Supersize mice that are eating chicks alive are threatening the world’s most important seabird colony, on British-owned Gough Island in the South Atlantic….
It’s only later they get to mentioning that they’re talking about albatross chicks that are nearly a metre tall, and weigh 10kg. Link to full article.
Wikipedia is a fantastic source of useless (and useful) information. After an entertaining read of made up words in the Simpsons, I read the tomacco page….
In 2003, inspired by The Simpsons, Rob Baur of Lake Oswego, Oregon successfully grafted a tomato plant onto the roots of a tobacco plant, which was possible because both plants come from the same family, Solanaceae or nightshade, and furthermore both plants are dicotyledons. (It is not possible to graft monocotyledons, because the xylem and the phloem are distributed in bundles throughout the stem, and therefore it is impossible to align the vascular tissues of the two plants.)
Baur suspected that the normal looking tomato that resulted may have contained a lethal amount of nicotine, however testing gave it the all clear (although the leaves of the plant did contain nicotine) – where’s the fun in that?
Fainting goats have developed the most stupid evolutionary trait imaginable. This is the sort of animal that creationists will point to to demonstrate that Darwinism is a load of cobblers.
“Oh, what’s that? A lion? I think I’ll have a lie down.”
The video under the link explains it all, but basically, due to a genetic condition (myotonia congenita) the goats legs stiffen when they’re suprised or over-excited. Often leading to them falling over. Apparently shepherds used to include them in herds with their sheep as wolf fodder. Now they’re being bred for novelty value. Poor goats.
One of the other Australians in the climbing group was farewelled in style, as I discovered that climbing fibreglass poles barefoot can lead to friction burns. Two days later I discovered that climbing offwidth cracks in an indoor gym leads to removal of skin (I suspect this rule applies to outdoor offwidth cracks as well, although I may have to test this theory in person). These incidents have combined to lead to painful stinging shower experiences.
For the non-climbers: an offwidth crack is one too wide to wedge hands inside and too narrow to wedge one’s body inside – the style required to climb such a thing is best described as ‘interesting’.
Meanwhile, newsflash, I have a new way to entertain myself as work – planarity. I just finished level 11. It’s not very exciting. Nothing gets blown up. And I might even concede that it’s just a little bit geeky. Yet strangely addictive.
Happy dandelion for a hot and muggy day.
After a chance meeting with one of the other people living in my apartment block (well, it’s not really a block, just a converted townhouse, but anyway) I discovered there were air conditioning units living in the basement. Last night was stinking hot and muggy (I understand this trend is to continue for the next couple of months, and probably get worse – am unimpressed). I eyed off the ac unit lurking on my kitchen floor. After some awkward manouvering, there was then an ac unit in my kitchen window. I poked it. It wobbled. Hmm, it didn’t seem to stabilise in any position. So I closed the window on it, and hoped I wasn’t going to come home to the prostrate corpse of a passerby who had been crushed by my air conditioner. My kitchen’s nice and cool now though. I might have to start sleeping there.