grrlscientist | January 15, 2007
The guy sitting next to me at my watering hole is having pancakes for dinner tonight, so I had to use this as a segue into sharing the most absurdly funny picture that I've seen on the internet (yes, I know it's been out there for years, but I've never had the opportunity to use it, until now).
I dedicate this picture to the guys who created the creationism museum.
grrlscientist | January 15, 2007
A mushroom that was showing a bit of its gills.
Image: David Harmon.
I am receiving so many gorgeous pictures from you, dear readers, that I am overwhelmed by the beauty of the images and the creatures and places in them. If you have a high-resolution digitized nature image (I prefer JPG format) that you'd like to share with your fellow readers, feel free to email it to me, along with information about the image and how you'd like it to be credited.
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tags: mushroom, fungi,nature
grrlscientist | January 15, 2007
Red-Winged Blackbird, Agelaius phoeniceus,
This is the bird named George, who lived in Central Park,
and was made famous by the book, Club George
by Bob Levy.
Image: Bob Levy.
People Hurting Birds
What appears to be the last male golden eagle, Aquila chrysaetos (pictured), in northern Italy was shot by a mindless idiot who lured the giant bird within shotgun range using the carcass of a dead sheep. According to the story, the number of animal killers has dropped in Italy from 2 million 20 years ago to 750,000. But the number of rare birds, including golden eagles, greater flamingos and…
grrlscientist | January 15, 2007Every year when MLK's birthday rolled around, I would read his "I have a dream" speech, along with others of his collected works. Now that it is a national holiday and now that YouTube is here, I can watch the speech on the holiday commemorating his birthday. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., is as close to a hero as I have, and here's several reasons why .. he is a gifted orator and an inspired speech writer. This streaming video shows an excerpt of MLK's beautiful "I have a Dream" speech along with subtitles.
Where have our fiery and articulate speakers gone? Why are we stuck with barely…
grrlscientist | January 15, 2007Ken Ham's Creationism Museum has attracted so much media attention and packed so many preview sessions that Ham is convinced that nearly half a million people a year will come to Kentucky to see his Biblically correct version of history.
The $27 million project, which also includes a planetarium, a special-effects theater, nature trails and a small lake, is privately funded by people who believe the Bible's first book, Genesis, is literally true.
For them, a museum showing Christian schoolchildren and skeptics alike how the earth, animals, dinosaurs and humans were created in a six-day…
grrlscientist | January 14, 2007
A small wasp washing its face.
The photo was taken on the path that runs behind the photographer's house.
Image: miz_geek.
I am receiving so many gorgeous pictures from you, dear readers, that I am overwhelmed by the beauty of the images and the creatures and places in them. If you have a high-resolution digitized nature image (I prefer JPG format) that you'd like to share with your fellow readers, feel free to email it to me, along with information about the image and how you'd like it to be credited.
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tags: wasp, insect,nature, entomology, zoology
grrlscientist | January 13, 2007
Image: NOAA
Between the effects of El Niño and global warming, 2006 was the warmest year on record since records were first kept in 1895. According to the preliminary data, 2006 averaged 55 degrees Fahrenheit, which is 2.2 degrees F (1.2 degrees Celsius) above the 20th Century average and 0.07 degrees F (0.04 degrees C) warmer than the previous record-setting warm year, 1998 (see figure, below). These temperatures were collected using a network of more than 1,200 U.S. Historical Climatology Network stations. The resulting data, primarily from rural stations, were adjusted to remove…
grrlscientist | January 13, 2007
An oak leaf in the photographer's backyard in Connecticut in October 2006.
It had rained that morning, so the leaves were all shiny and their colors were just outstanding.
The photographer says, "I had never thought of oaks as having great fall color, but it turns out I was wrong."
Image: miz_geek.
I am receiving so many gorgeous pictures from you, dear readers, that I am overwhelmed by the beauty of the images and the creatures and places in them. If you have a high-resolution digitized nature image (I prefer JPG format) that you'd like to share with your fellow readers, feel free to…
grrlscientist | January 12, 2007The bird flu has had some good effects: In an effort to avoid bird flu, the EU has permanently stopped the importation of wild birds, including psittacines. They now will allow only captive-bred birds from approved countries to be imported and sold in the EU. This move will serve to protect many wild populations of birds and parrots that have been over-exploited by the pet trade.
About 60% of the birds caught for import died before they reached Europe from poor handling or disease, Britain's Royal Society for the Protection of Birds said.
Furthermore, to prevent the movement of avian…
grrlscientist | January 12, 2007I absolutely loved this book, Brazzaville Beach, by William Boyd (New York: Perennial, 1990). Even though the book was published 16 years ago, I cannot understand how I could have missed it. But thanks to my friend, Coturnix, who sent the book to me, I had the priviledge to finally read it, so I include a review of it here. Not only is the prose surprisingly rich and evocative, but this book is probably one of the best examples of the new genre, LabLit -- short for Laboratory Literature -- which deals with real-life scientific themes without being science fiction.
This interesting story is…
grrlscientist | January 12, 2007A study carried out at the University of Tromso, Norway, found that blue-eyed men prefer women with blue eyes, whereas brown-eyed men and women with either eye color showed no such preference for eye color in their prospective romantic partners.
This could be tied in to the evolutionary laws of genetics for eye color; since blue eye color is a recessive trait to brown, a blue-eyed couple can only produce blue-eyed offspring, which helps reinforce the father's sense of paternity. If a child with brown eyes is born to a blue-eyed couple, there is no way that the blue-eyed father can be the…
grrlscientist | January 12, 2007
One of the Arizona desert tortoises, Gopherus agassizii that the photographer is a care taker of. It is probably Aphrodite.
Image: Mark Newton.
I am receiving so many gorgeous pictures from you, dear readers, that I am overwhelmed by the beauty of the images and the creatures and places in them. If you have a high-resolution digitized nature image (I prefer JPG format) that you'd like to share with your fellow readers, feel free to email it to me, along with information about the image and how you'd like it to be credited.
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tags: tortoise, reptile, nature, zoology
grrlscientist | January 12, 2007
American bison, Bos bison.
Bison have made a comeback after nearly going extinct more than 100 years ago. However, existing bison were preserved by ranchers, who frequently hybridized them with their cattle.
"They purposely crossed bison with domestic cattle to make a better beef animal," which they called cattelo, said James Derr, a geneticist at the Texas A&M College of Veterinary Medicine. "Bison did better in harsh conditions and are more resistant to parasites and native viral diseases." For example, bison do not contract Texas fever which afflicts cattle.
Even though these…
grrlscientist | January 12, 2007In a Federal Way school district near Seattle, a parent objected to the showing of Al Gore's film, An Inconvenient Truth, in his daughter's classroom. Perhaps not surprisingly, this same parent opposes sex education in the classroom;
"Condoms don't belong in school, and neither does Al Gore. He's not a schoolteacher," said Frosty Hardison, a parent of seven who also said that he believes the Earth is 14,000 years old. "The information that's being presented is a very cockeyed view of what the truth is. ... The Bible says that in the end times everything will burn up, but that perspective isn'…
grrlscientist | January 12, 2007
Rafflesia arnoldii flower.
Image: source.
The relatives of the largest and smelliest flower in the world, Rafflesia, have finally been found. This family, the Euphorbiaceae -- known for some of the smallest flowers in the world, too -- includes the poinsettia, Irish bells, the rubber tree, and castor oil plant.
The plant is found on the Indonesian island, Sumatra. It is a parasite that steals nutrients from another plant while deceiving insects into pollinating it. Its blood-red flowers can weigh as much as 7 kilograms (15 pounds ) and they smell like decaying flesh. And they even can…
grrlscientist | January 11, 2007Liberal media, my ass! If you believe that the majority of the mainstream media (MSM) is a bastion of "liberal" reporting, then you need to open your mind and read Lapdogs: How the Press Rolled Over for Bush by Eric Boehlert (New York: Free Press, 2006). In this book, the author examines the press coverage of the Bush administration during that turbulent year between September 2004 and September 2005.
Boehlert is an award-winning journalist who researches and writes extensively about media, politics and pop culture, and is a contributing editor to Rolling Stone. In Lapdogs, he unflinchingly…
grrlscientist | January 11, 2007
A southern alligator lizard, Elgaria multicarinata.
It was sunning itself on railroad ballast near Hood River, Oregon, spring of 2006. Specifically, on the Hood River Railroad, along Hood River, just east of the town of Hood River.
Image: Conrad Frost, Fisheries Biologist.
I am receiving so many gorgeous pictures from you, dear readers, that I am overwhelmed by the beauty of the images and the creatures and places in them. If you have a high-resolution digitized nature image (I prefer JPG format) that you'd like to share with your fellow readers, feel free to email it to me, along with…
grrlscientist | January 10, 2007According to a new national study using data collected by the Department of Housing and Urban Development, there are somewhere between 444,000 and 842,000 homeless people in America. It found that nearly 25% were chronically homeless, and it found that many of the chronically homeless people had mental health or substance abuse problems while others simply could not afford housing. This study also reported that while most of the homeless were single adults, 41% were families.
Some cities and states have done their own counts of the homeless, providing a mix of trends, said Nan Roman,…
grrlscientist | January 10, 2007So I have been back in my apartment for approximately 48 hours and already I have experienced the joys of having a nonfunctioning shower/bathtub because the hot water faucet cannot be manipulated into the "on" position even using a pair of pliars, and today, I found a leak in my ceiling that eventually took out a three foot in diameter section of paster that landed on my already soaked journals, destroying them.
The building super, who has got to the the worst building super on the planet because he doesn't fix anything except when under extreme duress -- and even then, he only does a half-…