Rats Past.

Ash, the rescue rat who started it all in 2006. In the first photo, Ash was busy working on thieving my ring. He was successful in pulling it off, and immediately scampered off to Rat HQ to stash his lovely ring. I recovered it later, after distracting Ash with Jaffa Wars (breaking out my precious supply of London Jaffa Cakes, and getting into a ferocious tug o’ Jaffa cake war with Ash.) The ring I still have. Wish I still had Ash.

© C. Ford.

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.