• “We didn’t pay 37 million zlotys [7.6 million pounds] for the largest elephant house in Europe to have a gay elephant live there” —Polish politician Michal Grzes.
• A chocolate inhaler now provides calorie-free indulgence in four flavors: raspberry, mint, mango, and plain. Inhaled mango-flavored chocolate powder? Really?
• What to do if you—oops!—swallow the Higgs boson.
• A divorced couple fights over frozen dog sperm.
• Watch a spider roll like an eight-spoked wheel.
• And, a humpback whale was spotted swimming under New York City’s Verrazano Bridge! Watch it surface here.
Even porcupines are visiting the unemployment office these days. After New York governor David Paterson proposed taking away all funding to the state’s zoos, botanical gardens, and aquariums for the 2010 fiscal year, the Wildlife Conservation Society decided to post a viral video, hoping to create enough opposition to the suggested budget cut.
In it, a porcupine called Wednesday is fired from the Bronx Zoo and goes on a job hunt. At first, he appears to be pretty employable. But Wednesday lacks computer skills — he never learned to use power point in his time at the zoo. So when he’s not looking for a job, he’s making ends meet by standing in front of the zoo entrance and holding a “please help” sign.The gesture is cute, but seems to be putting an overly-kind spin on the truth: If the budget cuts are made, zoos must cut back on the variety of animals. What will they do with the animals they have to “cut”?
Got OCD? It may surprise you to know that three percent of all Americans do! Normally, when people display compulsive behaviors such as excessively washing their hands, psychiatrists give them a simple questionnaire to screen for OCD. But for the first time, researchers at Tel Aviv University have connected animal behavior to OCD in humans, after observing animals at the zoo.
It turns out that OCD patients respond the best to behavioral treatment when researchers videotape them behaving compulsively. But before this new program for humans was created, the researchers had to first watch animals at the zoo.
The researchers observed OCD in bears, gazelles, rats, and other animals, both in the wild and in captivity. In the wild, animals appeared to have automated routines. But when the researchers watched animals in the zoo, they noticed the animals had rituals of repetitious movements such as pacing back and forth. By looking for common (compulsive) behavior in different animals, the researchers were able to identify which repetitious behaviors were healthy, and which were not. As such, when psychiatrists apply the videotaping to humans, they can use the animal database to classify human OCD behaviors.
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Virgin birth may sound like the stuff of myths and miracles, but now it’s the stuff of science, too. In recent years, asexual reproduction, aka virgin birth, has been confirmed in a number of organisms. And we’re not just talking about bacteria budding off one another. Large animals, like pythons, sharks, and komodo dragons, have been reported to reproduce with no sex involved. In these animals, the process is known as parthenogenesis, in which the females produce eggs that can develop without fertilization.
Could parthenogenesis, or some other scientifically conceivable process, have been at work in the most famous virgin birth story around? Dr. Aarathi Prasad, who’s writing a book about reproduction sans men, The End of Sex, ponders the question of Mary’s virgin pregnancy in the The Guardian. She points out one major problem with Jesus’s lack of paternity: that Jesus was male, presumably with an X and a Y chromosome. Since human females have only X chromosomes, there would be no way for Jesus to acquire his Y from Mary. Unless…
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Moles can eat their own weight in worms each day. But they’re no match for human worm grunters—also known as worm snorers, fiddlers, or charmers— who can collect thousands of worms each day, selling them for bait. Worm grunting involves thrusting a stick into the soil and rubbing it with a piece of steel to generate vibrations that send earthworms fleeing to the surface. It’s quite popular in the southeastern U.S.— but until now, no one really understood why it worked.
Ken Catania, a mole expert at Vanderbilt University and MacArthur genius award winner, made the connection between moles, worms, and human grunters. The humans are fooling the worms by unknowingly imitating the sound of a burrowing mole. The worms instinctively surface (faster than you’d think) because moles generally stay underground when foraging.
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