capital L

[ID: five images of details from a larger digital drawing. it is a colorful long horizontal drawing of many animals and plants on a stylized riverside background, including a turtle, frog, hummingbird, fairy shrimp, raccoon, trout, and cicada. end.]

Details from an upcoming community mural project! If you happen to be in the Connecticut area on June 13th you're invited to come help paint. :)

Here’s a gigantic African land snail (Lissachatina glutinosa) to brighten your day! 🐌Found in parts of eastern Africa including Malawi and Tanzania, this jumbo gastropod can grow up to 5.9 in (15 cm)—making it one of the world’s largest snails! This critter inhabits forest edges as well as river and lake shores. It’s a member of the Achatinidae family, which includes a number of similarly sized snails, some of which have become invasive species outside of their natural ranges.

Pupping season is winding down as summer begins, but the harbor seal spectacular is just getting started!

After giving birth, harbor seals will linger at the rookery as mothers bond with their pups and teach them the ways of the water. The little ones follow in mom’s flipper-steps, learning important life skills like hunting, galumphing, and riding waves onto the beach for a well-deserved nap. It’s tough work, but somebody’s gotta do it! 🦭

Harbor seals are protected by the Marine Mammal Protection Act of 1972, a key U.S. law that protects seals, whales, otters, and other beloved aquatic species from harmful human activity. 

If you venture out for some seal spotting this summer, stay quiet and keep a distance of 50 yards. It’s more than just the right thing to do–getting too close to marine mammals like harbor seals can mean big fines and even jail time for a law-breaking human!

Splitting Hairs

While auditory hair cells in our ears sway around in sound, wafting like arms in soft jazz, or violently back and forth like a headbanger’s rock horns, vestibular hair cells help us to find balance. Each movement helps to send information about speed, acceleration and gravity to the brain. Examining bundles of mice vestibular hair cells (highlighted here in green under a high-powered microscope), researchers find one cell in each bunch, the kinocilium (pink), behaves differently. Kinocillia contain some genes similar to motile hair cells – which generate their own force. Although the presence of force-generating cells among cells sensitive to movement is surprising – kinocilia with similar genes are found in many species, including humans. Researchers wonder if their presence helps to 'prime' our ears, keeping us alert and balanced in the outside world.

Written by John Ankers

Image from work by Zhanhong Xu and Amirrasoul Tavakoli, and colleagues

Department of Biomedical Sciences, Creighton University, Omaha, NE, USA

Image originally published with a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0)

Published in eLife, April 2026

Over fifty years of data show a peak in PFAS (also known as "forever chemicals") content in seabird eggs in the 90s, followed by a decrease as regulations went into effect. The most recent findings show a 70% decrease of most common PFAS.

Setting Up Home

Focussing on cells in the lining (epithelial cells) of mouse intestine just as they begin to become cancerous has revealed how they're equipped to continue on their fateful path. Stress signals displayed by these early tumour cells triggers the cell bed – fibroblasts – on which they rest to sculpt a nutritious niche perfect for the cancer to thrive, and which is even sufficient to make normal epithelial cells become tumours

Read the published research article here

Image made using Leica Microsystems microscopy

Image from work by G. Skrupskelyte and J. E. Rojo Arias, and colleagues

Cambridge Stem Cell Institute, Jeffrey Cheah Biomedical Centre, University of Cambridge, Cambridge, UK

Image contributed by the authors and originally published with a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0)

Published in Nature, March 2026

Rosemary Beetle

Over the last 20 years, Kazakhstan managed to resurrect the Small Aral Sea, a.k.a. the North Aral, a small part of the Aral Sea, which once was the fourth largest lake in the world, bustling with life and abundance. Situated between Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan, the Aral Sea fell victim to the Soviet Union’s agricultural policies. In the 1960s, when both nations were part of the Soviet Bloc, officials began cultivating vast stretches of barren land in Central Asia by diverting water from the two main rivers that fed the Aral Sea: the Syr Darya and the Amu Darya. Without water from them, more than 90 percent of the lake’s surface area dried up, turning the sea into the Aralkum Desert, filled with toxic pesticides and fertilisers washed down from the cotton fields. After years of restoration efforts, the North Aral, located on the Kazakh side of the dried-up sea, has become an astounding success story in reversing one of the worst anthropogenic environmental disasters in world history. Health and environmetal consequences The consequences of draining such a colossal body of water were devastating and continue to affect the population of regions around the sea and beyond. It significantly affected the climate, manifesting in unbearably hot summers and harsh frosts in winter. The residents of the Aral Sea region were hit hardest. In the late 1990s, the child mortality rate in the region was the highest in the world, and the situation remains dire. Every year, storms disperse 80 million tons of toxic sand and salt from the lake bed, which poisons the population, leading to a myriad of chronic and deadly diseases. NASA’s Terra and Aqua satellites have been documenting the diminishing of the Aral Sea since 2000. Image from NASA Goddard Photo and Video. License: CC BY 2.0 Various regional studies found toxic substances, insecticides, and dangerous pesticides in the blood and urine of adults and children, and even in the milk of nursing mothers. Adults and children in the region often suffer from anaemia, cancer, kidney disease, and epidemic-spreading tuberculosis. Economically, the drying up of the sea killed off the finishing industry, one of the main sources of livelihood and food for locals. Until the 1960s, the annual fish catch amounted to 80 thousand tons, making the Aral Sea by far the largest fishery basin in Central Asia.

In addition to fish, which all disappeared from the sea due to increased salinity, the Aral Sea disaster also led to the extinction or endangerment of dozens of mammals, birds, and plants in the area.

Save a small part or lose all of it?

By the early 1990s, after the Soviet Union fell and Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan became independent, the Aral Sea stopped existing as a single body of water. It was divided into the “Big” Aral on the southern Uzbek side, fed by Amu Darya, and the “Small” Aral on the northern Kazakh side, fed by Syr Darya.

Connecting these two bodies of water was a narrow channel, which ran from the Kazakh city of Aralsk to the largest biological weapon testing site in the world, built by the Soviet Union on the so-called Vozrozhdenie Island, located in the Big Aral.

Uzbekistan failed to direct water from the Amu Darya, which originally fed 70 percent of the water to the sea. Consequently, the Big Aral became an evaporating pot for the water coming from the Syr Darya as well, which trickled down from the north, pushing Kazakhstan to prioritize saving the North Aral.

Put simply, there was not enough water to save the entire sea.

Thus, in 2005, Kazakhstan built the Kokaral Dam to trap water flowing from the Syr Darya and save the North Aral. Stretching 13 kilometers, the dam was built with the financial support of the World Bank.

By the time the dam was built, there were no fish left in the North Aral, and the shoreline had retracted 40 kilometers away from Aralsk, a former port town. In addition to building the dam, the authorities also modernized the irrigation and water distribution system to increase the flow capacity of the Syr Darya and save water for the North Aral.

Parts of the Aral Sea, a once-expansive body of water between Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan, have dried up, leaving boats grounded and the region desertified. Image from Flickr. License: CC BY 2.0

The results have been an astounding success. In 2025, the total volume of water in the North Aral increased by 42 percent and reached 27 billion cubic meters. This helped to decrease the salinity level by four times and reclaim 870 square kilometers of previously dried up sea bed.

Here is a YouTube video about the resurrection of the North Aral.

[you'll need to visit the article for this because i can't view or copy embedded yt videos]

Environmentalists also reintroduced fish to the sea — so successfully that the annual catch reached 8,000 tons, reviving the fishing industry and boosting local economic development.

Continued resurrection efforts

More good news awaits the North Aral in the near future. The Kazakh government has already announced that it will start implementing the second stage of the project to resurrect the North Aral and will continue cooperating with the World Bank and researchers.

Between 2026 and 2029, the authorities plan to make the Kokaral Dam wider and taller to help raise the water level from 40.4 to 44 mBS (meters of the Baltic system). This will also increase the water volume from 27 to 34 billion cubic meters and expand the water surface to 3,913 square kilometers.

In addition to reconstructing the dam, Kazakhstan will modernize and automate irrigation systems in the Turkestan and Kyzylorda provinces, through which water from the Syr Darya flows. This will further improve water resource efficiency and direct the saved water to the North Aral.

Here is a YouTube video about the next steps to resurrect the North Aral.

(this one apparently works?)

Ultimately, the goal is to improve the socio-economic standing of the population and the environmental situation of the nearby region.

Kazakhstan’s biggest challenge going forward is the sustainability of the North Aral. The interim success is built on man-made support, which makes the current landscape quasi-natural, characterized as “imperfect, unnatural, and weak” from the sustainability viewpoint.

Reports of significantly reduced fish catch amounts in 2025, from 7.8 to 3.9 thousand tons, and the receding water line underscore the precariousness of this victory.

Kazakhstan’s status as a “downstream country” also contributes to the sustainability problem, making it dependent on the upstream and neighboring Kyrgyzstan for a steady water supply. Not to mention the rapid melting of glaciers that feed the Syr Darya.

Why the blue tongue? For this reptile, it’s a form of self defense! Meet the blue-tongued skink (Tiliqua scincoides). Found in Australia and New Guinea, this lizard can reach lengths of nearly 2 ft (61 cm). Its body is covered in overlapping scales, supported by bony plates called osteoderms, which protect it from predators. But when faced with persistent foes, the blue-tongued skink has another defense: It will open its mouth, hiss, and reveal a bold blue tongue—startling foes with a flash of vibrant color. 

True Colours

Sea slugs or nudibranchs are often called the butterflies of the sea. Like butterflies, their striking colours result from are a combination of pigment-based chemicals, and structural colour – where light is separated into colours as it bends around tiny contours on their bodies. Stacks of tiny refractive crystals, a bit like pixels on a screen, allow this Chromodoris annae nudibranch to produce a bright silvery blue colour. But the vibrant hues are a warning – or aposematism – to the sea slug’s deadly trick. Nudibranchs are chemical thieves – wonderfully named 'kleptochemists' – reusing and modifying chemicals ripped from their prey for their own defences. In other research, human chemists find that some of these bioactive chemicals are toxic to cancer cells, suggesting nudibranchs could be living factories for future life-saving drugs.

Written by John Ankers

Video from work by Samuel Humphrey and colleagues; Cancer drug research by Servillera & Peña et al, in Marine Drugs, Aug 2025

Department of Sustainable and Bio-inspired Materials, Max Planck Institute of Colloids and Interfaces, Potsdam, Germany

Video contributed by the authors and originally published with a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0)

Published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Science (PNAS), March 2026

Anti-cancer Neurons

Melanomas originate in the pigment-producing cells of the skin and are the deadliest type of skin cancer. As they grow, they often incorporate peripheral nerve cells (like the ones coloured green in this melanoma pictured) and the presence of neurons has been linked to the tumour’s metastatic potential – their ability to spread around the body. However, new research indicates this depends on the type of neuron. While pain neurons seem to have pro-cancer effects, sympathetic neurons, which control things like blood flow to the skin, have an anti-tumour effect. Indeed, local depletion of pain neurons inhibited melanoma growth in model mice, but depletion of sympathetic neurons accelerated it. This effect was found to be mediated by the hormone noradrenaline, released from the nerves, which directed local immune cells to keep the tumours in check. Harnessing this sympathetic neuron-driven process could thus lead to novel anti-tumour treatments.

Written by Ruth Williams

Image from work by Tingting Liu and colleagues

Department of Biochemistry and Biophysics, Weill Cornell Medicine, New York, NY, USA

Image originally published with no restrictions – hence published here with as Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0)

Research published in Neuron, May 2026

I wanted the birds to look like they were actually in the space so first thing after doing the draft was to do a lighting study

after that I covered the walls in letters in lieu of a projector/vr headset bc i have neither of those :) Then i take a picture of the section of wall and superimpose the lineart over top of it so I can pencil in the lines

et voila

GIVE IT UP FOR BIRD NUMBUH 5, THE CANADIAN GOOSE, Branta canadensis!!!!

bird 5/14, Bluejay, Cyanocitta cristata

birds 6 and 7: American Goldfinch, Spinus tristis, male and female

BIRD NUMBER 8, (yellow shafted) NORTHERN FLICKERRRRR, Colaptes auratus

genuinely made me start questioning my sanity around day 3, it's half the size the of the goose, WHY did it take me 4 days to finish??

Bird number 9: Red-tailed hawk, Buteo jamaicensis

my chains are broken i am FREE. although i did have a great deal of fun with this, the barring on the wings itself took me like four days and i am READY to move on

this was a week and a half of continuous work so please excuse me for getting a little emotional in the bg 🙏

BIRD NUMBER 10!!! The Male Mallard Duck, Anas platyrhynchos

the male and female ones are gonna be posted separately bc they're taking a lot longer lol but yea! super happy i was able to capture the iridescent green of the head, i found metallic green and blue paint at a craft store that really made his head POP. it looks better in person i promise

ALSO!! As this is the 10th one, BIG announcement. The end is in sight!!!!! I plan to finish within the next 3 weeks and there will be a small dedication ceremony/ unveiling happening at the library to commemorate its completion on the 16th of May. If you live in the Western New York region and want to check it out for yourself shoot me a dm!

aaaand another one bites the duck,

we're movin right along with bird numero 11!! The lady Mallard!! Anas platyrhyncos

power couple that they are, here's bird number 12 and 13,

the Northern Cardinals, Cardinalis cardinalis

and NOW that they are complete, ITS GO TIME, in the next five days (library's closed for mother's day 😭😭) i need to have the GBH fully rendered, the names of the birds vectored, weeded, masked, applied to the wall, and then painted, plus additional cattails throughout. I may be able to get away with just getting the GBH done in time for the unveiling and then just have the names and cattails added later, but i'm gonna really try to get it all done in time. BUT, i have a plan. Part of why i take so long on these is because i really am just figuring it out as I do it lmao. there have been many a time where i am sitting on top of the ladder googling "how to paint birds" but I think if i take the time tomorro to do all that figuring out how to approach it beforehand, this will go a lot faster. I may also recruit some of my artist friends to help with the placing of the names... hrmm we'll see.

Anyways, shout out to the librarian who tracked down exactly the thing i needed so i could figure out where to place the highlights in my birds eyes, ur the real mvp

Bird number 14 out of 14,

The Great blue heron, Ardea herodius

thank you to everyone who reached out or got excited about this project, it genuinely gave me the fuel i needed to keep going. In total, the 480+ total hrs it took me to cover this wall pales in comparison to how long its expected to spend on there, hopefully imparting a sense of beauty and love for the natural world to the next generation and here's hoping i'm only getting started with these.

Oscillating Insight

This study investigates what underlies the spontaneous, oscillating firing of neurons in the retina of a mouse model of the genetic sight-impairing disorder retinitis pigmentosa. By analysing genetically different mouse models of congenital night blindness, the team finds the mechanism for these sight-disrupting oscillations is shared with those in other different outer retinal diseases

Read the published research article here

Image from work by Sho Horie and colleagues

Graduate School of Pharmacy, Ritsumeikan University, Kusatsu; Center for Systems Vision Science, Research Organization of Science and Technology, Ritsumeikan University, Kusatsu, Japan

Image contributed by the authors and originally published with a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0)

Published in Journal of General Physiology, October 2025