The US National Aeronautics and Space Administration is notoriously good at finding means for justifying its science budget, sometimes deploying what amounts to science fiction (see vintage hype image gallery in a separate post). Mostly, though, it’s simple hype. All of us slugs are on the NASA news release list. An unusually cryptic, tantalizing PR…
I love red pandas. These house-cat-sized cuties spend most of their lives in trees of the temperate forests of the Himalayas. Despite their name and a penchant for bamboo, red pandas are thought to be more closely related to weasels or dogs than they are to Giant pandas. The exact placement of the red panda…
I am a world-changer, at heart. I have led a privileged life, not without its challenges; but it still provides a stable place from which I feel an obligation to afflict the comfortable and comfort the afflicted. Sometimes, you never know what impact you’re going to have on the world, as we learned this week…
Nads is on a roll and I thought I’d share a set of my own loose associations triggered after my facebook status update netted a comment by an astronomer. My original caption: “See, otters. OR It otter be illegal to kayak near otters. Oh wait, it is; 50 meter restraining order on all Homo sapiens.”…
1. Sea otters have the densest hair of any mammal – around 900,000 hairs per square inch (140,000 hairs/cm2)[1]. That’s more than 500X denser than the hair on the human scalp, which averages at 1600 hairs per square inch (250 hairs/cm2).[2] 2 Sea otters have individual preferences for prey. Some sea otters prefer to crunch…
I got a little taste of the perils of field research when some of us got drenched by a wave where the researchers first set up. They assured us they’d never experienced something like that in over 10 years. Once we got set up though, things went smoothly, and we actually got to collect sea-otter…
