Would someone call security and please escort Kanye off my blog?
Pharyngula
Evolution, development, and random biological ejaculations from a godless liberal
Would someone call security and please escort Kanye off my blog?
Those darned Christians are always ruining our fun. Now we’re getting preemptive finger-wagging: we have been warned that sex with robots is always wrong. The author is afraid we’re going to someday run out and buy life-like android sex slaves, and then humanity will go extinct…because of course we’d all prefer to have sex with a perfect Christian woman an obedient, unquestioning, subservient machine.
(Shhh. While he’s busy looking for androids to cluck over, don’t let him know that the sex machines are already here. They aren’t humanoid at all. They tend to have shapes that vary from simple cylinders to oddly bumpy-twisted things that get around some of the deficiencies of our natural forms, and they vibrate. They also don’t seem to be leading to the disappearance of the species.)
I am shackled to my laptop, writing, writing, writing for a while as all of my body but brain, eyes, and fingers atrophy, so I’m going to have to send you off elsewhere to find your jollies. Gary Farber has compiled a fine collection of short, strange science links…well, some are only tangentially science, but they’re weird, anyway.
Someday, when my work is done, I must make the pilgrimage to Darwin, Minnesota, to see the world’s largest ball of twine.
You can now buy scents on the web that are inspired by HP Lovecraft. For instance, you could get Cthulhu: “A creeping, wet, slithering scent, dripping with seaweed, oceanic plants and dark, unfathomable waters.”
But what if you already smell like that all the time?
(via io9)
Look at the interesting snake found in China — it’s got a leg.
How can this happen? Genes are pleiotropic — they tend to have lots of different functions. The genes involved in making a limb are also expressed in other places; for instance, the Hox genes that specify identity along the length of the body are also reused in specifying identity along the length of the limb. What that means is that when the snake evolved limblessness, it didn’t do so by simply throwing away a collection of leg genes — it couldn’t, not without also destroying genes that functioned in generating its body plan. Instead, it evolved genes or modified the regulation of genes to actively suppress limb development…but the genes to build a limb are still in the genome, and still functional, and still actively working in other ways.
What most likely happened here is that some environmental agent suppressed the suppressor, allowing the old developmental program for a limb to be re-expressed. The retention of such programs is, of course, evidence that this animal evolved from limbed ancestors.
It would be interesting to know what triggered this change. It’s not likely to be genetic (the asymmetry suggests that), but is probably a consequence of some pollutants that disrupt development. It’s not a good sign, anyway.
Some good suggestions from the comments: it may not even be a teratogenic deformity. It could just be a poor lizard that punched a claw through the abdominal wall as it was being digested, and the snake was briefly trundling about in pain from the injury.
We need to do a dissection!
Breaking news: the evidence is all publicly available, plain as day.
(Oh, man, bad flashbacks…anyone else remember Reagan’s weird fascination with alien invaders uniting all of humanity? That dude was stone cold nuts. Brrrr.)
Perhaps there is a god…how else do we explain this lovely miracle? We don’t have to stop there, either — there are also these to explain. Of course, the god revealed by these wonders seems to be a bit of a libertine, so he’s probably not Abrahamic at all. But definitely a fun guy.
We just have to make the practice of sky burial popular! Maybe this photo set of a Tibetan funeral will help. (WARNING! Those photos show a large flock of vultures stripping a human body of flesh, with the assistance of some helpful Tibetans who break up the larger bones with hatchets. Don’t click on the link if you are at all squeamish.)
Boy, those are some happy vultures. I think I’d like to bring a little joy into the life a few carrion-feeders after I die, too.
Ooops, another warning: I’d looked at it with an adblocker, so I hadn’t noticed the very in-your-face porn ads on the page, so my apologies. I wouldn’t have thought it worth worrying over if it were just pictures of naked people, but ads that treat women like pieces of meat are far more revolting than corpses getting eaten by big birds.
Someone needs to start an organization with this name just so they can use this logo that I got from Glynn Lane:
Students could join, and then they could all run out and get these t-shirts:
Unfortunately, there’s pretty much nothing we could do to be even creepier than that other, better known Campus Crusade for some guy.
