The Ed's Up #38

Why Dinosaurs Were Like Tuna, Great Whites, and Echidnas

A new study found that dinosaurs were mesotherms: they were lukewarm-blooded. "Mesotherms are different. Unlike a basking crocodile, they rely on their own metabolism to raise their body temperature. But unlike you, they don’t keep their temperatures at a fixed point. They turn the heating on, but they have no thermostats." (Images: Terry Goss, and Kabacchi)

The Barnacle That Eats Glowing Sharks

Most barnacles sit on hard surfaces, and filter small particles of food from the surrounding water. But Anelasma squalicola is an exception. It’s a parasitic barnacle that eats sharks, by fastening itself to their flanks and draining nutrients from their flesh. “The chances of finding such an organism are incredibly slim. For evolutionary biologists, a chance to study all aspects of the biology of such a creature is a rare gift.” (Image: David Rees)

The Architecture of Living Buildings

Swirl fire ants in a tube, pour liquid nitrogen on them, and put them in a CT scanner. The result: astonishing images of living ant structures. "The scans showed that the ants are extraordinarily good at finding each other. Even though the team forced them to form into balls very quickly, while being swirled in a beaker, almost all of them attached all of their legs to a neighbour. of 2640 legs, 2624 were stuck to another ant." (Image: Tim Nowack)

Intelligent Crows Flunk Causality Test (But Babies Pass)

"These two abilities—understanding causality, and using that understanding—seem so simple and mundane to us that it feels weird to lay them out, and weirder still to separate them. But they are separate. That much becomes clear when you study an animal that can do one of these things and not the other. The New Caledonian crow is one such animal." (Image: Alex Taylor) 

Half a Billion Years of Suicide

Newly-discovered coral proteins can persuade human cells to kill themselves, and the human versions of those proteins trigger suicide in coral cells too. Corals and humans have been diverging for 550 million years, but these proteins are interchangeable--a testament to how important and ancient programmed suicide is to our cells. (Image: David Burdick)

More good reads

• A cadre of elite writers has created a new venture called Deca—every month, one of them publishes a story, and the others support. The first one, by the awesome Mara Hvistendahl, is a great read on the true crime murder of Canadian model in China. Well worth your $3. Here’s their Kickstarter campaign
• "Can neuroscience help us rewrite our most traumatic memories?" A spectacular feature by Michael Spector, seamlessly melding narrative storytelling with clear explanatory writing.  
• Step 2 of 7: "Ask a stranger to FedEx a whale vagina" By Marah Hardt
• Was a Fisher Price alphabetic fridge magnet set responsible for a generation of synaesthetic people? Great piece by Frank Swain.
•  “Do Animals Suffer From Mental Illness?” Laurel Braitman’s new book sounds fascinating.
• This piece on the history of pepper spray for bears is a constant stream of gold. By Amanda Hess.
• Sialoliths—salivary gallstones—are a thing. A terrible, terrible thing. By Cassandra Willyard
• "Genes are not gods; they are cogs." Patrick Clarkin on nature, nurture, and the wonder of developmental plasticity
• A really sweet story about Bill Watterson's brief return to comics
• This is like Catch Me If You Can, but with dinosaur smuggling. Paige Williams follows up on her amazing New Yorker feature on the black market trade in fossils.
• The obsessed heiress who made forensics a science. A wonderful piece from Rachel Nuwer featuring blood-spattered dollhouses
• Environmental journalist Jeremy Hance gets a string of good-news stories, is confused, writes lovely piece.
• “My mom, Amahl, is one of those Voyager voices. She’s speaking her native Arabic, and her message is simple: “Greetings to our friends in the stars. We wish that we will meet you someday.” By Nadia Drake.
• Then & now images of D-Day.

More good links will be released in tomorrow's linkfest on Not Exactly Rocket Science

You can also follow me on Twitter, find regular writing on my blog. If someone has forwarded this email to you, you can sign up yourself. 

And that's it! Thanks for reading.