Sexy Beast by Brendan Kiley. Buster is feeling shy, as usual. Buster is so acutely shy that researchers at the Seattle Aquarium can't tell whether this giant Pacific octopus is a boy or a girl. If Buster is a boy, he'll have a special tentacle (the third to the right, going clockwise, from the front of its mantle) that is both an arm and a dick. And, since the suction cups on octopuses* also function as taste buds, his special tentacle will be an arm and a dick and a tongue—making all octopus sex fisting and intercourse and cunnilingus, simultaneously. The young blonde giving the "feeding demonstration" to a large pack of squirming schoolchildren explains these facts more delicately.
"What if you tasted everything you touched? " she asks. "Until they're full grown, octopuses are the cupcakes of the sea—everybody likes to eat them," the guide says. Some aquariums will pay $1,000 for a giant Pacific octopus—they're big, they're weird, and kids love them. Not that you'd want to. And sometimes they attack divers. Dr. The blue of berries isn't blue at all. That's kind of a gray zone really. If you blend this berry skin up, it won't be blue anymore, but if you blend a blueberry skin up, it will still be, because of pigment, which means blue is the actual MATERIAL'S color. You would be right in say that the berry itself has a blue color to it's look, but the berry itself is not actually a blue material, it merely looks it from a distance.
That's precisely the difference between pigment color and structural color, though. Both pigment color and structural color take in a broad spectrum of light and reflect back only select light wavelengths (and which wavelengths determines their color.) Pigments remain pigmented if you blend them up. Structural colors are still colors, but if you alter their structure you also alter which wavelengths of light are reflected. It doesn't make structural color not color, it just makes structural color not pigment. Let's imagine that I'm pretty. Brilliant series of posts. This otherworldly amphibian has a completely transparent underbelly. Fire Ant Swarms Form Living Life Rafts. "Superbird" Cormorant's Deep Dive Caught on Video—A Surprising First. Scientists in Argentina recently attached a lipstick-size video camera to an imperial cormorant's back. The result? Footage of the so-called Superbird diving 150 feet (46 meters) to the seafloor to catch a fish—far deeper than researchers thought cormorants could plunge.
"Superbird" Video: Watch Imperial Cormorant's Seafloor Dive The bird's-eye view footage shocked researchers, according to the Wildlife Conservation Society (WCS), which teamed up with the National Research Council of Argentina (CONICET) on the project and released the cormorant video Tuesday. "The assumption was that they fed on the surface, or just below the surface," said WCS biologist Martin Mendez, spokesperson for the project, which was led by CONICET biologist Flavio Quintana. "This is the first time we have seen them diving to the floor. (Picture: Cormorant Flings Octopus.) "The team wanted to document the situation of where these animals fed, what they were looking at," Mendez said.
The Loom. Your hands are, roughly speaking, 360 million years old. Before then, they were fins, which your fishy ancestors used to swim through oceans and rivers. Once those fins sprouted digits, they could propel your salamander-like ancestors across dry land. Fast forward 300 million years, and your hands had become fine-tuned for manipulations: your lemur-like ancestors used them to grab leaves and open up fruits.
Within the past few million years, your hominin ancestors had fairly human hands, which they used to fashion tools for digging up tubers, butchering carcasses, and laying the groundwork for our global dominance today. We know a fair amount about the transition from fins to hands thanks to the moderately mad obsession of paleontologists, who venture to inhospitable places around the Arctic where the best fossils from that period of our evolution are buried. (I wrote about some of those discoveries in my first book, At the Water’s Edge.) Both fins and hands get their start in embryos.
The Eight Super-Adaptable Life Forms That Rule Our Planet. A new species of bee that survives solely by invading other beehives. There are half as many microbes as we once thought, but they still outnumber us. By a lot. Like, a lot a lot. Why are human babies so helpless? The only time it pays to be stabbed repeatedly happens to be during sex. Eight things you didn’t know you could do with human sperm. "Why would you need huge quantities of it? " This question assumes a couple of things that are by no means conclusively proven: 1) I am highly skeptical that human sperm has any beneficial cosmetic effects.
Show me a few huge sample size, double blind FDA studies, and maybe, maybe, I'll change my mind. 2) If there is a beneficial effect, we don't have any idea at all how much will be needed. You say it might be small but this is no more certain than my saying that it might need huge quantities. "You don't eat huge quantities of vitamin pills every day do you? " See point two above. "Also why would you trust pharmaceutical plants more than a natural substance? " Because chemically there is absolutely no difference. "Taste is highly subjective so that's a poor argument. " Well, going by stuff I've frequently read in Dan Savage's column, the general opinion by men and women, is that human semen really isn't the most pleasant tasting stuff there is on this planet.
Harvester ants use their own internet for hive-mind decision making. 10 Limits to Human Perception ... and How They Shape Your World. Watch a Bunch of Fire Ants Destroy Technology. How Is It Possible That Olympic Athletes Keep Breaking World Records? Do people of different races have different voices? The First Oxygen Users? None of us would be here today if, billions of years ago, a tiny, single-celled organism hadn't started using oxygen to make a living.
Researchers don't know exactly when this happened, or why, but a team of scientists has come closer than ever before to finding out. They've identified the earliest known example of aerobic metabolism, the process of using oxygen as fuel. The discovery may even provide clues as to where the oxygen came from in the first place. To travel so far back in time, evolutionary bioinformaticist Gustavo Caetano-Anollés of the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, along with colleagues in China and South Korea, did a bit of molecular sleuthing. They scoured published genomes from all groups of organisms-although they didn't include viruses in this study-focusing on pieces of proteins known as domains. These pieces have their own distinguishing shapes that provide clues to the protein's function and can be categorized based on various characteristics.
Old Termites Blow Themselves Up to Protect the Nest. When trekking through a forest in French Guiana to study termites, a group of biologists noticed unique spots of blue on the backs of the insects in one nest. Curious, one scientist reached down to pick up one of these termites with a pair of forceps. It exploded. The blue spots, the team discovered, contain explosive crystals, and they're found only on the backs of the oldest termites in the colony. The aged termites carry out suicide missions on behalf of their nest mates. After their initial observation, the team carried out field studies of Neocapritermes taracua termites and discovered that those with the blue spots also exploded during encounters with other species of termites or larger predators.
Back in their labs, scientists led by biochemist Robert Hanus of the Academy of Sciences of the Czech Republic in Prague went on to show that the blue termites always had shorter, worn-down mandibles than others from the same species, indicating that they were older. 30. Invasive Species in the Hudson River Estuary. Secrets of the half-male, half-female cuttlefish revealed at last. Does oxygen deprivation make you stronger? The first cloned animals were cloned over a century ago. Clone really just means copy. When an organism has identical genes to the original. A twin is a copy(ergo clone) of the other twin.
Though in this case telling which is the original is a bit hard if not impossible. but which one is the real one? Because that is really all that matters. which one is the clone, which we all know is evil, and the original, which we all know is good? Without those definitions set in stone it is all magic and must be burned at the stake! Twins aren't clones. No idea if a human clone would have the same or different fingerprints, as, to my knowledge, human cloning hasn't been achieved. :) Which one has been in my house, eating my birthday cake, with my family? Fossils give hope that life can flourish on surprisingly primitive planets. The answer to your question lies in examining the fundamental forces of our universe. As we understand it we have gravity, electromagnetic, weak nuclear, and strong nuclear.
The latter two are the far stronger forces, the first the most enigmatic, but the second is what makes life work. Simply put, atoms react with atoms based on electromagnetic force. Covalent bonds forms when two atoms do not have enough electrons by themselves and so 'share' electrons. This type of bonding is generally much stronger than noncovalent bonds. Noncovalent bonds occur between larger molecules who have areas that positive or negative (for example, water is a polaric molecule, which is why it has surface tension and tends to clump). Not all molecules have polarity though, lipids (fats/oils/ect) are almost always non-power which is why they do not mix with water (for an example, imagine transporting powerful magnets in loose sawdust. Can you guess the subject of this photograph? Deep sea ‘zombie worms’ consume bone by drilling with acid. The Amazingly Disgusting Science of Cheese. Why Some Civil War Soldiers Glowed in the Dark. By the spring of 1862, a year into the American Civil War, Major General Ulysses S.
Grant had pushed deep into Confederate territory along the Tennessee River. In early April, he was camped at Pittsburg Landing, near Shiloh, Tennessee, waiting for Maj. Gen. Don Carlos Buell’s army to meet up with him. On the morning of April 6, Confederate troops based out of nearby Corinth, Mississippi, launched a surprise offensive against Grant’s troops, hoping to defeat them before the second army arrived. Grant’s men, augmented by the first arrivals from the Ohio, managed to hold some ground, though, and establish a battle line anchored with artillery. Fighting continued until after dark, and by the next morning, the full force of the Ohio had arrived and the Union outnumbered the Confederates by more than 10,000.
The Union troops began forcing the Confederates back, and while a counterattack stopped their advance it did not break their line. A Bright Spot And that’s just what Bill did. A Good Light. The Science of Being Scared to Death. "But stress and trauma don't just take out the heart. These catecholamines go tearing through all the muscles of the body. They cause muscles to burn so hard that they break down, especially skeletal muscles — the muscles that are connected to the skeletal system. As these muscles break apart, their proteins get into the blood, and from there into the kidneys. These proteins eventually overwhelm the kidneys, causing them to shut down and poisoning other areas of the body, leading to death. The process is, less poetically, called rhabdomyolysis. It happens suddenly, but more often it involves a long chase, with persistent muscle strain and emotional exhaustion.
" This sounds a lot like me. I have high anxiety, and can't help but be stressed all the time. Anyway, I have digestive issues I can't solve, I can't gain weight, and I have virtually no fat on my body. How Do Plants Know Which Way Is Up And Which Way Is Down? : Krulwich Wonders... Think of a seed buried in a pot.
Like this one: Robert Krulwich/NPR It's dark down there in the potting soil. There's no light, no sunshine. So how does it know which way is up and which way is down? It does know. More intriguing, if you turn a seedling (or a whole bunch of seedlings) upside down, as Thomas Andrew Knight of the British Royal Society did around 200 years ago, the tips and roots of the plant will sense, "Hey, I'm upside down," and will wiggle their way to the right direction, doing a double U-turn, like this: How do they know? He attached a bunch of plant seedlings onto a disc (think of a 78 rpm record made of wood).
If you've ever been at amusement park in a spinning tea cup, you know that because of centrifugal force you get pushed away from the center of the spinning object toward the outside. Knight wondered, would the plants respond to the centrifugal pull of gravity and point their roots to the outside of the spinning plate? ...that's what they'd done. The Failed Experiment That Shows Why Cheetahs are Twice as Fast as Greyhounds. I've thought about this before. I've had a greyhound ex-racer before, and many house cats. Seeing a Cheetah run its obvious they have the same general stride, and their build is really similar. But observing cats and dogs, it becomes obvious very quickly that cats are extremely supple and flexible, where as dogs are not nearly so. Dogs tend to be built for a purpose, at expense of all else. So the way that plays out is, even though greyhounds can run damn fast, its clear that they are built just for that one thing.
And as a result of the dogs general inflexibility it means they are not much good for anything else. So yes, the greyhound is fast, but only up to the limits of that inflexibility. Plants communicate with each other by using clicking sounds. Fungal infection causes tarantula to grow antlers. Cooked squid inseminates woman's "tongue, cheek and gums" SExpand This caused me to look up the definition of "inseminate" because I am nothing if not a pedant. Whoa, nellie! Firstly, there are definitions that align with my understanding of the word—you can't inseminate a mouth unless that's where your reproductive organs are too. Otherwise people giving BJs would be inseminated every day. *However* according to some definitions, only *some* people giving BJs are getting inseminated—there is at least one definition (Google's primary) that says you can only inseminate a woman, but it places no restriction on where the semen is being introduced.
See here. Articles. Playboy, January 2012 On a hay-mown crest, dozens of people are crouching in the dark. The Earth has turned away from the sun, and the sky has flowed down a color chart, from light gray to orange to bluish-black. A sliver of a waxing moon has appeared briefly and then slipped below the western horizon, leaving the sky to blinking airplanes rising from La Guardia fifty miles to the south, to satellites gliding in low orbit, to Jupiter and its herd of moons and to the great river of the Milky Way beyond. The crowd that sits in this chilly field in North Salem, New York, is surrounded by a ring of telescopes. There’s a Dobsonian, a giant barrel-shaped contraption that’s so tall you have to climb a stepladder to look through its eyepiece.
Small, squat Newtonian cylinders sit on tripods, rigged to computers that give off a weak lamp-glow from their monitors. “Just get snuggly. “We still have the remnants of what we typically call the Summer Triangle,” he says. “Oh my God,” the crowd murmurs. Honey bee apocalypse may not be caused by evil corporations after all. The Sexual Depravity of Adelie Penguins Is One of Science’s Dirtiest Secrets. How To Build A DNA Nanorobot. The three main problems with sexual reproduction, as explained by science.
10 Surprising Things That Bacteria Like to Eat. How copper kills flesh-eating bacteria. Meet Wolbachia: the male-killing, gender-bending, gonad-eating bacteria. Could your next hard drive be made with DNA? Whales have a sensory organ unlike anything we've ever seen. 10 Painful Insect Stings, as Measured by Science. Orangutans hold off puberty by up to 10 years just to be more attractive. Allergies | Health & Medicine. The Seven Weirdest Creatures Under the Sea. The weirdest mating habits of the animal kingdom, explained using humans. Ancient life, millions of years old and barely alive, found beneath ocean floor. A virus that creates electricity.
Meet the sarcastic fringehead, an oddly named fish who looks like the Predator. Are allergies our best defense against biohazards? Why is our skin waterproof? These little fish swap their gender roles every season. How Many Species Are There on Earth and in the Ocean? 10 Pieces of Evidence That Plants Are Smarter Than You Think. XNA is synthetic DNA that's stronger than the real thing.