The Internet – History’s Greatest Mass Murderer

Conservationists have pointed the finger at Nobel Peace Prize-nominee and abstract concept the Internet as one of the greatest threats to rare and threatened animals the world over.

In all fairness, it does not appear that the Internet has actually developed sentience and reached out from cyberspace, intent on murdering both our cutest and most threatened species. All it has done is what it does – make people more connected. And as is so often the case, the people connected in this way are truly awful excuses for human beings – namely wealthy people who like to eat, snort, or sleep on the pelts of rare animals and other people who have no qualms about hunting down and killing the aforementioned rare animals. The impact of this is clear – we can either keep endangered species like polar bears and rhinos OR we can have the Internet. And since endangered animals, of all but the best trained variety, do not bring us porn, it is an easy bet which one we will be  keeping around.

This news does deal a blow to the Internet’s chances at the Nobel peace prize, though. Try and name another Nobel Peace Prize-winner who was responsible for the annihilation of a species. If you’re thinking of Martin Luther King, Jr., think again! Despite the reverend’s best efforts, small groups of pandas remain extant in the wild, dealing a crushing blow to the American civil rights movement.

 

Grizzly Is The New Polar

The most dangerous thing to threaten polar bear habitats the freaking ice melting out from under them, which is totally NOT caused by global warming, you filthy hippie, is grizzly bears. Sick of being consigned to more southerly habitats, grizzly bears are arriving with troubling regularity in what scientists traditionally think of as polar bear habitat in Manitoba, Canada.

The bad news is that the two biggest species of bear in the world slugging it out with their very survival at stake is terribly, terribly sad, and promises to be just one more strike against the polar bears already dimming prospects for long term survival.

The good news? Dude, did you not see the part about “the two biggest species of bear in the world slugging it out with their very survival at stake?” This will be a super awesome animal fight, on par with shark versus crocodile, gorilla versus anaconda, and boxing kangaroo versus talkshow.

Place your bets on the future of all ursine-kind today and get prepared for the battle of the century. Round One, FIGHT!

 

Prehistoric Death Turkey!

It is a generally accepted scientific fact that dinosaurs are, technically speaking, pretty awesome. But apparently, the speedy ground dwelling carnivore known as Sinornithosaurus was even more awesome than previously suspected. Not only was it a feathered raptor about the size of a turkey that ran down it’s prey, but evidence suggests it also had venomous fangs, reminiscent of those found in rear fanged snakes today. The venom probably didn’t kill prey outright, but merely disabled it, making it a simpler meal for the sinornithosaurus.

But still, venomous fangs!And really folks, is there anything so cool that venomous fangs don’t make it just a little more cool?

I thought not.

 

The Cold, Unfeeling, Metal Spirit Of St. Louis

After the death of all of it’s polar bears, presumably because being dead is simply a more reasonable and respectable lifestyle choice than being a polar bear in St. Louis, the St. Louis Zoo has decided to make the most retarded decision possible over what to do for their Christmas display. That decision? To replace the dead bears with animatronic facsimiles. Which is to say, robotic polar bears.

Merry Fucking Christmas, Kids.

Really shitty robotic polar bears.

You can tell this is a retarded decision because PETA supports it, and it’s a well known fact that PETA is a front group for the meat industry designed to make every person who has even a semblance of respect for animal rights look like a brain damaged asshole through the consistently ludicrous, offensive and well publicized actions of PETA.

While Gizmodo expressed the completely reasonable concern that the development of a robot bear army is bad news, there is worse to this decision than just it’s implications in the inevitable robot uprising. It will serve as a nightmarish warning to the rest of the zoo’s charges, who will only be able to reasonably conclude that their departed bretheren have been returned to them in a state of horrific un-life, unable even in death to escape the dread clutches of St. Louis.

The folks at Chuck E. Cheese have to be fucking elated at this development though, knowing that they have a whole slew of new business opportunities building shitty robotic versions of actual animals that are too difficult or expensive for small zoos to acquire or keep. Did your rare white tiger get mauled to death by a pair of lions? Why not replace it with a version that costs half as much, never needs medical care or food, and erupts into a rousing chorus of ‘Happy Birthday’ every hour on the hour?

And why stop at making inroads into crafting zoo animals that can also play the banjo and terrify children? When real polar bears go extinct in ten years, we can just place animatronic bears on ice floes to star in our wildlife films and keep elephant seals in their fucking place.

 

When Animals Attack Science

The latest problem to crop up unexpectedly at CERN’s Large Hadron Collider? A bird dropped a piece of bread on some machinery outside of it, causing significant overheating. For those of you playing along at home, this means the most sensitive and advanced piece of scientific equipment ever known to man is not only vulnerable to terrorists – it can’t even protect itself from pigeons.

The collider wasn’t operational at the time, because that would have required the collider to be operational at some point, but if it had been working when it was attacked by the highly advanced warfare of a bird carrying some bread, fail safes would have shut it down.

 

At what point do we give up and just turn this thing into the world's biggest, coolest Laser Tag arena?

 

Remember though – its distinctly possible this bird was a double agent, dispatched by the folks at ConCERNed to stop the LHC before it kills us all. They have a lawsuit alleging that turning the machine on is a violation of the human rights of the entire world coming before the UN, but I think we all know how effective the UN is in these matters. Could it be that ConCERNed is using an army of trained animals to covertly take matters into it’s own hands?

Hey, it’s not the least likely theory on why the LHC remains broke-ass down. That would be the recently published paper on how the collider is being sabotaged. From the future. By God. Which, it turns out, actually may not be as crazy as it sounds.

Though in all fairness: It’s really hard for anything to be as crazy as that sounds.

 

Totally NOT A Stripper

Virginia Foxx, despite spelling her name with a double x in the traditional ‘stripper or pornographic performer’ style, is actually NOT a stripper. Rather, she is a caricature of the old lady from the ‘Where’s the beef?’ commercials if she went off her meds and decided to spend the recent of her brief, mean time on Earth strangled hippies with her ancient, claw-like hands. She also has the honor of being the craziest, most offensive member of Congress to come out of the Carolinas recently, which is really and truly saying something.

After calling the Matthew Shepard murder a hoax and repeatedly using the phrase “tar baby” on the floor Congress, Foxx recently declared the prospect of health care reform to be a bigger threat to the nation than “any terrorist right now in any country.”

Now, I’m no fear-monger, but I have to take issue with the fact that Virginia Foxx (again, not a porn star, despite what her name would lead you to reasonably assume) certainly appears not to hate or fear terrorism at all. Which is just wrong headed. If there’s one thing the last eight years have taught us, it is that nothing is scarier than terrorism. Nothing, anywhere, ever. The very word “terrorism” is, grammatically speaking, literally two thirds PURE TERROR and one third suffix. Nothing is scarier than that. Not health care reform. Not swine flu. Nothing.

So why doesn’t Virginia Foxx hate terrorism? Does it have something to do with her confusing stripper name? That’s a question only she can answer.

But until she can answer it, I think she should step down and relinquish her seat in Congress to someone who we know hates terrorism. For example, this bear in India’s Kashmir, who killed a pair of militants who were holed up in his cave. That bear fucking HATES terrorism. Hates it so much he mauls terrorists, or even just militant guerilla rebels, which are a lot like terrorists, kind of, to death. So even if he is Indian, and a bear, he is a True American. Not like Virginia “Probably Never Been An Adult Film Star But Totally Spells Her Name Like One” Foxx.

 

The Brains That Wouldn’t Die

Researchers at the University of Western England are working on making programmable robots out of living tissue, prompting the humble slime mold make the jump into the 21st century by getting all cybernetic up in here.

The mold has already proven capable of carrying small objects along during it’s growth process. Professor Andy Adamatzky and his team hope to take these possibilities to the next level, using chemical and light stimuli to control the way the mold grows, essentially programming it to carry objects to a specific point. Eventually, the hope is that they will be able to manipulate the mold, which already completes intricate computing tasks like finding the shortest distance between two points, to not only carry but assemble items.

Adamatzky isn’t the only one who thinks biological systems can help drive the next developments in computing and robotics. A recent episode of the Robots Podcast featured discussions with Charles Higgins, who is attaching the optic systems of dragonflies to improve robotic sensory capability and Steve Potter, who is growing neural circuits – essentially miniature brains in petri dishes – that, when attached to robotic sensors, can give us a better idea of how the same circuits function in the brain.

 

Land of the Lost

News outlets in the UK this week are brimming with new videos and photo galleries detailing life inside Mount Bosavi, a largely unexplored volcanic crater in Papua New Guinea. The things that live there are various and awesome, ranging from pretty terrifying jumping spiders with pincers as long as the rest of their bodies to teeny, tiny parrots that are exactly as adorable as you would expect teeny, tiny parrots to be.

Also among the 40 brand new species first identified by science in the Mount Bosavi crater – a giant, wooly rat that measures over two feet long from nose to tail and a frog with fangs.

 

I’ll Show You Useless

Scientists have known for some time that the appendix isn’t just a relic of evolution that’s stuck around too long, mucking up the works of the modern human body. Researchers at Duke University Medical Center showed years ago that the oft maligned organ acts as a place of refuge for the good bacteria that keep the human digestive system ticking away like a fine Swiss clock.

But a recent study by the same researchers shows that ill understood bacterial sac may be more important and interesting than anyone ever knew. The study, recently published in The Journal of Evolutionary Biology, shows that, at 80 million years old, the appendix has been quietly plugging away at it’s inglorious work for longer than most researchers suspected. It also turns out that appendices are more common than once thought – not only do many species have them, but appendices developed independently in marsupials and mammals, suggesting that their purpose may be as important as it is poorly understood.

But all due credit to the John Paxson of the gastrointestinal tract – the thing is still a patently unpleasant bag of bacteria that’s remarkably prone to infection, and people who lose theirs seem to live happily and healthily afterwards. So if it does get infected, you need to remove the appendix. Let me repeat that for the cheap seats – you need to remove the appendix – not just say you’ve removed it and leave it inside a person like a ticking time bomb of bacteria and pus. That’s just fucked up.

 

Boldly Going…

Best of luck to David Farrier and his compatriots as they set out across a vast and unforgiving dessert in search of  an animal that, if it exists, is as strange and dangerous as any on the face of the planet.

Farrier and his team begin trekking across the Gobi today in search of the Mongolian death worm. Depending on who you believe, this legendary monster is a red, segmented snake or worm, up to seven and a half feet long and resembling a length of cow intestine. Unlike a cow intestine, however, the death worm can spit a lethal venom, and is also capable of killing from a distance with what is apparently some sort of electrical discharge.

Farrier isn’t foolhardy enough to go in search of such a deadly creature unprepared, though, so he’s doing what any sane, thinking person would do – bringing along lots and lots of explosives. Ostensibly, the explosives are meant only to create vibrations, which supposedly cause the creature to surface so expedition members can capture images of it on film. But to be fair, anyone who goes looking for this thing and doesn’t keep a grenade handy is in dereliction of duty. Short of a large hydraulic piston and a pair of metal hooks, it’s the only responsible thing to bring along on an expedition like this.

 

In Which The Evergreen State Goes Nutty Cuckoo

For those who aren’t aware, I have been a Washingtonian for long enough that, aside from a few loyalties in the sporting world that are so deeply ingrained and despair inducing that they can safely be considered genetic disorders, I have pretty much gone native. It’s a mostly laid back corner of the country, which suits me just fine, because I tend to be a fairly tense sort of chap, and the green and grey backdrop and relaxed atmosphere cut that just enough that I’m not intolerable to those around me. For the most part.

Which is why it was a touch off putting to hear material concerning my mostly sleepy state all over the news today, starting with the big business story of the day out of Redmond. Microsoft and Yahoo have finally consumated their on again romance, and like so many drawn out courtships, the moment of truth was a touch anti-climatic. Microsoft, unsurprisingly, gets the sweet end of the deal, with Yahoo bowing out of search and to handle advertising sales as Microsoft takes over search and data analysis for both companies, with the recently launched bing powering Yahoo searches from here on out. And while the deal moves Microsoft into the clear number two position in the  search industry, it’s a distant number two, in which the competition, whose name is synonymous with finding information online, has a stranglehold on 70% of the market.

In other words, Microsoft is right now in the best position it’s ever going to be in to challenge Google’s online search and advertising supremacy. But with the Chrome OS launching in just a few months on netbooks, Google is giving as good as it gets. And if this thing turns into a two front war for domination of operating system software and online technology, I’d put my money on the more nimble young ‘un from Santa Clara County.

And while Steve Ballmer and company might not be at the top of their game, they’re still faring better than the killer whales of the Puget Sound. Harassment by whale watching vessels looking to give tourists that perfect close up is hampering efforts to help the regions fragile orca population recover, so federal regulators are proposing doubling the distance that pleasure boats must stay away from the whales to 200 yards. Which is a nice thought, until you realize that the main problem seems to stem from ships that are not obeying the current guideline that aims to keep a 100 yard barrier between whales and whale watchers. With that in mind, it’s hard to see how doubling a barrier that no one is acknowledging helps preserve orca populations.

Shane Aggergaard, who heads the Pacific Whale Watch Association, a group of whale watch tour companies throughout Washington and British Columbia, may have demonstrated the attitude of tourism companies earlier today, when said in an interview with KUOW that “…we love to educate people regarding these animals so they can further protect them. It will be much more difficult to do that at 200 yards…” Again, this sounds good until you think about it – it’s more or less like arguing that we can’t outlaw shooting people in the face, because if we do, then how will people know that being shot in the face is a terrible, terrible thing?

And oh yeah, the anarchists are up in arms in the Evergreen State, as the anti-war organization Olympia Port Militarization Resistance accused a civilian employee of Washington’s Fort Lewis of COINTELPRO style shenanigans. The group, made up of members of groups like Students for a Democratic Society, Wobblies and self styled anarchists claim that a man going by the name John  Towery posed as an anarchist for two years, reporting back to military sources on the groups members and planned activities, such as staging port blockades.

And as these so called anarchists try to peacefully resist and do some good in the world, 38 year old Jeff Monson is keeping it real, doing all the things a good lone wolf anarchist should do. Like cage fighting. And spray painting anarchy symbols on the state capitol building. And then posing with the graffiti for ESPN The Magazine.

But hey, it could be weirder, I guess. I could live in Alabama, where they taser deaf people, don’t they?

And oh, yeah – Dave Reichert is an idiot and a jerk – more on that tomorrow.

 

In Which Andres Gallaraga Shows Up In Unexpected Places

An off duty police officer in Scotland was filmed some of the best ever evidence of a panther sized black cat roaming the countryside near Argyll, Scotland. For any cryptozoology enthusiast, it’s a real treat – see it on BBC here.

Alien Big Cat enthusiasts in the UK have to be jumping for joy at the release of the video, which is essentially the Grail of big cat sightings. It’s steady and clear, comes from a reliable source, and most importantly, it offers clear, verifiable landmarks that can confirm the size of the creature in the video. Researchers claim that the animal shown is more than four feet long, significantly too big to be a domestic animal. It’s also pretty small for a big cat, though, which may mean it’s either a young specimen or a hybrid, the offspring of one of the big cats that are often reported but rarely confirmed in the United Kingdom and a feral small cat.

As big cat sightings are one of the rare cryptozoological phenomenon that I can totally rationally throw myself behind, this is totally exciting video – it’s the sort of thing that buoys my hopes that the current search for large melanistic felids in the Pallisades of New York will net something more than tired hikers and told you sos.