Read all stories written by Emily Moskal for Stanford Medicine’s Scope blog

Find all stories written by Emily Moskal for Stanford Medicine News Center

A futuristic technique conceptualized by Stanford scientists could enable astronomical imaging far more advanced than any present today.

By comparing the most energy-efficient running speeds of recreational runners in a lab to the preferred, real-world speeds measured by wearable trackers, Stanford scientists found that runners prefer a low-effort pace – even for short distances.

It felt like we were in a locker room, about to burst through the doors, ready to play ball. Sally Gale, head coach, I’d say if I didn’t know better, calls attention in her ranch barn where the Chileno Valley Newt Brigade gathers. Clad in reflective neon vests, counters, buckets and scrapers, the group is preparing for a night full of newt surveys.

For more than a century, the mouth of the San Lorenzo River had been a place for locals to swim, fish and relax before two jetties forever changed the river.

By using data from two lightning-spotting satellites, researchers measured explosions of thousands of small meteors and created a database that could help the planetary defense community.

Cows aren’t too bullheaded or dumb to learn new bathroom habits. Researchers showed this by toilet-training a small group of calves in a toilet they designed and dubbed the MooLoo. If they can scale up this approach to farms, the scientists believe it could help cut nitrous oxide emissions from cattle ranches—a major contributor to climate change, according to a recent report in Current Biology.

Opening up a portal into the earliest days of animal evolution, Monterey Bay area scientists have unlocked the genetic code of a comb jelly, a shimmering sea creature whose ancestors are among the world’s oldest animals.

Horror isn’t confined to movies. This Halloween, keep a lookout the next time you head to a park, or maybe even your backyard. These tricks are always a treat — until they rear their spooky heads out of the murk.

At Cal football games in the 1940s, when smoking was still permitted, as many as 20,000 simultaneous cigarettes would create a hazy cloud that hung over Memorial Stadium. That, says James Agee in Fire Ecology of the Pacific Northwest Forests, is when the beetles would show up. Masses of dark-bodied large insects would descend out of the sky, “alighting on the clothing or even biting” spectators. The phenomena, Agree writes, appeared “more disturbing to fans than a Stanford touchdown.”

The winter of 2017–2018 saw record-breaking numbers of seemingly lifeless, unresponsive turtles in near-shore waters and inlets of Texas—the largest cold-stun event recorded in the state and the second largest in the country.

Microbial mats that existed on sea floors prior to the “Cambrian explosion” provided the foundation for early animal life to arise, new research looking at trace fossils of that early life has found.

Did you know that Pokémon Go creator Satoshi Tajiri was an aspiring entomologist? Living in rural Machida, Japan, Tajiri's childhood was spent immersed in nature among rice paddies, forests and streams.

When I finished college, I headed straight out of Texas. But after two years in California, I returned home to the arms of my dying grandpa, who reminded me, “There’s no place like home.”

The American badger’s got swagger. With short legs and a broad body, it has a profile like a military tanker. It’s incapable of carrying out the agile pounce of a puma, but its confident waddle demands respect.

El Camino Real is Texas’ own Route 66; it’s the mother highway that carried travelers from Mexico to Louisiana long before concrete strips or railroad ties crisscrossed the state. As with that famed route, some communities along the way morphed into population centers we inhabit today, filled with varying cultures from those who traversed this camino, or road. Some communities just vanished, abandoned when railroads chose different courses.