The New York Times has this interesting piece on plans to reconstruct the Neanderthal genome using DNA extracted from bones discovered in Croatia. Scientists from the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Biology in Germany and 454 Life Sciences in the US will collaborate on the work. The study of Neanderthal DNA has been stalled by …
Sign of the Times
Garage sales are pretty common in our neighborhood. This is the first sign like this I’ve seen!
Terrierman and The Mammoth in the Hedge
I wanted to recommend this wonderful post by Terrierman that he put up last week while our blog was on its mysterious outage. The title alone is wonderful and it is a meditation on how humans need to take a long term view (10,000 years at least) of our species and our planet. In a …
Rina and The Skunk: A Budding Romance
OK, this is getting stranger but is true. From a note to Steve and other friends regarding recent chance meetings in the woods: “Rina and I have met the skunk again two nights in a row. Last night Rina’s attitude seemed to shift (from predatory interest to….what? Something more benign…?) when I made it clear …
Giant Yellowjacket Nests
… in Alabama. I mean, GIANT. One fills a’55 Chevy– see photo– and consists of possibly a hundred thousand individuals and several queens. “Without a cold winter to kill them this year, the yellow jackets continued feeding in January and February — and layering their nests made of paper, not wax. They typically are built …
Dangerous Book For Boys
This book sounds like grand fun, although some disagree. “The sort of fun promoted has also raised eyebrows. In a society that is preoccupied with safety, The Dangerous Book promotes activities in which boys are likely to get scuffed. This is a book for tree-climbers who occasionally pause to decipher enemy code or erupt into …
Whack- A- Mole?
“Intelligent Design” is like a whack- a- mole game– knock it down and it just pops up somewhere else. Here, John Derbyshire does his usual splendid, reasoned, and even good- humored smackdown of the IDers. Why oh why can they not see how “irreducible complexity” is a very dead and smelly horse?
Small town blues
Prairie Mary has a very good (well, aren’t they all?) essay on the inevitable conflicts that happen when the (relatively) rich and restless move to small towns and begin to throw their weight around. It is happening here too and I don’t have a clue about what you can do about it, save having rural …
Sea Creatures
Courtesy of Peculiar, soon to disappear into the wilderness with his bride for a bit, an astonishing gallery of deep sea life. I was particularly taken with the piglet squid. By the way, it has been PUPPIES who have kept me from blogging much. Three depart this weekend so things (like sleep and typing without …
This SHOULD be true
The Alpha Enviro recently sent me this gem, which he got from a friend: “Ted Nugent on deer hunting. “He was being interviewed by a British journalist. The journalist asked, “What do you think the last thought is in the head of a deer before you shoot it? Is it, `Are you my friend?` or …