Somewhere Different Now

Hey, LJ!  I've been a bit quiet lately, but I'm still alive.  I'll try to make a more substantial post later, but for now have a bit of a link and vid spam. (A few of you have seen some of these already on Facebook.)

Links

Whale-poo-sniffing dogs:  ladies and gentlemen, science in action.

Airdropping dead mice stuffed with acetaminophen over Guam to kill invasive snake:  if a cartoon evil overlord took up a second career as a conservation biologist, this sounds like the sort of plan s/he would come up with.  However, the brown tree snake situation in Guam is bad enough that all sorts of crazy stuff is worth trying.

Making bioluminescent plants:  You know the saying about sufficiently advanced technology being indistinguishable from magic? I think glowing trees would qualify.

Victorian Star Trek (via dameruth ):  photoshop win!

YouTube Stuff

( three youtube embeds under the cut to spare your f'list )

Behold,  snakes in the MRI machine.

I bloody love science.

Meanwhile, apparently the whales are tired of being the damsels in distress of the ocean, always in need of saving.  One decided to strike out against humans, starting with yacht owners.  We're going to need a bigger boat.  I bet whoever took that photo is SO PLEASED with her/himself.

Finally, this is slightly old news, but I want to be sure everybody heard about the crash of a car full of people dressed as zombies.  Now, the official story is pretty entertaining, but I have to say that this is the most obvious example of a government cover-up EVER.  Clearly the government is using the "zombie costumes" excuse to conceal the beginnings of an undead outbreak that let people who sustained fatal injuries walk away from the car crash.  Yeah, like we're going to fall for that!  Hopefully the zombies have been transported to a containment facility...but failure of containment is inevitable.  Prepare yourselves accordingly. 

Maybe we can convince the whales to go after the zombies.

Sign #529 that too much of my brain is occupied by Doctor Who:  while reading an issue of National Geographic with an article about Death Valley, I came across the passage below.

I am thinking specially of an area in the northwest section of Death Valley called the Racetrack, where, inexplicably, rocks as big as microwave ovens go zipping across the desiccated mud for distances of more than half a mile (880 m). The evidence is all there: deep tracks in the surface, with a rock at the end. One concludes, reluctantly, that the rocks somehow traveled a couple of hundred yards, leaving a telltale trail behind. There are over 150 of these roving rocks. But no one has ever seen them move.

Are you thinking what I'm thinking, friends?  No one has ever seen them move.  My first thought was "Hey, it's an ancestral form of the weeping angels!  They only move when no one's watching." 

Immediately after that came lots of thoughts about how weird the natural world is, how wonderful it is that we still have such mysteries on our own planet, how much geology rocks (cue pun groan), and whether I ought to add Death Valley to the list of places I want to visit (or stay the hell away since I tend to blink a lot!).  Still, that very first thought showed my particular brand of geekiness by combining evolution and DW.

The article (complete with sadly mundane explanation involving absolutely no wibbly-wobbly timey-wimey stuff) is available here.