David Bradley's Sciencebase

The Orange Tip butterfly, Anthocharis cardamines, is a familiar spring species across Europe. The eponymous orange wingtips are present only in the males, but both male and female have a green mottled pattern on the underside of the wings, which helps with camouflage when they’re at rest. Male Orange Tip butterfly, a master of sexual chemistry When they’re not at rest, there’s some a surprisingly sophisticated bit of chemistry going on during mating. The male passes not only sperm to the female…

I’ve got a confession…I’m not necessarily who you thought I was…I’ve lived a double life, erstwhile part-time science writer David Bradley, but always art-school bluesman Stardust Stanhope. Here’s the write-up that’s destined for the Chronicle scoop… Born in the shadow of the shipyards during the coal-dusted winters of the early 1970s, Stardust Stanhope was never destined for a quiet life. While the rest of the North East was looking at the gutters, Stanhope was looking at the stars, or at…

I finally got a photo of an adder, Vipera berus, at RSPB Minsmere. It slithered across the footpath as we headed for one of the hides on our mid-April visit, and Mrs Sciencebase almost trod on it. Thankfully, she didn’t, the Common European Adder (or Viper) is venomous. Not poisonous note, venomous. If it bites you, you may well succumb to its venom. It is probably quite edible, rather than being poisonous. Common Adder, Vipera berus Anyway, there’s another linguistic point to be made about an…

Photography has always involved a process of development, an interpretive stage that sits somewhere between capture and presentation. From the chemical alchemy of early darkrooms to the algorithmic polish of modern software, photographers have consistently shaped their images in pursuit of clarity, mood, and impact. My recent heavily cropped, high-ISO image of a Dartford Warbler was, by any technical standard, far from ideal: noisy, soft, and lacking the crisp detail one hopes for in wildlife…

It’s quite magical watching dozens of Sand Martins darting about in front of the holey cliff at RSPB Minsmere, viewable from the cafe table outdoors. The cliff is basically a rocky bank full of small holes and those holes provide these migrant visitors with nest sites for this summer’s breeding. They’ll burrow in, up to a metre or so, and make a chamber lined with vegetation and feathers as a nest at the end of the tunnel. The Sand Martin, Riparia riparia, is a small and understated bird, it’s…

There is no excerpt because this is a protected post.

I’m well into my ninth season of garden moth trapping, which basically involves enticing moths into the garden using an ultraviolet lamp, hoping they will settle on the egg trays in the trap that act as roosting spots for them overnight, and then identifying, counting, and photographing them in the morning, before letting them back … Continue reading "Mercury – the winged messenger of the nocturnal gods"

There are countless AI medical diagnostic tools being used by health services the world over. They allow vast numbers of scans and images from patients, biopsy samples, and microscope slides to be checked over very quickly for obvious health problems. The NHS uses one called DERM to check suspicious skin moles. The AI is trained … Continue reading "Playing check-a-mole"

A paper in a well-known journal from a major publisher on the subject of using nanogels for wound healing is packed with bizarre phrases that have nothing to do with the paper. It came to light this week on BlueSky via research integrity expert Leonid Schneider of For Better Science. A quick scan of the … Continue reading "Reaction roll genocide"

I almost missed a moth in the garden last night, a Brindled Beauty, Lycia hirtaria, one of the geometer (inchworm) moths in the family Ennominae. It’s one of those species in which the males have plume-like antennae. It’s subtly, but distinctively patterned. Unfortunately, the one in the garden last night had lost most of its … Continue reading "Moth of the Moment – Brindled Beauty"

Once or twice a year, sometime in March and then again in early April, I put a little rubber bung in one of those little gauze laundry detergent bags and hang it a sunny spot in the garden. The rubber bung arrived from a lepidopterist supplies company  in March 2019 and is covered in a … Continue reading "Moth of the Moment – the royal succession"

First, it’s a tragedy when once-thriving coastal towns fall on hard times, leaving younger generations with few meaningful prospects. There was a time when fathers, grandfathers, and great-grandfathers could expect a job for life in fishing or shipbuilding. The same over the whole country, even the world. That all began to erode decades ago, as … Continue reading "Depressing conversations"

Back in late 2023, a paper appeared in the journal BMC Genomics (Nakano M et al., 24(1):735; DOI: 10.1186/s12864-023-09841-0) that demonstrated that an extract from the caterpillar frass (faeces) of the Swallowtail butterfly (Papilio machaon) could block the proliferation of colon cancer cells, specifically HCT116 cancer cells. I must confess I’d not checked in with … Continue reading "Swallowtail frass and colon cancer"