WTF, Scientific Papers?

[Is There Mush-room for Bettongs on Dirk Hartog Island? Environmental DNA Assessment of Food Resource Availability for Fauna Translocations]

[Children’s books about scientists convey demotivating messages]

May We Peel A Twenty Oner?

“Now suppose that a particular Twenty-Oner develops an unexcisable and deadly tumor growing from the outside layer into the eighteenth layer below. The tumor will not go any deeper into the Twenty-Oner’s body, but if left untreated it will eventually fatally disrupt the functions of the whole humanoid body. So the doctors suggest peeling off eighteen layers. This has been done before and is invariably successful. Indeed, peeling off layers is a cosmetic technique widely used among the Twenty-Oners.”

[Moo-ving mountains: grazing agents drive terracette formation on steep hillslopes]

[The following observation proves that the voice of the quagga is very similar to the barking of a dog.

My grandson Peter aged 1 year and 4 months who was with me during the Warsaw Rising in 1944, certainly the smallest citizen able to imitate the voice of a zebra.

When asked: “How does the zebra cry?” he shouted in a funny “a — ha, a — ha, a — ha!”. Once, when we were indoors, we heard the barking of a spaniel in the street. To my astonishment little Peter began immediately to imitate the voice of the quagga. Since the child never had heard the barking of a dog the voice he heard now associated itself in his mind with the well-known notion of a zebra and an immediate reaction followed.

Fig. 3. The voice of the Chapman zebra noted by the author. (From A. RZĄŚNICKI, 1933).]

[Oh deer! Videography reveals a range of defensive behaviors against a cervid by a ground-nesting bird]

[Fig. 1. Two beavers are using different materials.]

[Crunchy on the outside, chewy on the inside: evidence for vertebrate predation and recovery in the Mississippian blastoid Pentremites spicatus]

[A head of the curve: Bonnethead shark (Sphyrna tiburo) cephalofoil morphology and trophic ecology]

[FIG. 5. Coiling radius R vs. Ed^2/ρg for lugworm feces (blue), pea dough (red), rice noodles (black) and spaghetti (green). Error bars for the data point with the maximum error in R are shown for each of the four materials. The black line is the theoretical prediction R = 0.70(Ed^2/ρg)^(1/3).]

Coiling of lugworm feces reveals universal mechanics for the shape of poo

[You should look a gift ungulate in the mouth: Using 2D occlusal cheek tooth morphology to study the evolution of molarization in ungulates]

[Flipping plankton]

[The elephant (bird) in the room: unknown mechanisms and unresolved impacts of low DNA yields in avian microbiome research]

[The Smoking Penalty: Distributive Justice or Smokism?]

[Solenostomus snuffleupagus sp. nov., a hairy ghost pipefish (Teleostei: Solenostomidae) from the Southwest Pacific, with an integrative comparison to S. paegnius]