Thejoyofscience - This Is For All The Nerdy Girls

Usual interstitial pneumonia

It has the loose fibroblastic balls (pink balls) next to relatively normal lung parenchyma (thin septae) and a bronchiole (the blueish wrinkly thing)

(Via pulmonary pathology)

Medical lung is like… impossible. COP. DAD. DIP. NSIP. BOOP. POOP. SCHMOOP. No idea. It all looks the same to me.

About to burst

A geyser forms due to water being heated by the energy beneath the Earth’s surface. The water is heated past the normal boiling point of water, but remains in a liquid state because of the pressure of the water on top of it.

Eventually, enough water turns to steam that it begins blasting the column of water upwards. Once the first bit of water is removed, the pressure drops, causing more water to turn to steam and leading to a runaway eruption of the water.

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(Image: U. Müeller)

New neurons (in green) are guided to the neocortex  - responsible for controlling language and movement - not by glial cells, but by a protein called reelin.

Journal reference: Neuron, DOI: 10.1016/j.neuron.2011.01.003

Ms. Holly Aaron, Dr. Karen Dehnert, Dr. Scott Laughlin, and Dr. Carolyn Bertozzi

University of California, Berkeley, California, USA Specimen: Fucosylated glycans in a zebrafish embryo. Technique: Confocal microscopy

Monochrome image of a victorian butterfly tongue captured by Gregg Kleinberg with a Paxcam microscope camera under the microscope at 400x.

This is probably silly, but would you mind breaking down the genders of bees in the hive and some of the roles the various genders take on? I've heard mixed things about what gender drones are, males dying immediately after sex with the queen (?), and I'm wondering how and when the hive produces another queen! Thank you so much, your patience and knowledge are hugely appreciated. Also, are there any cool insects that can change sex like frogs and fish occasionally can?

There is no such thing as gender in animals besides humans and gender roles aren’t based on anything other then misogyny and they don’t exist within animals.

What you’re specifically asking about is called castes, and your typical eusocial species of bee such as a honeybee have three castes; workers, drones and a queen. 

A queen’s function within the hive is to lay eggs, while a drones only purpose is to mate. The workers are tasked with every other role within the colony including cleaning, disposing of the dead or diseased, nursing, guarding and protecting the hive, foraging for pollen and nectar, and so on.

The queen lays two types of eggs; haploid (half the amount of chromosomes which is 16 in bees) and diploid (both sets of 32 chromosomes) eggs. The haploid eggs become drones meaning that they have no fathers, this is a type of parthenogenesis called arrhenotoky.

The normal diploid eggs (chromosomes sets from the queen + one of the drones that mated with her) can become either workers or a new queen. Every single diploid egg has the potential to become a queen. It is diet in the larval stage that determines if the egg will be a queen or a worker.

The workers will create a new queen themselves by building a specific brood comb called a queen cup, once the old queen has laid an egg in them, the workers will begin feeding them entirely on royal jelly: a secretion from the hypopharynx of nurse worker bees while larvae that will become workers are fed some royal jelly but mostly a mixture of pollen and nectar called bee bread. Because the royal jelly is so protein-rich it provides the future queen larvae with the energy to develop into a sexually mature females. 

Once the queen emerges from her cell fully-mature she will seek out other recently hatched virgin queens and unemerged queens and killed them as they are rivals: there can only be one queen after all. When the virgin queen is the sole survivor she’ll then leave the hive for the first (and often the last and only time) for her mating flight. Bees mate on the wing, so swarms of drones will chase after her competing for the chance to mate with the single queen, these are called drone comets. 

If a drone is lucky enough to mate with the queen, he’ll insert his penis into her before it is torn off (and often left inside the queen). This causes the drones to fall to the ground and die shortly after. The queen will mate with multiple drones sporing their sperm inside an organ called the spermatheca in which she uses to fertilise and lay her eggs. 

Here’s a queen with the penis of a drone still plugged inside her, otherwise known as the mating sign.

Not all drones get this chance to mate, and often die outside the hive because they’re evicted for reasons like lack of resources, the hive not being healthy / strong, or it’s the end of the bee season going into winter. Drones are relatively expendable within the hive and are useless at feeding themselves so they die pretty quickly. 

Colleen Conway-Welch (1944-2018) was an American nurse, known for her public health advocacy and numerous projects. She served as Dean of the Vanderbilt University School of Nursing for almost 30 years.

She received her doctorate from New York University and went on to work in various hospitals and universities throughout the United States. Under her leadership at VUSN, the university introduced an accelerated master’s programme and a PhD programme. She was named a Living Legend by the American Academy of Nursing.

New teeth grown from urine - study

Who would've thought? 

via asapscience:

Could We Stop An Asteroid From Hitting Earth?

Bill Nye the Science Guy and AsapSCIENCE team up to answer this burning question. Do we stand a chance against a giant rock, on a collision course for Earth?

Well, that’s a pretty special guest there, guys! 

New goal: Do IOTBS video with Bill Nye.

Amazing Annual Monarch Butterfly Migrations

Monarch butterflies in other countries also migrate with the season, but it’s those in North America that travel the greatest distance. Each year, there are two major Monarch Butterfly migrations in North America. Those monarchs that live east of the Rocky Mountains fly down to Mexico, while the more western population stops in California. Monarchs do not like the cold, and as soon as things start to get a little chilly up north, they take off south (and west) for warmer climates.

The largest group travels over 1,250 miles from the Rocky Mountains to spend the winter in Michoacán, Mexico. The government of Mexico has managed to almost stamp out logging in the monarch’s wintering areas, a practice which once threatened the migrating insects. Working with environmental organizations and individuals, they have been encouraging communities to start eco-tourism enterprises by planting trees for the butterflies to nest. The monarch is a butterfly ruled by the sun. When the autumn sun reaches fifty two degrees above the horizon, the monarch reproduction cycle shuts down, and their great migration begins. When they begin their flight down to Mexico, they have never been there, yet every generation is able to find the exact same spot year after year where their previous ancestors spent the winter.

The second group travels from Ontario, Canado to spend their winters in Santa Cruz, California. You may wonder why the monarchs don’t simply stay and enjoy the warmer weather there year round. That’s because they need the milkweed plants on which their larvae feed, and those are more plentiful up north. So as soon as the weather starts to warm up, that’s where they return every year. Interestingly, not every generation of monarchs migrate. Some simply remain in their breeding ground. Those that do migrate are born at the end of summer or early autumn. Because of their trip to warmer climes, this special generation will outlive several younger generations that stay put. It will then be the migratory monarchs’ great grandchildren that follow the beat of their forebears’ wings.

in Ontario, Canada, in their summer home. It’s thought that the distinctive bright coloring of the monarchs acts as a warning to predators to stay away. Monarch butterflies are also poisonous and will make any animal that tries to eat them sick – hopefully sick enough not to try snacking on them a second time! The poison comes from the milkweed that they eat while they are caterpillars. This doesn’t always work, however. Certain bird species, for example, have learned that some parts of the butterflies are not as toxic, while other predators are resistant or immune to the poison altogether.

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