That’s a baby gorilla holding hands with a worker at the Lefini Faunal Reserve. It’s a touching picture (and there’s a much larger version available if you click on the image), but there’s an ugly story behind it. The gorilla is a “bush-meat orphan”.
“Bush-meat orphan.” That’s a phrase of understated unpleasantness.
I expect Carl Zimmer must have already seen this, but it’s cool anyway: Attenborough shows us some of those freaky parasitic fungi destroying insects.
The neurophilosopher writes on the virtues of being ugly—there’s actually a good reason why bat faces are decorated with odd protrusions and lumps and folds. Maybe “Yo momma echolocates” would be a good insult to remember.
Ah, Aplysia. Also known as the sea hare, Aplysia is a common preparation used in neurobiology labs; it’s a good sized beastie with the interesting defense mechanism of spewing out clouds of mucusy slime and purple ink when agitated. I well remember coming into the physiology lab in the morning to find a big bucket full of squirming muscular slugs in a pool of vivid purple goo. And then I’d reach in to grab one, and they were all velvety soft and undulating and engulfing my whole arm in this thick, slick, wet, slippery knot of rippling smooth muscle…
Ahem. Well. Let me compose myself for a moment. I will say that I always thought handling Aplysia is an amazingly sensuous experience.
If you looked like that, you’d be very sad, too. Especially if you’d just been trawled up from your nice home a thousand meters beneath the sea and made to pose for a photographer.
(via Jeffrey Shallit)
You know how we great clumsy gallumphing unsophisticated atheists are always comparing belief in gods to belief in fairies at the bottom of the garden or tooth fairies or whatever? We may have to revise those arguments.
Now we really have to worry. If some space probe snaps a picture of an orbiting teapot, we’ll have nothin’.
Crap. Sean knocks the props out from under my godlessness. Now I’m going to have to convert to something…what does everyone recommend? Catholicism, LDS, Scientology, etc., or should I just go all the way primitive, erect a phallus-shaped rock in my backyard, and start worshipping that?
The BBC is going to be showing a program with images of developing embryos (there are some galleries online) generated from ultrasound, cameras inserted into the uterus, and largely, computer-generated graphics. It’s all very pretty, and I hope it will also be shown in my country, but…these pictures violate all the rules of scientific imaging. The images are clearly generated by imposing artistic decisions derived from the conventions of computer animation work onto the data that was collected—I can’t tell what details in these embryos were actually imaged, and which were added by the CGI guy.
I can tell you that the way they’re rendered as free-floating individuals suspended in great airy spaces lit by a glow through distant membranes like stained glass windows is complete hokum, and the textures just look all wrong. They ought to be slimy, wrapped in membranes, and enveloped closely in maternal tissues. I hope the program includes some honest description of the process of making the images, with before and after photos, so viewers can see how much of the work is interpolated and artificially added.
New artwork at Olduvai George’s place: it’s the start of a series on cetacean evolution.
