#bedtimescience

Chimps consume equivalent of a beer a day in alcohol from fermented fruit Study finds chimpanzees’ enthusiasm for guzzling ripe fruit puts their ethanol intake at about 14g per day

There's so much alcohol in ripe fruit from natural fermentation by wild yeast that chimpanzees eat the equivalent of a beer every day www.theguardian.com/science/2025... #BedtimeScience 🍎🦠🍻🧪

Water droplets sliding efficiently off human eyelashes

Human eyelashes are a hydrophobic curved flexible fiber array that is perfect for catching and shedding water droplets to protect our eyes www.science.org/doi/10.1126/... #BedtimeScience 👁️💧😎🧪

Genomic and phenotypic imprints of microbial domestication on cheese starter cultures - Nature Communications Here, the authors characterize over 100 community samples and over 100 individual strains isolated from historical and modern traditional Swiss cheese starter cultures, showing imprints of millennia-l...

The bacteria that make cheese for us have been under domestication for thousands of years: constantly living in milk, slowly losing genes that would help them survive in the wild, perfecting the production of cheese www.nature.com/articles/s41... #BedtimeScience 🐄🦠🧀🧪

A giant clam https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Giant_clam

Giant clams and Heart cockles photosynthesize! They independently evolved symbiotic dinoflagellate partners that use photosynthesis to provide essential nutrients for their animal hosts #BedtimeScience 🐚🌈🌿🧪

Heart cockle shells, and a cartoon of them relaxing in some sunshine while feeding their photosynthetic endosymbionts

Heart cockles have fiber optic cable crystal windows in their shells that catch and focus light to feed their photosynthetic symbionts www.nature.com/articles/s41... #BedtimeScience 🐚🌈🌿🧪

"Molecular mirror-image" bacteria, decades away if research proceeds, might have some uses but are profoundly risky. Heterotroph mirror bacteria could not be intrinsically biocontained and could become broad pathogens. Research should cease. www.science.org/doi/10.1126/... #BedtimeScience 🪞🦠☠️🧪

Buffalo buddies have similar personalities

Graphs showing significant but maybe somewhat weak correlations between tension or dominance and proximity as a metric of friendliness

Best Buffalo Friends Forever 🐃😊 Researchers found that buffalos that hang out together tend to have similar personalities, which is very sweet. www.cell.com/iscience/ful... #BedtimeScience 🧪 (An alternative interpretation could be that no one wants to hang out with tense bullies)

Graph showing that stimming improves autistic people's self-efficacy scores

When autistic adults were allowed to stim, their self-rated task efficacy was the same as allistics. When stimming was not allowed they performed much worse. Stimming helps people cope with difficulties, and should not be ‘treated’. link.springer.com/article/10.1... #BedtimeScience 🧪

Long brown scar in the landscape of the Nullarbor plain made by a tornado

Australia isn't known for tornados because they mostly happen where there aren't many people. This 250 m wide, 11 km long scar in the Nullarbor was made in 2022 by a tornado with winds over 200 km/h, and was only discovered by satellite imagery. www.abc.net.au/news/science... #BedtimeScience 🦘🌪️🧪

Complex figure including a graph of the sizes of fossil dinosaur poo, with the largest being 12 cm in diameter

Some dinosaur coprolites were 12 cm in diameter 🦕💩😳 #BedtimeScience 🧪

There are three types of bromalites: coprolites 💩, cololites 🫄, and regurgitalites 🤮 #BedtimeScience 🧪

Reconstructed food webs showing dinosaurs evolving over 30 million years from small scared critters to dominating the planet

By studying fossilised poo, scientists reconstructed ancient food webs and found that dinosaurs became dominant because they weren't fussy eaters and thrived when the climate and hence the vegetation drastically changed in the Triassic. www.nature.com/articles/s41... #BedtimeScience 🌱🦕🦖🧪

A large glass of water

Want to prevent kidney stones, migraines, urinary tract infections and low blood pressure, or lose weight? Drink more water! "On the other hand, someone who suffers from frequent urination at times may benefit from drinking less" www.eurekalert.org/news-release... #BedtimeScience ⛲🚰🍶🧪

I am *very* impressed! ⬇️ Hiren @glyco.me deserves honorary Sardinian citizenship for bringing Su Filindeu to the bluesky 🦋 and #bedtimescience @benschulz.bsky.social 🧵audiences 👏🏻👏🏻🤩🤩 🧪

Spaghetti topped with basil and parmesan, angel hair spaghetti broth, totally inedible and invisible nanopasta

Spaghetti is 2 mm wide, the thinnest hand rolled pasta is less than 1 mm, and now scientists have made NANOPASTA, narrower than the wavelength of visible light. Not so good to eat, but a potentially useful starch based nanomaterial pubs.rsc.org/en/content/a... #BedtimeScience 🍝 🧪

A wasp drinking a beer

Wasps love alcohol. They seek out alcoholic drinks, and survive even after drinking the equivalent of 5 L of vodka, because they are incredibly efficient at metabolizing ethanol, helped by duplication of their alcohol dehydrogenase gene. www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/... #BedtimeScience 🍺🐝 🧪

The initial spread of peaches across eastern North America was structured by Indigenous communities and ecologies - Nature Communications Combining radiocarbon dating with ethnohistory, the authors describe the timing and tempo of the spread of peaches in eastern North America after the fruit’s introduction. They show that peaches were ...

Peaches were introduced to North America by the Spanish in the 1500s, and then spread through Indigenous communities via their land management practices. Indigenous societies were not just passive in the socioecological process of colonization. www.nature.com/articles/s41... #BedtimeScience 🧪

A sea mouse, Aphrodita aculeata

Aphrodita aculeata is a marine worm covered in iridescent spines. It's called a sea mouse because it could be mistaken for a drowned rat, while its binomial name means spiny love 😳 www.discoverwildlife.com/animal-facts... #BedtimeScience

ChimpanSEE, ChimpanDO: Grooming and play contagion in chimpanzees Behavioural contagion—the onset of a species-typical behaviour soon after witnessing it in a conspecific—forms the foundation of behavioural synchrony and cohesive group living in social animals. Alth...

Behaviour of animals can be contagious, but these are typically "negative", like scratching. Now researchers have observed positive social contagion in chimps - they "catch" wanting to play and groom when they see other chimps doing the same. journals.plos.org/plosone/arti... #BedtimeScience

How humans evolved to be ‘energetically unique’ — Harvard Gazette Metabolism rates outpaced ‘couch potato’ primates thanks to sweat, says new study

Humans sweat a lot and don't have much hair. That means we can lose heat efficiently, which allowed us to evolve a much higher metabolic rate than other animals, enabling more physical activity, big brains, and increased reproduction. 🥵💪🧠🐣 news.harvard.edu/gazette/stor... #BedtimeScience

Ready to feed Lawsonibacter asaccharolyticus with a cup of espresso

Coffee polyphenols feed the bacterium Lawsonibacter asaccharolyticus, so it's more abundant in the microbiome of coffee drinkers, and more prevalent in populations that drink lots of coffee. www.nature.com/articles/s41... #BedtimeScience

Artist's impression of Permian critters leaving footprints and belly prints in some nice soft mud

Recent landslides in the Italian alps uncovered 280 million year old fossils of insect, reptile, and amphibian footprints and belly prints 🐸🪳🦎 www.theguardian.com/world/2024/n... #BedtimeScience

Glaciation of liquid clouds, snowfall, and reduced cloud cover at industrial aerosol hot spots The ability of anthropogenic aerosols to freeze supercooled cloud droplets remains debated. In this work, we present observational evidence for the glaciation of supercooled liquid-water clouds at ind...

Small particles of industrial pollution can seed ice formation in water droplets in clouds, making it more likely to snow downwind. www.science.org/doi/10.1126/... #BedtimeScience

Physically holding cash gives us an emotional connection to money that makes spending feel real, so we spend much more freely with cashless transactions. www.emerald.com/insight/cont... #BedtimeScience

Biodiversity impacts of the 2019–2020 Australian megafires - Nature Data collected from more than 2,000 taxa provide an unparalleled opportunity to quantify how extreme wildfires affect biodiversity, revealing that the largest effects on plants and animals were in are...

The 2019/20 Australian megafires were devastating, but forest in large national parks recovered better. Expanding protected areas will protect biodiversity but the most important thing is urgently reversing anthropogenic climate change www.nature.com/articles/s41... #BedtimeScience

A beautiful glass of Hefeweizen glowing in the German summer sun

Wine is supposedly healthy, but it's probably mostly correlation, not causation. Beer drinkers have worse diets than wine drinkers, and tend to be less active and smoke more. www.eurekalert.org/news-release... In any case, ales are certainly much better for you than lagers 🍻😉 #BedtimeScience

Seems like a good time to restart #BedtimeScience 🥳 Daily bite-sized juicy pieces of knowledge