Science

Please send in your good wildlife photos (with “wildlife” construed broadly) if you have them. So far we can continue on.

Today’s bird photos are by Ephraim Heller, continuing with his pictures from the Pantanal wetlands of Brazil. Ephraim’s captions and IDs are indented, and you can enlarge his photos by clicking on them.

These photos are from my July 2025 trip to Brazil’s Pantanal, the world’s largest tropical wetland area and the world’s largest flooded grasslands. Today I have photos of a toucans, aracaris, woodpeckers, and “cardinals.” It’s a random assemblage of species, but all the adult males have at least some red feathers so I declare it to be a cohesive post.

Toco toucan (Ramphastos toco). The largest and most recognizable toucan species. Despite its size, the bill is lightweight due to internal honeycomb structure. Per Wikipedia:

Research has shown that one function is as a surface area for heat exchange. The bill has the ability to modify blood flow and so regulate heat distribution in the body, allowing for the use of the bill as a thermal radiator. In terms of surface area used for this function, the bill relative to the bird’s size is amongst the largest of any animal and has a network of superficial blood vessels supporting the thin horny sheath on the bill made of keratin called the rhamphotheca. In its capacity to remove body heat, the bill is comparable to that of elephant ears.

This one kindly posed against the full moon before dawn:

The enormous beak helps the toco reach fruit on small branches:

Chestnut-eared Aracari (Pteroglossus castanotis). Just a small, cute toucan:

Green-barred Woodpecker (Colaptes melanochloros). The green-barred woodpecker’s diet is almost entirely ants including their larvae and pupae. Yum!:

Little woodpecker (Veniliornis passerinus). As you can see, it is a hard worker:

Female:

Male:

 

Pale-crested woodpecker (Celeus lugubris):

Yellow tufted woodpecker (Melanerpes cruentatus):

Now for the “cardinals.” Why the quotation marks? Because neither the yellow-billed cardinal nor the red-crested cardinal are true cardinals. Both belong to the tanager (Thraupidae) family, not the cardinal family (Cardinalidae). Now why would you go and call a tanager by the name cardinal? I’m outraged by it. How did the naming bodies allow this? In my opinion it puts all of science in a bad light with the general public, like cold fusion.

Red-crested cardinal (Paroaria coronata):

Yellow-billed cardinal (Paroaria capitata):

Please write to your congressperson and ask them to immediately address this issue. Tell them to “follow the science.”

A network of powerful ground-based telescopes captured rare starspot-crossing events on TOI-3884b, revealing cooler patches on the star’s surface and rapid changes tied to its rotation. By combining multicolor transit observations with months of high-cadence brightness monitoring, researchers nailed down the star’s rotation period with impressive precision. These measurements allowed them to map the system’s geometry—and what they found was surprising: the planet's orbit is wildly tilted relative to the star’s spin.

Searching for technosignatures - signs of technology on a planet that we can see from afr - remains a difficult task. There are so many different factors to consider, and we only have the technological capabilities to detect a relatively small collection of them. A new paper, available in pre-print on arXiv but also accepted for publication into The Astrophysical Journal Letters, from Jacob Haqq-Misra of the Blue Marble Space Institute of Science and his co-authors explores some of those capabilities by using a framework they developed known as Project Janus that estimates what technology will look like on Earth 1,000 years from now in the hopes that we can test whether or not we can detect it on another planet.

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The post “Gain of Function” Research Is Misunderstood – And That Is A Problem first appeared on Science-Based Medicine.

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Camera traps in an area of the Leuser rainforest patrolled by NGOs spotted 17 tigers in 2023 and 18 Sumatran tigers in 2024, while surveys elsewhere on the island averaged seven

What can an exoplanet leaking helium teach astronomers about the formation and evolution of exoplanet atmospheres? This is what a recent study published in Nature Astronomy hopes to address as an international team of scientists investigated atmospheric escape on a puffy exoplanet. This study has the potential to help scientists better understand the formation and evolution of gas giant planets, specifically with many gas giant planets observed orbiting extremely close to their stars.

Duelling prairie chickens, a snake-mimicking moth and a once-a-year sunrise at the South Pole feature in the best images from the Royal Society Publishing Photography Competition 2025

arXiv:2512.00492v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We describe how the ESA Comet Interceptor mission, which is due to launch in 2028/29 to a yet-to-be-discovered target, can provide a conceptual basis for a future mission to visit an Interstellar Object. Comet Interceptor will wait in space until a suitable long period comet is discovered, allowing rapid response to perform a fast flyby of an object that will be in the inner Solar System for only a few years; an enhanced version of this concept ...

The JWST has made a name for itself by discovering mature galaxies in the Universe's early times. This time, a pair of Indian astronomers working with the JWST found a fully-formed spiral galaxy much like the Milky Way only 1.5 billion years after the Big Bang. The discovery, and others like it, are forcing scientists to reconsider their understanding of the cosmic timeline.

By blocking a molecule that pushes the immune system into overdrive, a vaccine protects mice from life-threatening anaphylaxis

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Feeling alienated in others' company, or "existential isolation", can happen to us all. David Robson digs into the psychological literature for a solution for one reader

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