Researchers have argued that pointy eggs are common to cliff-nesting
birds because they roll in a circle and are less likely to tumble off an
edge. Or that asymmetric eggs pack together more easily and would allow
females with large clutches to incubate their broods efficiently. Or
that spherical eggs are stronger and less prone to breaking, or use the
least amount of shell for a given volume, which would be useful for
birds that can’t get enough calcium in their diet.
“There are a
lot of hypotheses, but no conclusive explanation or theory,” says
Stoddard, who’s an evolutionary biologist based at Princeton University.
“It was a good puzzle.”
To solve it, Stoddard teamed up with L. Mahadevan,
a biophysicist at Harvard University who has studied “how leaves
ripple, how tendrils coil, and how the brain folds, among other things.”
He realized that all eggs could be described according to two simple
characteristics—how asymmetric they are, and how elliptical they are.
Measure these traits, and you can plot every bird egg on a simple graph.
They did that for the eggs of 1,400 bird species, whose measurements
Stoddard extracted from almost 50,000 photos. It was the resulting graph
that revealed the left-field nature of chicken eggs.
Cornelius Hickey’s knife. This kinfe, as well as some officers utensils were found with ‘possessive’ carving (names and initials). Hunger makes you do this kind of thing. Seriously, there’s clinical evidence. In the 1940’s a man named Ancel Keys performed a study on the physical and psychological effects of starvation on humans using conscientious objectors volunteering for experiments to opt out of World War II. One of the things he observed in the volunteers was an obsession with all things associated with food, including smuggling utensils out of the cafeteria and hoarding them. Based on the fact that the men in the experiment were only semi-starved in the interest of their safety, you can imagine their behaviour would be amplified in men fully starving with no way out. (The volunteers in the 40s could opt out at any time if it became too much or were withdrawn if it was becoming too much of a danger to their health). Keys wrote a huge two volume report on his findings, The Biology of Human Starvation… a great source to help consider the physiology and psychology of the men on the Franklin expedition.
Dead Yard Animal Alarm Levels depend on several criteria: What animal, whether it’s whole or in parts, and where it’s located. This guide is scaled for the colorado rocky mountains in particular but should be applicable for most of the continental US.
This is a humorous and largely non-gory take on the weird shit that ends up in your yard sometimes. Warnings: Discussion of animal death, predation, your weird-ass neighbors Under the cut:
this is a Good Post, although having grown up in an area with both a) a lot of farms and b) a lot of very ambitious coyotes, I feel like bits and pieces of various livestock in the yard were a 2/10 on the ‘be alarmed’ scale at best. We would call the appropriate neighbors for live donkeys/pigs/cows/etc wandering through, but once the coyotes had gotten them, well, the coyotes were in charge of disposal, too (and were generally much better at it than the human neighbors). The dog I grew up with would often turn up with an entire haunch of donkey or deer, looking smug at having been once more blessed by the Coyote Gods (we knew this was not great, but getting a not-so-fresh donkey leg off a smart and determined 100 lb husky mix is…. challenging).
I just discovered that the NYT has a crossword app. I may never be productive again.
any time I see house-made pico de gallo being sold in grocery stores I think of the time at my old job when I made an entire batch (about ten gallons) with parsley instead of cilantro because the case was mislabeled and I totally failed to notice how it smelled different than usual until my coworker tasted some and was like ‘mica what the FUCK’
we added actual cilantro and extra lime juice to cover the flavor and just sold it anyway
This is your periodic reminder to stop feeding, petting, grabbing, and otherwise harassing the wildlife. In addition to the danger you put yourself and other people in, when you habituate a wild animal to human food or contact you set them up for disaster. A fed animal is a dead animal.
A Pretty Taste for Paradox 