This little guy is Pierre, an African penguin living at San Francisco’s Academy of Sciences. He’s 25 years old, pretty hoary for a penguin, and is unfortunately starting to go bald around the tushie. Penguins don’t have blubber and need their feathers to keep warm, so instead of sitting around watching Pierre shiver after every [...]
How often do you hear about a hospital being forced to evacuate patients and close its doors? Now how often do you hear about a hospital evacuating patients and locking up because it was invaded by an army of lethally poisonous spiders? The Baralaba Hospital in Australia’s Queensland state was declared too dangerous by officials [...]
A series of strange, unsolved killings of wild brown donkeys in Cyprus have pushed hundreds of young Cypriots, both Turkish and Greek, to start an online movement to save the rare species. Using Facebook and email, as well as more traditional methods such as banners erected near the Rizokarpaso donkey sanctuary (yes, they really have [...]
Quadruplets are a pretty rare occurrence already, but the bunch of babies pictured above are extra special: they are three identical twins and a… uh… well they should invent a name for those. Other than fourth-quadruplet-who-wasn’t-identical. The little combo of joy was born prematurely last January at the Greater Baltimore Medical Center in Towson, Maryland. [...]
Pictured above is a Swinhoe’s soft-shelled turtle, the largest freshwater turtle in the world. Only three are currently in captivity, and none were thought to exist in the wild until the news broke out that researchers from the Cleveland Metroparks Zoo Asian Turtle Program found and shot video footage of a live specimen in a [...]
Snopes.com is a great place to visit for anyone with a reasonable amount of curiosity about strange hoaxes, weird myths and the odd piece of junk science. This being a weird science blog, the idea isn’t to help spread junk science, but to demonstrate how genuine science can be used to debunk the dubious stuff. [...]
German scientists are working to develop autonomous, robotic firefighters that in the future could put Smokey the Bear out of a job. I’ve never wanted to see a forest fire in person before, but a chance to see these bad boys in action just might make me chance my mind! The beetle-shaped, six-legged robots go [...]
Hats off to Laika: intrepid space explorer and science subject, dutiful citizen to the motherland, first mammal in space. That’s a pretty long way for a stray mutt to come. 50 years later, Russia is commemorating the pioneering pooch with a statue in her honor at a military research unit near Moscow.
There’s an “early bird” reference here somewhere. It seems that the European cuckoo is the latest victim of global warming, with populations dropping by 25 percent in recent years. According to scientists, one explanation seems to be that the cuckoo’s host birds, such as reed warblers and dunnocks, have started breeding earlier in the year [...]
Studies by three London universities have shown that men and women can usually tell whether members of the opposite sex are looking or short-term flings or long-term romantic relationships based soley on facial features. The men preferred women with large lips and wide eyes– indications that they were open to short-term realtionships. The women, strangely [...]