“Imagine trying to move by vomiting out of a giant straw, and flapping your skirt around very, very fast.” The cuttlefish is a mysterious and majestic creature, with eyes “in the shape of Charlie Brown’s mouth when he misses a football.”
Another excellent video from zefrank1:
“Playing hide-and-seek with a cuttlefish sucks. They don’t move, they just change color.”
Here are a few more cuttlefish being colorful: Continue reading
An historic snowfall in Cairo does not prove by itself that global warming is some sort of hoax, but that won’t stop certain people from saying so anyway. It is important to remember that at this point in history those people’s miscomprehension of climate science is a conscious choice on their part. Ed Brayton explains further.
The question of whether cats really do love unicorn horns has finally been answered:
Dogs, however…
I’ve often heard the story of how NASA blew millions of dollars developing a ballpoint pen that would work in space, while the Russians just used a pencil. The tale even popped up on The West Wing and in the 2004 movie Primer, but it never quite felt right. I suppose the point was to mock NASA’s large budgets and seeming inefficiency, but of all the problems with the story and the “smell test,” if you will, consider this: the moral seems to be that the Soviet space program, part of the great communist experiment of the 20th century, was somehow more efficient than the private industry-dependent American program. Ponder that for a bit.
A friend posted this picture on Facebook (h/t Paul), which led me on a brief investigation to confirm that yes, the pencil story is incomplete, if not complete bullshit:
If the above image doesn’t load, here are the highlights: Continue reading
![By NASA, ESA, ESO, F. Courbin (Ecole Polytechnique Federale de Lausanne, Switzerland) and P. Magain (Universite de Liege, Belgium) [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons](http://crypticphilosopher.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/12/600px-Quasar_HE0450-2958-300x300.jpg "By NASA, ESA, ESO, F. Courbin (Ecole Polytechnique Federale de Lausanne, Switzerland) and P. Magain (Universite de Liege, Belgium) [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons")
Research that has apparently been around for a while suggests that time and space do not actually exist. It is also possible that the universe is a hologram.
Somehow, I suspect I’m still going to have to pay the mortgage this month.
Photo credit: By NASA, ESA, ESO, F. Courbin (Ecole Polytechnique Federale de Lausanne, Switzerland) and P. Magain (Universite de Liege, Belgium) [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons.
Presenting the shoebill, Balaeniceps rex, apparently also known as the whalehead. It lives in Africa, and it appears to be mildly amused by you.
It’s also classified as “vulnerable,” which is better than “endangered,” but still not good. Who could harm such a majestic creature? I mean, as opposed to backing away slowly from such a majestic creature while trying to avoid direct eye contact.
Photo credit: Jimo.
People who know me know that I’m a somewhat obsessive Carl Sagan fan. (We don’t need to go into too many details, but while some people imagine their lives having theme music, mine has voiceover narration.) I was therefore excited to see that we have an effort to investigate Carl Sagan’s claim that there are more stars in the universe than grains of sand on all of the Earth’s beaches. The answer (well, estimate, really), via Fraser Cain at io9, is that yes, there probably are more stars than grains of beach sand (I’m not sure what Carl Sagan had against deserts.)
The total number of stars in the universe might be somewhere between 10 and 200 sextillion (that’s 1×10^22, or 10,000,000,000,000,000,000,000). The number of grains of sand on beaches (bear with me here) is somewhere between 2.5 and 10 sextillion. So Carl Sagan was right, maybe.
Also, in case you think 10 sextillion is a big number, you might wonder how much space that many atoms would occupy. Per io9, “about four times smaller than a dust mite.” Ponder that, but watch out for the existential dread.
This little frog has huge adorable eyes, and is a beautiful shade of blue.
And he will poison the sh!t out of anyone who messes with you.
Because he’s got your back. Just don’t let him actually get on your back. Seriously.
NOTE: It is possible that this is actually a ruby-eyed tree frog, Leptopelis uluguruensis, Photoshopped to look blue (h/t LLLReptile). It might also be a red-eyed tree frog, Agalychnis callidryas. It is probably not a blue poison frog, Dendrobates azureus (h/t Solmen). It’s still adorable, but I’d advise against giving it a hug unless you speak directly to a herpetologist first.
From the imgur album “Playing with your food,” submitted by Reddit user godsgimp. Don’t click all the way through if you like happy endings to your nature stories.
Via Reddit user macaronis, who writes “I think the Baby Kiwi is underrated.”
Obviously, they can be very cute, and also quite cuddly (via Rcrowley32): Continue reading
