Hat tip: Dave the Happy Singer
You can learn much from this video which offers a brief overview of recent politics and issues in Australia.
Yes. It is true. In Australia we choose our leader by dangling rancid meat and political portraits before a crocodile pit and hurl beer cans at those crocodiles.
Look at the picture below. This is quite likely an actual unedited 1940s photograph of the reopening of a bridge in British Columbia.
Can you spot the alleged time traveler?
What are your immediate thoughts and explanations?
Full story and investigation at forgetomori. It probably is not a hoax. But it also probably is not time travel. And it is interesting nonetheless.
Interesting quote on the ‘why then and there’ skeptical thinking: “Of course, because we know nothing happened there right? But if we are considering time travel, how can we know if in some other timeline something historical happened right there?”
You gotta admit, it’s shows quite some guts (and that’s just for using a pun in the title, oh, Dr Spiers…) .
Can anyone find a print of the complete article?
It sounds interesting.
Hattip: the ever awesome AIR
Creepiest story ever over at i09.
WARNING GRAPHIC IMAGE.
Some commenters over there havepointed out the original source for the story is an unreliable Russian tabloid, but still, inhaling a branch of a pine tree is a pretty big effort. And that’s a good 8 inches of lungs they seem to have cut out.
It’s just more proof that if we don’t kill those trees, they will kill us.
via iO9
I was going to post about some more interesting news…
Then I watched this…
… my post title barely touches what is awesome in this awesome steampunk pilot of awesomeness
I’m going to sleep now because nothing will ever be as awesome as the last 20 minutes. Nothing.
He would have this one.
Normally I when I bring up crazy bras they are usually Japanese – remember that one that turned into a shopping bag.
Well Americans went a bit further – with a bra that can turn into not just one anti-terrorist gas mask, but two.
I can see it now – during a gas attack, women calmly stripping off their undergarments in response … the chaos… the sweet beautiful chaos.
…and spraying it over Tasmania’s new growth forests.
Now this is an interesting “weird” science story. Dingo urine has been chosen as an innovative natural marsupial repellant.
But what sort of threat do kangaroos pose to lumberjacks and pulp mills exactly? Why is cyanide being used to kill native fauna in the first place?
I’m all a bit confused about this discovery.
It’s a new species of ant, found in Brazil, so they naturally are going around calling it “the ant from Mars“.
The ant is so strange and un-ant-like they are placing it in a new sub-family of ants. I’m not even sure if I should be actually calling it an ant (It’s a maybe-ant). The maybe-ant sub-family split off very early from other ant families in terms of evolutionary divergence – which has lead people to draw similarities between the situation of monotremes and other mammals. So, it’s also being dubbed the insect platypus. It does not have anything nearly as cool as a five-pronged schlong, poison spurs or even a duck-bill. It just has a shit pair of legs at the back.
That’s right. It’s a cripple. Nature quotes an entomologist as saying the maybe-ant “doesn’t even look like it could walk at all”. It’s also blind. Has a “delicate” mouth. And has pigmentation issues.* It probably hasn’t been discovered before because it has just been wallowing in self-pity for its entire existence.
The closest living relatives of ants are bees and wasps. The maybe-ant doesn’t quite share many characteristics with its other airborne cousins. Much like platypuses don’t really resemble modern day birds or lizards much either. Further examination may however show some similarities.
*Update: I could add that it is spineless too, but I think that’s just rubbing it in.
Has anyone thought that a plausible explanation for rats eating each other after a good cleaning is that a dirty scungy rat just isn’t quite so appetizing?
A nice well scrubbed pink little squirmer on the other hand… well… probably tastes just like chicken.
Kiron, the Bangladeshi two-headed baby, died from a fever after being taken home from hospital. His parents could not afford to keep him in hospital.
This happened in the time it took for me to drive home from work…
The baby had two heads, but one stomach, one set of genitals, and a single complete set of limbs (two arms and four legs) – click the link above for a photo.
This is a case incomplete twinning (developmental issues, not a bizarre mutation) – but would Kiron count as two babies or one? If you had to chop off one head, how would you choose?
The baby was apparently rather healthy (probably a victim of impovershed conditions, more than anything developmental) – could he have grown up normally? Would the heads have individual egos? How much control would they have over limbs?
Pictures. Stories. And an explanation are all available at Tetrapod Zoology.
Apparently I’ve been hiding under a rock lately. Is that where they hid Australia?
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