Birds Are Weird

They are! Like chickens, for example – some chickens are born both male and female. This isn’t so weird in and of itself – it happens in pretty much all species, to one extent or another. But in chickens, it can manifest in particularly impressive fashion, in which the animal is born sexually bisected – a hen on one side, a rooster on the other. Researchers at the Roslin Institute in Edinburgh recently delved into this phenomenon, which once caused chickens like this to be burned at the stake because they were unclean products of dark magic, rather than being deep fried because they are delicious, as is right and proper. It appears that these gynadromorphous chickens (and other birds, such as finches and parrots) manifest as male and female at once because their individual cells are both Glenn and Glenda – rather than a makeup of cells that are all male or all female, the birds appear to have cell which are distinctly both, resulting in physical traits that split them down the middle, sexually.

Meanwhile, birds in the United States are responding to climate change in the only reasonable way–by shrinking. A study published in the journal Oikos had found that the majority of migrating birds US has gotten measurably smaller over the past few decades. It’s a finding that dovetails with findings last year that saw birds throughout Australia getting smaller and smaller over time, with many scientists finding the explanation for this in Bergmann’s Law, which states that, for reasons we don’t quite understand, fauna tends to be smaller in warmer climates, and as parts of the earth grow warmer, their birds will adapt to thrive in these new conditions, becoming as compact as they need to be to do so.

 

Republicans Discover Snow, Finally Dispel Global Warming Myth

Good news, everyone – global warming doesn’t exist, because it is snowing in Washington today! And if climate change were actually occurring, we wouldn’t have snow anymore, right? Right. That’s called Science and it is outlined by Virginia Republicans in this snazzy video! You can tell it is Science because of all the stock footage.

In other news, when night falls on Washington this evening, it will have nothing to do with the natural cycle of day and night. It will be because Barack Obama used socialism to murder the sun, plunging the world into an eternal darkness in which we are all enslaved by orcs. If by some chance the sun does rise again, we can all thank John Boehner, who probably saved us all with a magic sword made of Jesus and Tax Cuts.

This is also Science!

 

Final Analysis

Prepare for in-depth commentary as we take you through the many twists and turns of the biggest non-news story of the year, the 2009 UN Copenhagen Climate Conference.

For two weeks, a staggering variety of pundits, scientists, journalists and policy wonks predicted that, despite the growing urgency of the situation, chances were that no meaningful change would come out of the summit.

Then, leaders, political leaders, activists and endless legions of lawyers descended upon Denmark at the expense of taxpayers worldwide and talked for twelve days days, producing a toothless, non-binding document that represents no meaningful change.

Then, for several nights afterward, every news outlet in the country weighed in on just how meaningless the Copenhagen Accord is, what made it so meaningless and, in a triumph of existentialism in mass media, what the meaninglessness of the document means.

Then everybody realized they still had Christmas shopping to do and decided to forget about climate change for the next few years, because surely, someone will have done something about it by then, right?