Hedgehog! Eeeeee.

From rq, who says: Came home Wednesday morning 5AM from work, and woke the dog up – between the two of us, we disturbed Spiny on their morning constitutional. I’m 99% sure they were just taking their daily stroll while everyone else is ordinarily sleeping, and so did not expect an overly curious dog and human to be examining their passage through the yard. Yes, I picked the hedgehog up and moved to a slightly safer space (most magical feeling in the world, couldn’t tell you why, but it was very calming), and then I put the dog behind the fence to let them make a safe getaway, because as friendly as the puppy is, I don’t think she’s good at estimating her own strengths towards smaller beasties. The lighting was crap, but it’s the hedgehog that counts!

So cute! Click for full size.

© rq, all rights reserved.

Pigs Will Fly 2.

Artist’s rendering – Flying Pigs on Parade over the Chicago River.

Last night, I posted about Flying Pigs on Parade, a great art project, and one which needs help from people! Marcus gave me another reason to spread the word:

Enjoy, and please, if you can, donate to Flying Pigs on Parade, so that pigs will fly in front of Trump everywhere.

Naked Mole Rats: Surviving Oxygen Deprivation.

Rats, ever extraordinary!

Deprived of oxygen, naked mole-rats can survive by metabolizing fructose just as plants do, researchers report this week in the journal Science.

Understanding how the animals do this could lead to treatments for patients suffering crises of oxygen deprivation, as in heart attacks and strokes.

“This is just the latest remarkable discovery about the naked mole-rat — a cold-blooded mammal that lives decades longer than other rodents, rarely gets cancer, and doesn’t feel many types of pain,” says Thomas Park, professor of biological sciences at the University of Illinois at Chicago, who led an international team of researchers from UIC, the Max Delbrück Institute in Berlin and the University of Pretoria in South Africa on the study.

In humans, laboratory mice, and all other known mammals, when brain cells are starved of oxygen they run out of energy and begin to die.

But naked mole-rats have a backup: their brain cells start burning fructose, which produces energy anaerobically through a metabolic pathway that is only used by plants – or so scientists thought.

The full story is here.

Attaining Red.

I was a bit disappointed that the red hydrophilic beads weren’t actually red, but an odd pink. So, a bit of paint in the water took care of that one. :D By the way, if you have rats, don’t forget to secure them, because apparently, they make fabulous toys, and disappear completely, to no observable ill effect. Click for full size.

© C. Ford.

Badger Buries Cow Carcass.

Warning: If you don’t want bad Benny Hill skits in your head, mute video immediately. Badger buries cow.

After scientists set up cameras to keep tabs on the behavior of scavenger animals in Utah, they were surprised to discover a badger buried a small cow carcass, according to a new study published Friday.

While badgers, which are small, omnivorous mammals, were known to scavenge and store small food items underground, this was the first evidence of the critter storing an animal carcass larger than itself, according to the study, which was led by undergraduate students from the University of Utah.

You can read all about it here.