Africa | Southern Fried Science

Eat hagfish, work at LUMCON, clone Vaquita, question floating trash collectors, and more! Monday Morning Mega-Salvage: August 13, 2018

Posted on August 13, 2018 by Andrew Thaler

Foghorn (A Call to Action!)

It’s time for Africosh! The annual Africa Open Science and Hardware Summit Heads is in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania this year!
LUMCON is hiring! They’re looking for two exceptional coastal and marine science faculty hires in any discipline. And they have the best “come work for us” video!

Flotsam (what we’re obsessed with right now)

Hakai Magazine is my jam this month.
- How an Epidemic Exposed the Ecological Importance of Sea Stars: The near eradication of British Columbia’s sea stars demonstrated the dynamic role they play in regulating kelp forests.
- How to Dismantle a Blue Whale: In Chile, a team of volunteers confronts stench and gore to ensure a new life for a dead whale. [Warning: Link contains graphic pictures of whale evisceration]
I’ve been following this project for almost 2 years. Awesome to see how far they’ve come. NinjaPCR is a WiFi enabled, Opensource DNA Amplifier and Thermocycler for Polymerase Chain Reaction developed by 2 hackers in Tokyo.
Plastic wrap made from shellfish and plants is completely compostable.

Hagfish (just Hagfish)

Yes, people do eat hagfish. Yum! Snake-like creature writhes, squirms on grill.

Hagfish are the emissaries of love, not war. Stop it. Synthetic ‘Slime’ To Help US Navy Trap Enemy Ships.

Fun Science FRIEDay – The Break-up

Posted on July 20, 2018 by Kersey Sturdivant

Our lives are a blip in the space time continuum. As a result, it can seem that the Earth is relatively static, with many of the large scale dynamic changes that shape our sphere largely unnoticeable to us occurring on geological time-scales. One such change is the movement of landmasses on earth, better known as plate tectonics.

Earth’s landmasses are not static but in constant flux. The Earth’s lithosphere (formed by the crust and the upper part of the mantle) is broken up into a number of tectonic plates that move relative to each other at varying speeds, “gliding” over a viscous asthenosphere. There is still ongoing debate about what force or forces causes this movement, but whatever the forces are they can also cause the plates to rupture, forming rifts, and potential leading to the development of new plate boundaries. When this happens landmasses break-up and new continents forms; this is currently happening in the East African Rift in southwestern Kenya.

View of East African Rift in Kenya from space (Photo credit: Google Earth. Data SIO, NOAA, US Navy, NGA, GEBCO).

Climate change denial, open-science hardware, some missing pink dolphins, and more! Monday Morning Salvage: May 1, 2017

Posted on May 1, 2017 by Andrew Thaler

Fog Horn (A Call to Action)

Are you represented by a climate change denier? Motherboard has put together this amazing guide to every climate change denier in congress. Check your state and give your congressperson a piece of your mind. Congressman Andy Harris may be sick of hearing from me, but I guarantee he’ll be gone from my district long before I am.

Flotsam (what we’re obsessed with right now)
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Fun Science FRIEDay – The Origin of HIV

Posted on November 14, 2014 by Kersey Sturdivant

Happy Fun Science FRIEDay

After a hiatus, I hope to get back to regularly writing these pieces. This week I was particular inspired to focus on an article I read about the discovery of the origins of the human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) and subsequently the origins of AIDS.

Scanning electron micrograph of HIV-1 (in green) budding from cultured lymphocyte. Multiple round bumps on cell surface represent sites of assembly and budding of virions.
Photo Credit: Centers for Disease Control (CDC)

AIDS burst onto the scene like a bat out of hell, wreaking havoc on an unsuspecting human population. First recognized in the early 1980s by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, better known as the CDC), AIDS went on to cause approximate 36 million deaths globally becoming one of the most devastating diseases in human history. But where did this affliction come from and what were the chain of events that led to the pandemic?