Pandas. Pandas Fucking. Yep.
- YAKIMA, Wash. – If workers cleaning up the nation’s most contaminated nuclear site didn’t have enough to worry about, now they’ve got to deal with radioactive wasp nests. Mud dauber wasps built the nests, which have been largely abandoned by their flighty owners, in holes at south-central Washington’s Hanford nuclear reservation in 2003.
- That’s when workers finished covering cleaned-up waste sites with fresh topsoil, native plants and straw to help the plants grow — inadvertently creating perfect ground cover for the insects to build their nests. Nearby cleanup work also provided a steady supply of mud, which the wasps used as building material.
- Today, the nests, which could number in the thousands, are “fairly highly contaminated” with radioactive isotopes, such as cesium and cobalt, but don’t pose a significant threat to workers digging them up.
Night Fisherman
- For centuries fishermen on the Li River of Southern China have partnered with cormorants to catch fish. Each fisherman has a complement of half a dozen or so trained birds. The light of a lantern attracts the fish, and the cormorants return to the boat, fish in beak. They can’t swallow them because the fisherman fix a band around their necks, but they eventually get their share.
Scientists Claim to Create Glow-in-the-Dark Dogs
A team at Seoul National University located in South Korea has successfully created a new breed of beagle capable of fluorescing under ultraviolet light
The goal of this project is to create a device that will autonomously train crows. So far we’ve trained captive crows to deposit dropped coins they find on the ground in exchange for peanuts. The next step is to see how quickly we can get wild crows to learn the system, and then how quickly they can learn it from each other.
Once we’ve got system down for teaching coin collection we’ll move to seeing how flexibly they can learn *other* tasks, like collecting garbage, sorting through discarded electronics, or maybe even search and rescue. The crows continue to amaze us with their abilities, so who knows?
In the meantime, the idea of mutually beneficial synanthropy is gaining ground. That’s the concept that we can have mutually beneficial relationships with animals adapted to human ecologies. We’re doing some consulting with companies that have animal-related problems to find animal-related solutions - instead of just bombing, shooting, or poisoning them.
Fossil hints at fuzzy dinosaurs in China - BBC
(Dr.You) described the filaments seen on the body of the new dinosaur, which the team has named Tianyulong confuciusi, as “protofeathers” - the precursors of modern feathers.
“Their function was probably display, as well as to keep the body warm” he said.
These, they suggest, might have evolved for show, and may even have been coloured.
Well, to ease tension today, here is a photo of an otter holding a video camera. (The surveillance state is everywhere!)
