What's going on with that stupid piece of rock up in space? READ MORE

One of the cool things about the West and the Southwest is that lots of species get pooled and segregated into little genetic pools—at the top of isolated mountains, squirrels that once roamed and mingled now have been separated for ages, like the nine sub-species of Abert's squirrel. Now at Yosemite, the Alpine chipmunk is being forced to ascend uphill as well, into isolated genetic pods. Radical lesbian elitist climate change atheist publication Nature Climate Change reported the details on how "global warming" is forcing the squirrels ever upwards. Climb, chipmunks! Climb for your lives! (Picture: a detail from a photo by Miss Pudding.)

Google is rumored to be working on a pair of heads-up display glasses, which would allow information and text to appear in your immediate visual field. Futuristic! But before you get too excited: READ MORE

"It’s a mammal with a long, rat-like snout, a rather high number of small incisors, closely spaced premolars with pointed cusps, and especially long, curved upper canines. Note that, unlike dogs, foxes and so on, it doesn’t have an obvious rhinarium (the area of dark, distinctly textured skin that surrounds the nostrils in such animals). These features all immediately screamed “opossum” to me. Partly this is because I’ve handled opossum skulls and am familiar with their surprisingly big upper canines and high number of incisors. Even the fur looks opossum-like (mammal carcasses typically slough fur after they’ve been decomposing in water for a while, and this explains the naked face). When you add all this to the fact that the Virginia opossum is a common, widespread mammal in California we have an obvious and uncontroversial identification." READ MORE

Uh oh: "We've heard obesity can be 'spread' between friends when we copy each other's eating habits, but a new study in mice suggests obesity could actually be infectious. That's right, infectious. As in, something you can catch. In the study, mice engineered to have a particular immune deficiency developed fatty liver disease and got fatter when fed a Western-style diet. But strikingly, when these immune-deficient mice were put in the same cage as healthy mice, the healthy mice started to come down with symptoms of liver disease, and also got fatter."

Is there life on other planets? With the universe so vast and our knowledge of it so infinitesimal, it would be foolish person who bluntly offered an answer one way or another, which is why it does not fill me with any amount of pleasure to have to tell you that no, there is not, give me a break, if there were living beings on other planets we would already be working in their salt mines or they ours, depending on who had the better technology. I've heard all the arguments about how it's remarkably shortsighted and even Earthling-essentialist to assume that we are so fortunate and unique to be on the only habitable space in all of creation, but quite frankly I am not totally sure that there is even life here. You know that religion whose main tenet is the belief that the idea of human consciousness is actually a shared delusion born out of the troubled sleep of a giant sea turtle living on top of the world? (It's called the "Reform" movement of Judaism.) That is actually probably true. We're all living in a tortoise's nightmare and none of this matters. (Or at least that's what I tell myself when the crippling burdens of existence—the shame and sorrow that make something as simple as running downstairs to check the mail seem like an epic ordeal with no hope of survival so why would you even bother when you can just keep sitting there on your couch with your shirt off and your chest hair matted with tears and pita chips—seem too much to bear.) But so long as we are all part of the same bad dream, we might as well pull together, go to this new habitable planet they found, and start strip-mining it. I mean, at least it's something we're good at, according to the turtle. READ MORE

"He achieves continuous sperm transfer after having been removed by the aggressive female, or has moved away himself. At the same time, his palp (sexual organ) plugs the female, thereby monopolizing her." READ MORE