Welcome! Let me be the first to congratulate you on joining the Street Turtle Rescue Squad. The Street Turtle Rescue Squad, or STRS, is an elite team of wildlife rescue personnel completely and solely dedicated to serving the turtle population in your neighborhood. Our work is vital. Without the heroic efforts of the Street Turtle …
Author: Prentice, the Science Platypus
Prentice is the mascot of Insanitek.
Why a platypus? Well, why not? It's unusual, somewhat crazy, and evolution pretty much smashed a bunch of concepts together and said, "Try that."
Tick and Mosquito-borne Illnesses Are On The Rise: What Can You Do?
Summer is the season for spending time outdoors, but unfortunately, this can put us in contact with pests that carry disease. Ticks and mosquitoes, for instance, can both transmit illness to humans, and new research shows that they are doing just that this season. Federal health officials now say that the number of people getting …
Dinosaur Chompers May Have Inhibited Their Ability to Chow Down
Carnivorous dinosaurs were thought to have ferocious bites that are unimaginable compared to the animals we see today. However, new research suggests that the bite force of some of these meat eaters was not as threatening as we might perceive. In addition, the formation of their teeth also made the “puncture and pull” method more …
Study: Soccer Heading May Cause Negative Health Effects
Soccer is a popular sport played by people around the world, but for those who start out playing young, there may be a risk of cognitive damage, depending on how often they use their heads – literally. A new study has discovered worse cognitive function in soccer players who frequently practice “heading,” or bumping the …
Report: 44 Genomic Variants Now Tied to Major Depression
Major depression can interfere with everyday life and make it difficult to function. Now, researchers claim that they have identified 44 different genomic variants (loci) that have a statistically significant association with depression. With this information, it may be easier for doctors to spot and treat the condition in patients in the future (“Forty-four genomic …
Frost Heave and the Surface Emergence of Rocks
Every spring, when farmers plow their fields, they find large boulders that weren’t there the previous year. Does the boulder fairy deliver these to the farmer? Nope! The truth is, the rocks have always been there, hiding deep in the soil out of reach of the plow blade. Thanks to the process of frost heaving, …
How One Mass Extinction Helped Pave the Way for the Dinosaurs
An asteroid may have hit the planet and caused the mass extinction of the dinosaurs, but what happened to Earth before then? As it turns out, a previous mass extinction may have paved the way for the dinosaurs. Recently, researchers took a look at all of the tetrapod tracks published over the past few decades. …
Do Coffee and Caffeine Really Negatively Affect Your Health?
If you’re a coffee drinker, you know how reliant you can become on caffeine. However, not everyone stops to think about the impact that caffeine may have on the body. Over the years, there has been a slew of research conducted on caffeine – and even specifically coffee – to determine its impact on the …
Confusion in the Produce Aisle: Team Fruit vs Team Veggie
Imagine ordering a fruit smoothie only to find out it is made with bell peppers, squash, tomatoes, eggplant, peas, olives, and corn. Ewww. While not the sweet treat you expected, the restaurant didn’t make a mistake. Technically speaking, you got what you ordered…a mixture of blended fruit. This misunderstanding stems for our muddled classification of …
New Fossil Reveals When Homo Sapiens Migrated Out of Africa
When did our predecessors, Homo sapiens, actually explore the grasslands of Saudi Arabia? According to a new find, they may have stumbled into this area a lot sooner than we originally thought. But let’s back up for a moment. It’s important to recognize that our species first appeared in Africa about 300,000 years ago (Dunham, …