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Nectar-guzzling bats have a curious adaption…
When a bat is about to feed, its tongue engorges with blood, growing in size and causing its papillae to stand tall.
The bats get what is essentially a tongue erection.
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Can cloning redwoods help fight climate change?
A recent study revealed Earth is currently warmer than any given point in the past 11,300 years. So what should we do?
One idea: Clone and plant a lot of gigantic trees with a glutton’s appetite for carbon dioxide. Archangel Ancient Tree Archive is spearheading a movement to plant California’s towering redwood trees in Australia, New Zealand, Great Britain, Ireland, Canada, Germany, and other parts of the United States.
According to NASA previous research has demonstrated that these monstrous organisms are capable of digesting much more carbon than any other tree on the planet.
Photo from: DLILLC/Corbis
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This 19th century shark-tooth sword reveals extinct biodiversity in the Gilbert Islands. These “badass” weapons feature dagger-like teeth from eight different shark species, one of which oddly isn’t found in the area. While trading with other far-away cultures could explain how the teeth got there, it’s more likely the spottail sharks were fished out.
Photo from Drew J, Philipp C, Westneat MW (2013)
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On this day in 1872, President Ulysses S. Grant established the nation’s first national park — Yellowstone. A future president, Gerald Ford, worked as a park ranger at Yellowstone — the only President to ever work as a park ranger.
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Drones aren’t always the rights-infringing death machines conjured up by news stories. Sometimes they do the world quite a bit of good. Take the above nature footage by Thomas Renck, a hobbyist whose camera-equipped tricopter captured a pack of wild coyotes sweeping across a hillside in Riverside, Calif. The vantage point makes the video look like something straight out of a Discovery Channel documentary.
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Your cat is a killer. According to biologists, when they’re not curling up in your lap, cats are off killing other animals — billions of ‘em. Scientists from the Smithsonian Conservation Biology Institute and the Fish and Wildlife Service estimate that each year, apparently bloodthirsty felines are preying on billions of birds and small mammals like indigenous chipmunks, shrews, and meadow voles. “When we ran the model, we didn’t know what to expect,” researcher Dr. Peter Marra told theNew York Times. “We were absolutely stunned by the results.”
4 to 18 — Birds killed by a typical house cat every year
8 to 21 — Small mammals killed by a typical house cat every year
1.4 billion to 3.7 billion — Total birds killed by America’s cats every year -
Two young filmmakers camped out in the freezing cold for weeks to capture this thunderous, rare shot of a massive 4.6-cubic-mile glacier in Greenland crumbling apart. This brief clip of the largest glacier calving ever caught on camera is just a small segment in the recently debuted documentary Chasing Ice, which is dedicated to chronicling the perhaps-irreversible impact of climate change on glaciers (and sea levels) around the world. Filmmaker James Balog says watching the roaring landscape shift is like watching “Manhattan breaking apart in front of your eyes.” Seeing is believing, says Will Oremus at Slate. Here, “[Balog’s] team succeeded in capturing the awesome effects of climate change in a way that papers published in Science just can’t.” Terrifying? You bet. (Video via The Guardian)
(Source: theweek.com)
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If you’ve never been to California to see its giant redwoods, you should probably go soon. It might be only a matter of time before they’re all gone. Research released Friday indicates that the world’s oldest trees are dying at an alarming rate. “It is a very, very disturbing trend,” says lead researcher William Laurance of James Cook University. “We are talking about the loss of the biggest living organisms on the planet, of the largest flowering plants on the planet, of organisms that play a key role in regulating and enriching our world.”
The rapid die-off of the world’s oldest trees
(Source: theweek.com)
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At the age of 5, Marina Chapman was reportedly kidnapped and abandoned in the jungle, left for dead. But she managed to join a tribe of capuchin monkeys, “copying what they ate and drank, their social activities, their language,” until she was a part of the family, which she stayed with for five years.
The animals, which experts say are known to accept young children into their fold, taught young Marina how to catch birds and rabbits with her bare hands, so she was able to survive.
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A Red Deer stag, with his head perhaps accidentally covered in ferns, calls out in Richmond Park, southwest London. PHOTO: REUTERS/Luke MacGregor
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Now that space experts have a better grasp of where the water on the moon came from, we can divert our attention to a more fundamental question: How did the moon itself even get there?
Multiple studies published this week shed new light on a long-standing — but flawed — theory that the moon was birthed from a massive, high-impact collision between a primitive version of Earth and a smaller planet. Was the moon once part of Earth?
Photo: huang xingwei/Xinhua Press/Corbis
(Source: theweek.com)
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This recently discovered species of daddy longlegs has creepily sprawling legs 13 inches in length. Found in the Laotian province of Khammouan, this creature will “probably unnerve those… with hair-trigger squeamishness,” says Cyriaque Lamar at io9, even though it doesn’t pose a threat to humans. Researchers are having a hard time pinpointing its exact species level, but suspect it belongs to the genus Gargrella. Hopefully, “the arachnologist community will identify this species before this spindly demon develops a taste for human flesh.”
In the spirit of Halloween, here are 7 of the scariest spiders in existence.
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The British government’s meteorological service recently released new figures on global temperatures that prompted the Daily Mail, a conservative British tabloid, to declare: “Global warming stopped 16 years ago.”
The bold headline rekindled the often bitter debate over climate change, and what world leaders should do about it. Have climate scientists changed their minds about what’s happening to Earth’s temperatures, and how pollution affects those temperatures? Did global warming really stop 16 years ago?
Photo: Uriel Sinai/Getty Images
(Source: theweek.com)
