• Don’t let unemployment put a wrinkle in your plans. Viagra isn’t the only treatment you can get for free—a spa has offered free Botox, too. Confused? Watch the video.
• Hear, hear! Severed your ear but don’t know where to store it? Consider copying this guy by having doctors attach it to your stomach. Then surgeons can use cartilage from your ribs to stitch it back onto the side of your head.
• A 15-year-old, two-foot-tall girl in India is the world’s smallest teenager. Doctors think she has a pituitary problem, but apparently they haven’t been able to pin down the problem.
• Check out this video of the blackbird that’s terrorizing people in San Francisco by dive-bombing their heads. (It’s ok to laugh…we won’t tell.)
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Two Vietnamese men, Duc Le and Sony Dong, were charged this week with eight counts of smuggling. Only the goods weren’t drugs or CDs—they were rare songbirds, which the men carried from Vietnam to Los Angeles. In their socks.
The weirdness went down like this: In March, Dong was arrested at Los Angeles International Airport when an airport worker noticed poop droppings on his socks and feathers popping out of his pants. When the Fish and Wildlife Service inspectors checked Dong’s pants, they found over a dozen songbirds pinned to his socks, each hung like a Christmas ornament.
Millions of birds are illegally trafficked overseas, stuffed inside boxes and bags to be sold on the black market. Dong smuggled songbirds, but other hobbyists specialize in transporting parrots, snakes, and numerous other birds. The global demand for cute, exotic pets encourages criminals to mine biodiverse hot spots for rare species to trade. Despite regulations to keep this from happening, people fascinated with owning their own wild pet fuels the smuggling trade.
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Turns out humans aren’t the only ones who can keep a beat!
This sulphur-crested cockatoo can dance “in time” to a changing rhythm—and in a particularly impressive display, it can even raise its feathers when the music picks up.
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In a move of criminal genius, prisoners in Brazil got carrier pigeons to do some of their dirty work for them. Or got them to try, at least—until they got caught. Last week, guards at a Sao Paulo prison noticed that a pigeon on a nearby electric wire had a small bag tied to one of its legs. They lured it down with some food, and found a small cell phone inside the bag.
The next day, another pigeon was found with a similar bag—this time, with the phone’s charger.
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Who knew sharper images and clearer sound would be good for our feathered friends? Come January 15, Hawaii will be the first state in the U.S. to switch over to digital TV, a month before the mandatory nationwide conversion on February 17. But the interesting part about the switch isn’t so much when but why: Federal wildlife officials suggested tearing down the old analog transmission towers earlier to avoid interference with the nesting season of a bird, the endangered Hawaiian petrel.
Petrels, also known as the ’Ua’u, are only found in Hawaii, and more than 1,000 of them nest on the slopes of Maui’s Haleakala volcano, where the analog towers are currently located. The nocturnal species, which reportedly has a chirp that sounds like a yapping puppy, is not adapting well to urban sprawl: The birds are disoriented by city lights and sometimes get caught on wires. Officials think rebuilding the towers at a different location, away from the petrel’s nesting sites, will give them some peace to nest, and help the species’ survival in the long term.
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· Jailbirds for conservation: Britain recruits prisoners to build bird houses and survey threatened species.
· Virgin Galactic rejects $1 million proposal to shoot sex-in-space video on its commercial spacecraft, the WhiteKnightTwo.
· Bikers go green: Honda shrinks the hybrid engine and will offer hybrid motorcycles by 2011.
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Ostriches, kiwis, emus—these birds always look out of place, bound to the land while their feathered cousins take to the sky. It’s easy to imagine that flightlessness evolved only once, and that bird species then split into several species; indeed, most scientists figured that was what happened. But according to a study led by John Harshman of the Field Museum of Natural History in Chicago, that’s not so: Birds lost the ability to fly at least three times.
Harshman’s team began to poke holes in the common ancestor hypothesis by examining DNA from the different birds to see how they were related. The researchers found that emus and kiwis were actually more closely related to a ground-dwelling but flight-capable bird called the tinamous, which lives in the Americas, than they were to ostriches.
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They cheer together. They lose together. They commiserate together. In that way, Andy Radford says, South African birds called green woodhoopoes are much like soccer fans in his native Britain.
Radford, a University of Bristol professor, found that woodhoopoes live in gangs of about a dozen, and those groups don’t get along terribly well—they often descend into shouting contests. Unlike human shouting matches, which usually just end up with everyone unhappier than they were before, the birds’ contests have a definite winner. But, Radford says, the interesting part is what happens with the losers.
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