Life Science

Here's your science factoid of the day: male Atlantic cod grunt during spawning season. It may sound like useless trivia, but that behavior could help fishery managers better protect cod stocks.

Underwater microphones - hydrophones - installed along the shipping channels leading into Boston already listen for right whales and automatically alert nearby vessels in real time. In fact, you can even get that information on your iPhone.

Now, a new study demonstrates the ability to use a similar method of passive acoustic monitoring to locate aggregations of spawning cod, known as haystacks.

Back in June, I spoke with Whitney Bernstein and Michael McMahon about their nascent artist-scientist collaborative, Synergy. The project has now reached fruition; eight artist-scientist teams have produced science-inspired works of art that will be shown at Boston's Museum of Science starting February 16th.

The exhibit spans media from music to abstract video, from sculpture to painting. Each work of art is as unique as the artist-scientist team that came together to create it.

Four sisters who claimed their breast cancer was caused by a drug their mother took during pregnancy in the 1950s have reached a settlement with a pharmaceutical company in Boston.

Robert Langer is a bit of a legend at MIT. He has more than eight hundred patents granted or pending, and has had a hand in creating twenty-five companies — and hundreds more benefit from his lab work.

When a journalist from Nature followed Langer for a day, she found herself exhausted by his pace and seemingly endless creative energy.

There’s nothing new about tension between New England’s fishermen and the scientists and regulators who oversee their industry. But the situation has reached fever pitch in the past two years, in large part due to a federally mandated deadline to end overfishing and the introduction of a new management scheme, known as catch shares, in which a total catch limit is set and the catch is divvied up among eligible fishermen.

I feel like I'm becoming a broken record. Each week, my guests wow me with just how little we know about their chosen field. Today, it was the diversity of life on Earth. Earlier this year, Encyclopedia of Life (EOL.org) passed the one million page mark. While that's impressive, it's nowhere close to the project's goal of one page for every species on Earth. In fact, Nathan Wilson, technical director for EOL.org and a curator on the site, says we don't even have a good handle on how many species there are on Earth.

Endangered sea turtles are continuing to show up stranded on beaches on Cape Cod, but the real activity is happening in the New England Aquarium’s rescue center.

It may be the last thing you’d expect to find inside an old, brick industrial building in a shipyard in Quincy: a giant pen of penguins. Huge tanks of rays, sharks and glittering fish. And now, pool after pool of sea turtles, along with a hospital-style clinic to treat them.

Frank Lalli is a personal-finance writer who accidentally stumbled on a healthcare story. Years ago Lalli was diagnosed with multiple myeloma, a type of blood cancer. When his coverage changed he wondered how much his medication would cost.

After 70 phone calls to 16 separate organizations, Lalli found wide variance: the cost of a year's worth of drugs was quoted between $240 and $17,000 per year.

Hurricane Sandy's winds, water and devastation once again thrust climate change back in the spotlight. The costs of cleanup will run into the tens of billions. City leadership now wrestle with how to head off rising coastlines and the imminent threat of superstorms and hurricanes.

The debate over climate change hasn't been completely settled, and neither has consensus on what to do about rising global temperatures.

Dust is unsightly, a sign of poor housekeeping, perhaps. But toxic? Unfortunately, yes.

In 2003, researchers from Massachusetts-based Silent Spring Institute sampled dust from 120 homes on Cape Cod looking for hormone-like chemicals known as endocrine disruptors. They followed that up with a study of 50 homes in California. In both cases, they found what they were looking for.

One of the chemicals they found in high levels was a banned flame retardant called PBDE. So they went back, again, to look for other flame retardants in those California homes. And, again, they found what they were looking for in abundance. One class of flame retardants, known as chlorinated Tris compounds, made up as much as 0.1% of dust. That's a lot for a single chemical.

Oceans cover three quarters of the Earth’s surface, so it’s no surprise that three quarters of volcanic activity happens on the sea floor. Understanding those volcanoes has ramifications for everything from climate science to the evolution of life. But studying volcanoes covered, in some cases, by miles of water is no mean feat. So it’s also no surprise that there are still plenty of discoveries yet to be made and questions remaining to be answered.