The Ed's Up #77
Fish that Walks on Land Swallows With Tongue Made of Water
Michel filmed Atlantic mudskippers with high-speed cameras as they sucked up pieces of shrimp that had been placed on dry surfaces. As he reviewed the videos, he noticed something odd. In the moments after a mudskipper leans forward and opens its mouth, a small bubble of water protrudes from its open jaws. The water spreads over the morsel of food, which the mudskipper envelops with its mouth. It then sucks both morsel and water back up. The water acts like a tongue—a “hydrodynamic tongue”, in Michel’s words. It allows the fish to lap up its food and then swallow it. (Image: Bjørn Christian Tørrissen)
Can Probiotic Bacteria Save An Endangered Frog?
"I saw a ghost at the Vancouver Aquarium last summer. I was walking out of a room overlooking the main shark tank when I saw something in a glass cage embedded in the wall, something small, black and yellow. I mean Black and Yellow—colours so intense that you almost expect to turn the creature over and find a country of origin embossed on its underside. It was a Panamanian golden frog, and it is extinct in the wild. It only survives in zoos and aquariums. It is an ecological phantom, a ghost of nature." (Image: Brian Gratwicke)
Darwin’s “Strangest” Beast Finds Place on Tree
“Toxodon is perhaps one of the strangest animals ever discovered,” wrote Charles Darwin, a man who was no stranger to strangeness. He first encountered the creature in Uruguay on November 26th, 1834. “Having heard of some giant’s bones at a neighbouring farm-house…, I rode there accompanied by my host, and purchased for the value of eighteen pence the head of the Toxodon,” he later wrote." (Image: WereSpielChequers)
More good reads
- “Three days before Britain declared war, on September 3, 1939, Janet Vaughan received a telegram from the Medical Research Council. It read, “Start bleeding.”” Rose George on a woman who changed our relationship with blood.
- The great Hillary Rosner on the beetle that's killing North America's forests, and what their incursion says about our changing world.
- I love this Alexis Madrigal piece on doing talks from memory; it’s such a rewarding thing to do, and something I adored of the TED experience
- “The paper describes a way to read the book of history in human DNA to a level of detail that is completely unprecedented.” Christine Kenneally on a fantastic new paper on Britain’s DNA
- "Prosthetic devices have long been created by men, for men." A fascinating, top-class piece by Rose Eveleth
- The most remarkable globe in the world is in a Brooklyn office building. Via Atlas Obscura.
- This is a really interesting piece on how Apple works the three metals in its watches. By Greg Koenig
- Mars One finalist talks about how ridiculous and flawed the whole affair is
More good links will be released in tomorrow's linkfest on Not Exactly Rocket Science.
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And that's it! Thanks for reading.
-Ed