Monday Science Links

This set of science is a bit late, I know, okay a lot late but things have been hectic... Sorry and they'll come in more regularly again now.

• Bec at Save your breath for running, ponies looks at cuttlefish laying eggs on seahorses (and don't miss Cuttle's comment, either!): Oh Cuttlefish. I thought it would kind of go without saying that you can’t just lay your eggs wherever you want. People have their own shit going on, they don’t need to deal with yours as well. And I’m not telling you this just to be an arsehole, I’m telling you this because people are already talking about it at the office. Like, remember that time you went to the kitchen and that douchebag from accounts, who always takes forever at the coffee machine because he wanders off halfway through and you don’t want to move his cup because you’re kind of weird like that so you have to wait for like five minutes for him to come back before you can have your turn, was there? And he’s all, “Hey look. It’s raining.” And you’re like, “Yeah. Hey can you hold these?” “What? For how long? Hey!“ But you were already back at your desk, pretending to be on an important call or something, and that douchebag from accounts had to carry your eggs around for like three weeks?


• At Magma Cum Laude Jessica has a couple of posts on words that have come up in connection with the Eyjafjallajökull-Fimmvörduháls eruptions, jökulhlaup and tephra: Tephra is a major hazard associated with volcanoes. Bombs tend to be more of a problem in the vicinity of a volcano, but as many people in northern Europe are finding out, smaller particles like lapilli and ash can travel much higher and farther. Ash from a powerful eruption can reach the upper atmosphere, far higher than airplanes can fly; and because glass makes up a good portion of those ash particles, any plane that does fly through an ash cloud risks sucking glassy particles into its engines, where the glass can melt and re-solidify.
  


• Jessica at Bioephemera has some lovely Hubble shots: Space is amazing, isn't it? And Discovery has a wonderful slide show to check out, too.


• Brian at Laelaps tells us about bats with suction cups on their wings: In the tropical forests of Madagascar, there lives a very peculiar kind of bat. While most bats roost by hanging upside-down from cave ceilings or tree branches, the Madagascar sucker-footed bat (Myzopoda aurita) holds itself head-up thanks to a set of adhesive pads on its wings. Nor is it the only bat to do so. Thousands of miles away in the jungles of Central and South America, Spix's disk-winged bat (Thyroptera tricolor) does the same thing, but how do their sucker pads work, and why do they choose to roost in a different way from all other bats?


• And we'll end with a couple of more posts on "that volcano in Iceland", first Ethan at Starts With a Bang, Ethan looks at lightning in ash clouds; at Eruptions, Erik gives us a look at the raminfications; and at Language Log Mark Liberman explains how to pronounce it.
  

Enjoy!