Lemurs! Aye-ayes! Mammal woodpeckers!????!

Prepare to be assaulted by cute pictures and amazing discoveries! By the end of this post you will never look at the mammal world in the same way.

As I walked into the lemur enclosure during my discovery-filled visit to the Duke Lemur Center as part of the Science Online 2012 conference, I was impressed not only with the lemurs' musky odor but also with their piercing eyes. So intense, so seemingly interested!

Coquerel's Sifaka (mother and child) living large at the Duke Lemur Center. via their Blog. 

Cool Chameleons, Cool Carotenoids, Cool Colors

Check out what this chameleon can do!  Understanding how chameleons do this will help you to understand how all life on earth is connected.

"Unexpected Flying Animals" or "Winged Convergent Evolution"

Flying fish become airborne by leaping from the water and spreading their enormous pectoral fins.  They typically fly from 100-200 feet, an adaptation that is thought to have evolved for predator-evasion.  Check it out!

Flying fish have to hold their breath (WTF)!!

Moving from fish to reptiles, the flying snake climbs up trees (not unusual for snakes) and then jumps (unusual for snakes) from tree to tree.  The snake flies (ok, glides) by distorting nearly its entire body into a concave wing-like shape and undulating through the air, in a process that is much more energy efficient and less prone to predation than slithering down to the ground and back up.

Why Animals Migrate

The humpback whale migrates up to 16,000 miles every year, from polar regions to tropical waters and back.

Humpback whale migration routes.

The arctic tern migrates over 44,000 miles every year, from the arctic to antarctic and back.

Bird migration routes. 1-Northern Wheatear, 2-Bluethroat, 3-Eastern Yellow Wagtail, 4-Dunlin, 5-Wandering Tattler, 6-Bartailed Godwit, 7-Arctic Tern, 8-Sandhill Crane, 9-Brant, 10-Smith's Longspur, 11-American Golden Plover, 12-Tundra Swan, 13-Semipalmated Sandpiper.

These are just two examples of the incredible migrations performed on earth every year.  What could possibly motivate these animals to do this?  Well, the exact reasons are slightly different for every migrating animal, but a unifying theme can be found in the video below.  This is a video of "Net Primary Production", which is essentially a measure of the growth of plants.

I came from That??!?

Last weekend I visited the Field Museum in Chicago.  It may come as no surprise to some of you that this museum completely blew my mind.  My friend Willard and I spent almost the entire time in their "Evolving Planet" exhibit, which walked us from the formation of the earth through to the present day.  Afterwards we talked about asteroids and looked at some wicked crystals.

Anyhow, the most surprising discovery from this visit concerned Dimetrodon, which when I was a child was one of my favorite dinosaurs from my extensive collection of plastic dinosaur toys.  My Dimetrodon toy looked vaguely like the one below, minus the "Dino-Strike Clamping Jaws".

What an awesome sail on his/her back, right?  Coolest dinosaur ever, or so I thought until my weekend stroll past the "Synapsid vs Diapsid" section of the evolving planet exhibit.  It was in this section that one of my childhood dino dreams died, and out of the ashes rose what I like to call the phoenix of discovery!  I discovered that Dimetrodon was not a dinosaur, but was instead our ancestor!!!!!  While that sinks in, here are some cool Dimetrodon pictures.

The Correlation of Human Skin Color and UV Radiation Levels

AMAZING!!!!!!!!!

For more on this, go here and here.

we are the byproducts of exploding stars

Today I am going to tell you where the atoms in your body came from.

Below you will find the periodic table of the elements. Stick with me, cuz this will melt your mind. Each of these elements has a different size nucleus. The nucleus is the very tiny very heavy part of the atom. Nuclei are made of these things called protons and neutrons, and the more protons that the atom's nucleus has, the higher the atomic number (atomic # increases left to right, top to bottom, just like reading)(different atoms of a given element can have different number of neutrons). Those are the basics, now on to the really good stuff.

"Duck, Duck, Clam" or "Awesome Adaptations"

We were sitting underneath a tree in the mountain view cemetery on a sunny day in Oakland. The bay and the golden gate were laid out in front of us in all their glory and the dead bodies were laid out below us in all their sarcophagi.  Suddenly, a cute duck couple landed a few feet away from us.  They looked pretty much like this:

Cute duck couple: top left, male - bottom right, female.

We thought about giving them some food, but all we had were these disgusting circus peanuts in the shape of bunnies. We didn't want to poison the ducks with the same stuff with which we poison ourselves, so we kept the bunnies hidden.

Magic Eye of bunny-shaped circus peanuts.  Cross your eyes and a new image will appear (j/k).

The female duck was quacking and waddling around like a duck should, but the male duck was hobbling along pitifully a few feet behind.  Upon closer inspection it seemed that the male duck's foot had become totally rotten, as a dark mass could be seen on the bottom of its leg. It looked like this, except really gross: