The Nobel Prizes start getting awarded next week, so now is the time to make your predictions in a contest to win an iPad2. I’m afraid, though, I’ve already got a lock on it: I’m predicting that Walt Brown and Bob Enyart, the most brilliant scientific minds ever, are going to win it this year.
There is a Nobel for inanity, isn’t there?
(Also on FtB)
You can download the app today for £9.99…and the price of your iPad, of course, but all the cool kids have one of those already.
Dang, I was feeling so special because I had the book on Friday and the rest of America wasn’t going to have it until 4 October, and now it turns out I was only 3 days ahead of you all.
(Also on Sb)
Good news, everyone! The dire predictions of the IPCC about the effects of CO2 have been found to be wrong. (I expect that’s all the denialists will tell you.)
The bad news is that the actual observations are showing that the IPCC predictions were too conservative, and that the pace of climate change is faster than predicted.
It’s Monday, so you’re probably already depressed, and a little more pessimism won’t make you feel much worse…so watch the video, have a cup of coffee, despair.
(Also on Sb)
This is the way to help save endangered species: encourage humans to reproduce less. The Center for Biological Diversity is distributing Endangered Species Condoms as part of their 7 Billion and Counting campaign to increase awareness of the effects of overpopulation. More non-procreative recreational sex…to save the planet!
(Also on Sb)
They are utterly adorable, and I feel the stirrings of the maternal impulse deep in my mantle. The way their little bodies bob as they swim…awww, for cute.
(via Deep Sea News)
(Also on Sb)
This is a beautiful illustration of the flaw in applying human sexual conventions to non-human organisms. researchers studying deep-sea squid found that all of the squid, male and female alike, were speckled with sperm packets — the males just flick these things out at any passing squid, on the chance that it’s a female. It’s silly to call this bisexuality or same-sex mating, though — it’s pretty darned common in invertebrates. Many species of sea urchins, for instance, indulge in synchronized ejaculatory orgies: on one or a few days a year, all of the individuals in a colony simultaneously spew eggs and sperm into the water, to the degree that they can turn the ocean milky white with semen and ova. Do we call that homosexuality? Is it even right to refer to it as an “orgy”? It’s just indiscriminate fertilization.
The authors of the paper, at least, get it exactly right.
In the Royal Society paper the team writes: “In the deep, dark habitat where O. deletron lives, potential mates are few and far between.
“We suggest that same-sex mating behaviour by O. deletron is part of a reproductive strategy that maximises success by inducing males to indiscriminately and swiftly inseminate every [squid] that they encounter.”
It’s every boy’s dream, just hosing everything down with semen, just to be sure.
(Also on Sb)
