Nature involves Science, too! (Nobody Cares...)

[CronoCloud Creeggan]

No, the dire wolf has not been brought back from extinction

Colossal Biosciences claims three pups born recently are dire wolves, but they are actually grey wolves with genetic edits intended to make them resemble the lost species

www.newscientist.com

Looks like a big fuzzy white doggo. Just because it might look somewhat like a dire wolf used to doesn't make it one. Stupid biotech company braggarts.

 

[Dakota Tebaldi]

“You can use the phylogenetic [evolutionary relationships] species concept to determine what you’re going to call a species, which is what you are implying… We are using the morphological species concept and saying, if they look like this animal, then they are the animal.”

lol this is so stupid. I actually felt embarrassed reading it.

Literally these guys right now:

 

[Casey Pelous]

lol this is so stupid. I actually felt embarrassed reading it.

You mean you don't find, "Yeah, well that's just, like, your opinion, man" to be a compelling scientific argument?

 

[Dakota Tebaldi]

I see a lot of serious commentary along the lines of scary references to Jurassic Park, and I understand why, but I can't take any of it seriously because these dweebs didn't even do that. Like they didn't actually insert any real actual dire-wolf DNA into anything. They were just like, "hmm, seems like dire wolves had white fur" so they found a grey wolf gene that expresses white fur and made sure their grey wolves had that gene. And it was like that for every single "dire wolf" trait they wanted expressed. It's misleading to even call it a "hybrid" - it's whatever the equivalent of "mixed breed" is for a grey wolf, if grey wolves even have breeds, but it's still 100% grey wolf. So dumb.

Even the tech they used to do the gene selection isn't new at all, they literally just used CRISPR.

 

[Free]

No, the dire wolf has not been brought back from extinction

Colossal Biosciences claims three pups born recently are dire wolves, but they are actually grey wolves with genetic edits intended to make them resemble the lost species

www.newscientist.com

De-subscribed read: No, the dire wolf has not been brought back from extinction (archive.today)

 

[Dakota Tebaldi]

Happy Earth Day, everyone!

 

[Free]

Happy Earth Day, everyone!

Maglink

 

[Dakota Tebaldi]

Kilauea rockin it again:

 

[Argent Stonecutter]

My wife walked in on me watching volcano porn and spent the next 15 minutes talking about the idiots involved in active volcano tourism.

I've been to Kiluea but it was not venting anything but a bad smell.

 

[Free]

Space science is nature science, right?

It’s official! An interstellar object is visiting our solar system

There’s a new object in the solar system headed toward the sun, and it appears it came from interstellar space. We only know of two other interstellar objects that have entered into our solar system before, ‘Oumuamua and Comet 2I/Borisov. The nature of ‘Oumuamua is still a matter of debate, and the second was a comet from another solar system. And now we have a third interstellar visitor. First named A11pl3Z, the object is now designated as 3I/ATLAS, or C/2025 N1. The object’s trajectory indicates it didn’t originate inside our own solar system.

The International Astronomical Union’s Minor Planet Center first added the object to their Near-Earth Object confirmation list on July 1, 2025. The object is also on NASA/JPL’s website for Near-Earth Object Confirmation Page under A11pl3Z. Despite being listed as a near-Earth object, there is no fear of it hitting Earth or even coming particularly close.

 

[Free]

The Earth is spinning out of control!

Earth Spun Unusually Quickly in July and August 2025

Since 2020, Earth has notched up unprecedentedly short days midway through the year. It happened again in 2025 around July 9, July 22, and August 5.

www.timeanddate.com

Until 2020, the shortest LOD ever recorded by atomic clocks was -1.05 ms. This means that Earth completed one rotation with respect to the Sun in 1.05 milliseconds less than 86,400 seconds.

Since then, however, Earth has managed to shatter this old record every year by around half a millisecond. The shortest day of all was -1.66 ms on July 5, 2024. Earth is expected to get close to this again in 2025 around July 9, July 22, and August 5.

 

[Argent Stonecutter]

Autonomous planet is having an unexpected acceleration problem.

 

[Free]

Is there such a thing as a magnitude 0 earthquake?

I regularly cause magnitude negative three earthquakes.©2025 xkcd, inc.

www.youtube.com

 

[Free]

This is the kind of news that is perfect for this thread!

Peacock feathers can emit laser beams

The feathers can emit two frequencies of laser light from multiple regions across their colored eyespots.

arstechnica.com

Peacock feathers are greatly admired for their bright iridescent colors, but it turns out they can also emit laser light when dyed multiple times, according to a paper published in the journal Scientific Reports. Per the authors, it's the first example of a biolaser cavity within the animal kingdom.

As previously reported, the bright iridescent colors in things like peacock feathers and butterfly wings don't come from any pigment molecules but from how they are structured. The scales of chitin (a polysaccharide common to insects) in butterfly wings, for example, are arranged like roof tiles. Essentially, they form a diffraction grating, except photonic crystals only produce certain colors, or wavelengths, of light, while a diffraction grating will produce the entire spectrum, much like a prism.

In the case of peacock feathers, it's the regular, periodic nanostructures of the barbules—fiber-like components composed of ordered melanin rods coated in keratin—that produce the iridescent colors. Different colors correspond to different spacing of the barbules.

Both are naturally occurring examples of what physicists call photonic crystals. Also known as photonic bandgap materials, photonic crystals are "tunable," which means they are precisely ordered in such a way as to block certain wavelengths of light while letting others through. Alter the structure by changing the size of the tiles, and the crystals become sensitive to a different wavelength.

Tunable photonic crystals. Sound like what the next technology after CDs could have been.

 

[Free]

Good news, honey bee lovers!

Scientists found the missing nutrients bees need — Colonies grew 15-fold

Scientists have developed a breakthrough food supplement that could help save honeybees from devastating declines. By engineering yeast to produce six essential sterols found in pollen, researchers provided bees with a nutritionally complete diet that boosted reproduction up to 15-fold. Unlike...

www.sciencedaily.com

A new study led by the University of Oxford in collaboration with Royal Botanic Gardens Kew, University of Greenwich, and the Technical University of Denmark could provide a cost-effective and sustainable solution to help tackle the devastating decline in honeybees. An engineered food supplement, designed to provide essential compounds found in plant pollen, was found to significantly enhance colony reproduction. The results were published on August 20 in the journal Nature.

 

[Free]

Cassini proves complex chemistry in Enceladus ocean

Scientists digging through data collected by the Cassini spacecraft have found new complex organic molecules spewing from Saturn’s moon Enceladus. This is a clear sign that complex chemical reactions are taking place within its underground ocean. Some of these reactions could be part of chains...

www.esa.int

Scientists digging through data collected by the Cassini spacecraft have found new complex organic molecules spewing from Saturn’s moon Enceladus. This is a clear sign that complex chemical reactions are taking place within its underground ocean. Some of these reactions could be part of chains that lead to even more complex, potentially biologically relevant molecules.

"Potentially biologically relevant molecules." This is such a scientist's, low-key way to say "There could be life on Enceladus!"

 

[Free]

Blue dogs?! No concerns over radiation or mutation, though.

Dogs With Blue Fur Have Been Pictured In Chernobyl: What Is Going On?

We spoke to the Dogs of Chernobyl program to find out what's going on.

www.iflscience.com

Dogs with blue fur have been spotted snooping in Chernobyl, the restricted area surrounding the epicenter of the infamous nuclear disaster. Rest assured, the dogs have not changed color due to any freakish mutation from decades of radiation – the explanation is likely to be far more mundane, if not a little bit gross.

After a few failed attempts to catch the tinted dogs, the team eventually found a likely culprit: a nearby porta-potty.

“They appear to have been rolling in a substance that had accumulated on their fur. We are suspecting that this substance was from an old portable toilet that was in the same location as the dogs; however, we were unable to positively confirm our suspicions,” Dr Jennifer Betz, Veterinary Medical Director for the Dogs of Chernobyl program, told IFLScience.

Temporary dye jobs.

 

[Innula Zenovka]

The Garden of Forking Paths | Brian Klaas | Substack

Wandering around an infinitely complex, ever-changing world. Click to read The Garden of Forking Paths, by Brian Klaas, a Substack publication.

www.forkingpaths.co

(Free to read, I think)

 

[GoblinCampFollower]

Very good argument that it's basically impossible to define a "fish" in a way that includes all the things we think of as fish but excludes us.

 

[Argent Stonecutter]

I'm sure it can be summarized in two paragraphs and I'm not going to sit through this guy babbling on for a quarter of an hour to get there.