Saturday, September 29, 2007
Wolves Fish
Friday, September 14, 2007
Honey JarWatch this amazing slideshow where bees make a honeycomb inside a glass jar.
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Wednesday, September 12, 2007
Wait! I Thought They Were All DeadHoneybees are invading New Orleans. But...but...but..I thought cell phones killed them all off. Oh. I see. They are KILLER honeybees. Anything that’s deadly will never die in the media.
PermalinkAfricanized honeybees, a fierce hybrid strain sometimes referred to as “killer bees,” appear to have established themselves in the New Orleans area, the state agriculture commissioner said.
A swarm of the bees was captured about five miles from where demolition workers found a colony of Africanized bees in January, commissioner Bob Odom said Tuesday.
The most recent find was close enough to the earlier find that the bees might have come from the same colony. But they might also have flown ashore from a passing ship or barge, Odom said in a news release.
“Although the exact source can’t be identified, we have to assume Africanized honeybees are now established in the area and people should be careful when working outside,” Odom said.
The Department of Agriculture and Forestry keeps traps along a north-south line through the state and at all deepwater ports to monitor the bees, which are smaller and more aggressive than the European honeybees raised for honey.
“Because Africanized bees have been labeled ‘killer bees’ for years, there’s an idea around that they are bigger than European honeybees,” Odom said. “The truth is they’re actually smaller but a lot fiercer.”
Friday, August 31, 2007
Oh, Shut UpA book and website tells us what would happen after humans. This is to show us what an impact we’re having. In other words: FEEL GUILTY!
If there were no humans, who would care? These kinds of arguments make me laugh, but they’re also interesting to read.
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Thursday, August 23, 2007
Not a Good ThingAs a fan of redheads, I find this story disturbing.
PETER Beattie, Nicole Kidman and Michael Voss are. So were William Shakespeare, Christopher Columbus and Queen Elizabeth the First.
But the future doesn’t look bright for people with ginger hair.According to genetic scientists redheads are becoming rarer and could be extinct in 100 years.
The current National Geographic magazine reports that less than 2 per cent of the world’s population has natural red hair - created by a mutation in northern Europe thousand of years ago.
Global intermingling, which broadens the availability of possible partners, has reduced the chances of redheads meeting and so producing little redheads of their own.
Although it takes only one red-haired parent to produce ginger babies, two redheads obviously creates a much stronger possibility.
Some experts warn redheads could be gone as early 2060, but others say the gene can be dormant in the reproductive system for generations before returning.
Oh, wait...this is the opinion of experts. Well now I know it’s bullshit. It would take a whole lot of forced intermingling to do that in 52 years. And even so, it wouldn’t probably happen. People only have so many kids in a lifetime. And while races intermingle, people tend to go for their own race as a rule of thumb. People are tribalists by nature.
This is another bogus article, referencing so called scientists who obviously don’t understand the slightest thing about reality. How could red heads go extinct in 52 years? When there are red headed babies being born as we speak?
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Thursday, August 16, 2007
Hungry?Now that’s what I call a mouthful!
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Saturday, August 11, 2007
World’s Weirdest Creatures
There’s some here I haven’t seen before. The hag fish is especially disgusting. Check out the star nosed mole.
Hag Fish Slime
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Monday, July 23, 2007
Real Life Sea MonstersFascinating stuff. When I was a kid I wanted to be a marine biologist. We’re still finding unique species down there.
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Tuesday, July 17, 2007
Bee StingLike Global Warming, I suspect the mass bee die off is a cycle not a crisis. Or as we say in the tech world, it’s a feature not a bug.
Over the last year, large die-offs of commercial honeybee colonies, from unknown causes, have raised concern that an agricultural crisis is at hand. Now, however, some experts on insect biology and bee rearing are questioning how unusual the die-offs are, saying commercial beekeeping has long had a pattern of die-offs, and without better monitoring, there is not enough information to know if anything new or calamitous is happening.
If the problem is worse than before, they say, it may be because more bee colonies are being housed and trucked by fewer beekeepers, raising the chances of infestations or infections spreading.
Here’s the money quote.
“In the late 1970s we had another scare similar to this,” Dr. Burgett said. “They called it ‘disappearing disease’ at the time. But we never found a specific cause for it, we continued to improve our bee management programs and ‘disappearing disease’ disappeared.”
[Via Instapundit]
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Wednesday, June 13, 2007
Old WhaleA 50-ton bowhead whale caught off the Alaskan coast last month had a weapon fragment embedded in its neck that showed it survived a similar hunt — more than a century ago.
Embedded deep under its blubber was a 3 1/2-inch arrow-shaped projectile that has given researchers insight into the whale’s age, estimated between 115 and 130 years old.
“No other finding has been this precise,” said John Bockstoce, an adjunct curator of the New Bedford Whaling Museum.
Calculating a whale’s age can be difficult, and is usually gauged by amino acids in the eye lenses. It’s rare to find one that has lived more than a century, but experts say the oldest were close to 200 years old.
I didn’t know whales got that old. It’s a shame someone killed it.
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