A reader sent in this photo of a captured pelagic octopus and observer. I know…most of you are going to be interested in the mundane mammal here.
I don’t think the beast has any kind of scientific interest in that lovely cephalopod.
There goes Jim Kakalios, the University of Minnesota’s official consultant to big Hollywood movies. He got recruited to add math to the new Spiderman movie.
This is good news! Less of that silly CGI web-swinging, and more chalkboards full of equations…that’s a good movie!
Yeah, it’s true: the most phallic fruit of them all is pretty much sexless, and is an abomination produced by cruel human manipulation. Sorry, Ray.
How can you possibly play video games with 14 minutes worth of lag? There’s some awesome engineering behind landing a rover on Mars.
Lonesome George, the last of the Pinta Island Tortoises, died on Sunday. He left no survivors that are known.
His death marks the extinction of Chelonidis nigra abingdoni.
Red hair. Freckles. Pale skin. Soulless. What good are they?
Seriously — I have a red-haired son and brother and cousins, and you’ve got to wonder why evolution has spawned all these strange color variants — there’s no known advantage to ginger-ness, and plenty of disadvantages.
The domination of cats is now at an end, because I’m bringing out the heavy artillery.
Red pandas.
Baby red pandas.
Checkmate, cat fans!
I’ve been working up a science talk for the fall — I am going to do a basic review of many the mechanisms other than selection that contribute to evolution for lay audiences. And then I discover that T. Ryan Gregory has already done some of the work for me.
Maybe I should just plagiarize it?
(No, not really: my talk is less genomics, more development, and gets more basic than this one. But Gregory’s talk is very, very good.)
(via Sandwalk.)
