanding the major players of weather and climate variation
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Were you one of those people experiencing unusual weather during Christmas and heard the weathermen on TV talk about something with El Niño? What is El Niño and what does a little boy (translated from Spanish) have to do with weather? Read on to learn more! and Happy New Year!
(Photo credit to SNAPAssembly; http://thesnapassembly.com/icon/happy-holidays-from-summer-santa)
Bread Better: The Yoga Mat Chemical
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Azodicarbonamide, more popularly known as the "yoga mat chemical" was recently removed from Subway's bread after a public outcry. But what was it doing in there to begin with? And was it really as dangerous as it sounds?
Read MoreOats, peas, beans and barley grow: saving seeds
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Why is it important to save seeds?
A study, now out of date, but still relevant, found 93% of major crop varieties had gone extinct. It’s a scary to think that all our eggs are in a pretty small basket.
Read More"Baby, you’re a firework. Let your colors burst:” Science exploding 10,000 feet in the air
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You've probably heard Musician Katy Perry's song, Firework as it was a number one hit in 2010. Combine that with the summer season, there's an urge to awe over the sights and sounds of fireworks. But I don’t think we or Katy Perry think about the science behind those oohs and ahhs. Learn about fireworks from its history to how they light up the night sky.
Read MoreAre Trees Socialists?
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A recent blog post over at Scientific American proposes that trees are unabashedly socialist. Is this really the case, though? Is there a classless, worker-owned utopia dwelling in the ground beneath our feet that takes from each according to its ability assigns to each according to its need? Probably not. Trip into a rhetorical pitfall and learn about a metaphor taken too far in this post.
Read MoreOMG GMO! Part 2: Are GMOs bad?
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The second post in our series wades into the good and bad of GMOs. There are a lot of articles out there that make the claim that there’s no such thing as a good GMO and that all of them are bad in some way. Others would have you believe that they are all completely harmless. We take a look at some of the different modifications out there to help you decide whether modifying crops is good or bad.
Read MoreTypes of vines
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I spent this morning battling bindweed and trellising pea plants. I work on a farm. If you’ve spent anytime working on a farm, you’re probably familiar these tasks. Manual labor gives one ample time to think, and today I was thinking about all the vines on farms. There are many; crop plants like peas, beans, cucumbers, squash and tomatoes, as well as weed plants like bindweed, honeysuckle and poison ivy.
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