Of course, the fun part is making up the name of the animal. Is it a Grolar Bear or a Pizzly Bear?
Pizzly sounds almost deprecating or demeaning. Like it's half of a real bear, just because it was the product of an interracial marriage.
Grolar sounds rough - like the kind of bear that would be tamed by an army of vicious goblins. Goblins, bwah!
From the article:
"Jim Martell (pictured at left), a 65-year-old hunter from Idaho, shot the bear April 16 on the southern tip of Banks Island (see Northwest Territories map), the CanWest News Service reports.
Wildlife officials seized the bear after noticing its white fur was interspersed with brown patches. It also had long claws, a concave facial profile, and a humped back, which are characteristic of a grizzly."
Perhaps the most interesting aspect is the mating behaviour of the bears:
"To prevent wasting their eggs, females ovulate only after spending several days with a male, Stirling explained. "Then they mate several times over several days."
Whoa - in order for a male bear to get a female 'knocked up', he's got to stick it out for a couple of weeks - wining, dining, seducing.
" In other words, the mating between the polar bear and grizzly was more than a chance encounter. "That's what makes it quite interesting," he added."
It's kind of sweet... a grizzly and a polar bear falling in love. Jungle Fever!
Everyone likes bamboo: it's cool-looking, it's useful, it makes you feel like you're in ancient China, it's fun to say.
But bamboo has an unexpected benefit, especially when combined with skilled horticulture:
"Heard of the United Nations program to plant a billion trees for the planet? Bamboo sequesters carbon dioxide at far higher rates than an equivalent stand of trees and releases up to three times the amount of oxygen."
"With tensile strength up to 52,000 pounds per square inch, bamboo is stronger than most steel, yet its fibers can be spun into a silky cloth blessed by natural antimicrobials.
...Unlike cotton, bamboo doesn't require pesticides to flourish. It needs modest amounts of water to thrive — some species rise a foot a day during growing season — and its root system can help stabilize hillsides and prevent erosion."
It's a fascinating plant with so many uses that we'd be better off going green. Jackie Heinricher figured out how to clone bamboo in a test tube and her company, Boo-Shoots Gardens, now produces over 2 million seedlings a year.
2 million a year and a foot a day? That means that all of the Boo-Shoot bamboo is growing 50 000 km every week. That's a lot of bamboo!
I'm in favour of planting big crops of bamboo in areas that have been deforested. The bamboo in Australia is quite pretty and gives the green parts of Sydney an interesting style. If only we had some fluffy pandas to go with it...
"Sometimes when no carrion is available golden eagles will hunt down owls, hawks, falcons, coyotes, young to adult wolves, wolverines and even young cougars and bear cubs."
Mama mia! That's incredible!
You a'int seen nothing yet... how about a video of a Golden Eagle hunting mountain goats? Yeah, you want to see it.
It's hard to hold something against the Golden Eagle, though. The mate for life, which is a little animalistically romantic, and the female lays two black eggs. Does that make black omlettes?
NASA usually calms our fears of an asteroid hitting the Earth.
"Don't worry," they say, "it'll never happen. Well, not never, but the probability is so small, it's like one in a zillion. Get yourself a Happy Meal and chill out, duuuuude
It's huge, really... after all, identical twins have helped researchers in their quest to pinpoint the origins of human behaviour. In fact, I'd suspect that quite a few psychologists have based their research on the idea that twins were genetically the same... the proposed idea may throw that out of whack
Today, a couple of excellent videos that highlight the sheer intensity of bad science out there...
First, a video about a museum tour group that offers Biblical-based tours for students. Found on FriendlyAtheist, the video follows two tour guides as they take student and their parents through a natural history museum. The guides make it seem like they're the only ones interested in science, as if scientists were following a belief system
It's a beautiful sight, the Chinook Salmon leaping over rocks and roaring water, making for the source of their birth, to spawn and then to float lifelessly back into the ocean.
They're also real tasty, smoked and served on a bagel with some cream cheese
It's such a simple experiment, but it validates something so unintuitive about the Universe that people usually say 'well, that's funny...'
Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle basically stated that we can never really know the location AND the momentum of a particle. Increasing the information about the position of the particle necessitates a lack of information of the momentum
Cibbuano
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