Mr. Bruno's Blog

Some of you have been asking me, Can we look at atoms under a microscope? The answer is “No”, because atoms are waaaaaay too small to see under an ordinary microscope. How small? Check out this site that compares the sizes of very small objects, and lets you “zoom in” to get a feeling for how small cells and atoms are. You have to zoom all the way in to get to a single carbon atom. It’s hard to even imagine how small that is.

Limusaurus inextricabilis

Check out this gallery of animals from millions of years ago. A lot of them are pretty weird, like the 40-foot-long snake. The one in the picture on the left is limusaurus inextricabilis, and it was technically a dinosaur, not a bird.

It’s a little weird to think about birds eating other birds, but this one ate one in one big gulp.

There are more pictures at the link.

Here’s a cool video showing one way how ants in a rainforest can survive a flood:

A little creepy, but impressive.

Traitor Mouse!

I don’t have a cat, but I’ve definitely noticed that sometimes when cats want something they make noises that sound an awful lot like a crying baby.

And sure enough, scientists have determined that when cats want something – like food – they basically imitate the crying of human babies. That’s pretty clever, because most humans really, really don’t like the sound of a crying baby, so they respond to it.

My supervisor from Berkeley sends me (and all of her former students) lots of great links to cool science stuff. Fresh in my mailbox today: the Time Tree of life. It’s a pretty simple website that can tell you how long ago two groups of organisms diverged evolutionarily.

So, for example, a quick search lets me know that most scientists think that about 30 million years ago was the last time humans and (old world) monkeys had a common ancestor.

It’s a pretty neat service, and it provides a lot of information that has been pretty hard to find online in the past.