I’m impressed with how effectively the visuals tell the story.
(hat tip to Hank Fox)
Pharyngula
Evolution, development, and random biological ejaculations from a godless liberal
Charity and art come together in a project to create structures out of canned food, which are then donated to food banks.
I fear I don’t have a big enough supply of canned food to pull this off at my house, though, and I don’t think we have the space, either.
One has to wonder how fundies react to the images enshrined on the floor of the state capitol building (you can also see a more panoramic view here).
For a rather different kind of squid, here’s a pretty image. There’s also a mammal in the picture, which I understand some people might find not quite safe for work, so don’t click through unless you can handle viewing an exposed superficial epithelium.
Every week, someone finds something that reminds them of me, and they send it off in an email. I think that every day someone strolls through a fish market and the PZ-spot in their brain lights up like a Tesla coil, triggering odd associations that can only be relieved by grounding them out in an email message. Some examples are below the fold.
The latest issue of Science has a fascinating article on Exotic Earths—it contains the results of simulations of planet formation in systems like those that have been observed with giant planets close to their stars. The nifty observation is that such simulations spawn lots of planets that are in a habitable zone and that are very water-rich.
Dynamics of Cats has a better summary than I could give, and it leads in with this lovely illustration of an hypothetical alien organism on one of these hot water worlds.
The only thing cooler than a cephalopod has to be a tentacled alien cephalopodoid. There’s a high-res version of that image at Dynamics of Cats—and I’ve got a new desktop picture.
If you’ve ever wondered what the heck Behe was smoking when he claims there are literal trucks trundling about on literal highways with literal traffic signals inside of cells, well, I don’t have an answer for you…but there is a wonderful Flash movie that will show you the Inner Life of a Cell so you can see what “molecular machines” look like, more or less. It’s a spectacular show. What you’ll see is the series of events that transpire when a lymphocyte encounters a cell surface signal that triggers emigration out of a capillary and into other tissues; it zooms rather abruptly from a cellular view to the molecules on the surface interacting with one another, then into the interior of the cell to see the response. All kinds of cool stuff fly by: actin and microtubule assembly and disassembly, kinesin-mediated vesicle transport, protein synthesis on ribosomes, ER processing, vesicle fusion, etc.
I do have a couple of gripes, though. One is an understandable shortcut: the cell is far too uncluttered, and events proceed in too directed a manner—there ought to be much more stochastic noise at the molecular level. We’re seeing chemistry in action, after all. Another is that there is no explanation at all for anything we’re seeing, it’s simply a weird and trippy voyage into a subcellular world. This clip was created under the auspices of Harvard scientists, so I hope there is a viewing guide somewhere, otherwise it’s only going to be appreciated by people who have already read Molecular Biology of the Cell(amzn/b&n/abe/pwll). I think it also needed a disclaimer somewhere that this video too is a visual metaphor for cellular activity.
But I’m being picky. Otherwise, it’s an excellent introduction to the profound weirdness of the processes going on inside a cell.
MinnObserver sent me this photo from the state fair: even here in the midwest, people are gluing seeds into the form of very angry octopuses. Portents? Omens? Subconscious resonance with the Great Old Ones? Who knows.
Also, Mark Chu-Carroll finds a similarly ominous sculpture. It looks to be in the strange genre of cyclopic cephalopods.
Somebody has a weird obsession with hybridizing terrestrial and aquatic animals, but even more strangely, there isn’t a single cephalopod in the whole collection.
Plans for my army of zombie cephalopod-cyborgs proceed apace. First target: Holland!
Go ahead, open the dikes—nothing will stop them.
(via My Confined Space)
