Name: Shaun Robinson
Age: 25
Occupation: Web Designer / Developer
Location: Ipswich, United Kingdom
Living with: My partner Andrew, and two kids Elliot and Oliver.
This is horrifying.
webbunny tumblelog
Pokemon for the real world
I can name the first 150.. so yeah this is a good idea, it would have been a lot better to learn real animals!
Kids can remember hundreds of Pokemon characters but very few animals. The solution? The Phylomon Project is an open source initiative aiming to make Pokemon-type cards for actual animals.
Shaped like a leaf itself, the slug Elysia chlorotica already has a reputation for kidnapping the photosynthesizing organelles and some genes from algae. Now it turns out that the slug has acquired enough stolen goods to make an entire plant chemical-making pathway work inside an animal body, says Sidney K. Pierce of the University of South Florida in Tampa.
The slugs can manufacture the most common form of chlorophyll, the green pigment in plants that captures energy from sunlight, Pierce reported January 7 at the annual meeting of the Society for Integrative and Comparative Biology. Pierce used a radioactive tracer to show that the slugs were making the pigment, called chlorophyll a, themselves and not simply relying on chlorophyll reserves stolen from the algae the slugs dine on.
“This could be a fusion of a plant and an animal — that’s just cool,” said invertebrate zoologist John Zardus of The Citadel in Charleston, S.C.
Green Sea Slug Is Part Animal, Part Plant | Wired Science | Wired.com
ReBlogged from atheistramblings
“ The Buddhists say we come back as animals and they refer to them as lesser beings. Well, animals aren’t lesser beings, they’re just like us. So I say f—k the Buddhists
ReBlogged from atheistramblings
Dust mite. Coloured Scanning Electron Micrograph (SEM) of the dust mite Dermatophagoides pteronyssinus. This mite is eight legged of which six legs are visible (at lower frame). The mite has an unsegmented, round body. It’s mouthparts (at lower centre) are highly adapted to feeding on the dead scales of human skin found in household dust. Dust mites are relatives of spiders and scorpions. (via sciencephoto)
It is truly horrifying to think of what monsters lurk in the microscopic world. Imagine this was 50ft high and reigning terror on the world below. Sometimes reality is scarier than fiction.
ReBlogged from atheistramblings
Giant 'meat-eating' plant found
A new species of giant carnivorous plant has been discovered in the highlands of the central Philippines.
Organic 'has no health benefits'
Organic food is no healthier than conventionally produced food, a large independent review has concluded.
Kuroshio Sea - 2nd largest aquarium tank in the world - (song is Please don’t go by Barcelona) on Vimeo (via Vimeo)
Beautiful. Follow the link to download the HD version.
Venus flytrap origins uncovered
It is a plant that traps and eats animals, and now scientists have worked out where this voracious plant came from.
Natural Mythology
There is nothing more powerful than an idea, and nothing more potentially harmful than a false idea that everyone “knows” is true and therefore does not question. “Natural” remedies are now a…
You’ve been opening bananas wrong all your life - Open a banana like a monkey
Monkeys Recognize Poor Grammar
See, even monkeys can recognize poor grammar!
I say we employ teams of monkeys to proof-read Facebook :)
“ Many people don’t realize that most of the plants that supply us food don’t exist in the wild. If I grow an apple tree sprouted from seed, it may never fruit. And if it does fruit, there are nearly perfect odds the fruit will be bitter, small, and inedible. Growing an apple tree from a Red Delicious apple seed will not yield you a Red Delicious apple tree. Some of you may have known that—but I’m guessing many of you may not have. To grow Red Delicious apples, you have to graft a Red Delicious apple stem to an existing apple tree trunk—of any variety (even a rouge like the one I have sprouted). The graft will produce Red Delicious fruit. You can’t grow modern domestic apple strains from seed. I don’t know if there are exceptions to this—but in general, this is the rule with much of our fruit bearing domestic crops. They don’t exist in the wild. And if all we had was seed, we would have to rebreed it from existing stock—re-engineer it, genetically, using a lab or evolution and artificial selection to recreate “Red Delicious” apples again.
