Deborah's Journal

Human eye spots single photons. Human eyes are capable of detecting a single photon — the tiniest possible speck of light — new research suggests. The result, published July 19 in Nature Communications, may settle the debate on the ultimate limit of the sensitivity of the human visual system, a puzzle scientists have pondered for decades. Scientists are now anticipating possibilities for using the human eye to test quantum mechanics with single photons.

M13: A Great Globular Cluster of Stars . M13 is a colossal home to over 100,000 stars, spans over 150 light years across, lies over 20,000 light years distant, and is over 12 billion years old.

A Crazy New Species of Beaked Whale Has Been Discovered in the Pacific. On Tuesday, a team of scientists announced the discovery of a brand new species of beaked whale. The findings, published in the journal Marine Mammal Science, detail the lengthy process of finding and identifying samples from 178 beaked whales in and around the Pacific Rim. Previously, there were only two known species belonging to the genus Berardius—Baird’s and Arnoux’s beaked whales—but these new findings indicate there’s another species hanging out in the North Pacific.

How Much You Need to Exercise to Make Up For Sitting All Day. There’s been a lot of finger-wagging of late about the health risks associated with sitting at a desk all day, or binge-watching our favorite TV shows. Now couch potatoes can rejoice because a new study has found that just an hour of moderate activity a day wipes out all the negative impacts of sedentary behavior—contrary to some prior studies claiming exercise didn’t help much at all.

Badass New Dragon Ants Remind Us Nature Is Cooler Than Fantasy. Writing today in PLOS One, a team of entomologists at the Okinawa Institute of Science and Technology has just described two new species of Pheidole, the most diverse ant genus on Earth. The distinctive feature of the newcomers is a crop of fierce-looking spines jutting out of their dorsal plates. The scientists couldn’t help but notice how this spiky armor afforded their specimens a dragon-like appearance, which is why they judiciously tossed out traditional Latin naming conventions in favor of Pheidole viserion and Pheidole drogon.

Distinctions blur between wolf species. Wolves are having something of an identity crisis. Gray wolves and coyotes might be the only pure wild canine species in North America, a new genetic analysis suggests. Other wolves — like red wolves and eastern wolves — appear to be blends of gray wolf and coyote ancestry instead of their own distinct lineages. Red wolves contain about 75 percent coyote genes and 25 percent wolf genes, an international team of scientists reports online July 27 in Science Advances. Eastern wolves have about 25 to 50 percent coyote ancestry.


Big-footed dinosaur. A tourist guide working in Bolivia has stumbled upon an enormous dinosaur footprint measuring nearly four feet wide. Experts say it’s one of the largest prints ever found of a carnivorous dinosaur, and a record for South America.

Nose bacteria fight Staph, even MRSA strains. The human nose harbors not only a deadly enemy — Staphylococcus aureus — but also its natural foe. Scientists have now isolated a compound from that foe that might combat MRSA, the methicillin-resistant strain of S. aureus. “We didn’t expect to find this. We were just trying to understand the ecology of the nose to understand how S. aureus causes problems,” bacteriologist Andreas Peschel of the University of Tübingen in Germany said at a news briefing July 26 during the EuroScience Open Forum. Investigating the intense interspecies competition in the nose — where microbes fight for space and access to scant sugars and amino acids — might offer a fertile alternative to searching for new drug candidates in soil microbes.