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. 

Why Pee is Cool - entry #6 - "Pee, Our Connection with the Earth's Metabolic Cycle"

Here, in the final PeePeePost, is where we bring all we have learned together and find out how the act of peeing unites us with our planet.

sciseekclaimtoken-4eab48c19bc77 Any form of life that we know of needs two basic things.  The first is matter, as life has to be made of something.  The second is energy, so life can do something with that matter (e.g., move around, reproduce, watch trailer park boys).  Most life on earth gets its energy from the sun.  All life on earth gets its matter from...from earth, duh!

As we learned in the last PeePost, the atoms in your body are no different from the atoms in rocks/oceans/air/etc.  Additionally, the composition of our bodies is close-ish to that of the earth's crust!!

Graph of abundances of chemical elements in the earths' upper continental crust.  We are made mostly of the really abundant stuff in the upper left (e.g., oxygen, carbon, hydrogen, etc.)

Because of those two facts, I like to think of any kind of earth life as little tiny earth particles--walking, talking, peeing, sometimes neighborly little chunks of the earth's crust.

Humans are earth particles.

The Grand Canyon Rules, pt 1

Recently I went to the grand canyon, which is one of the top five most amazing sights I imagine I will ever see in my life. Here is a picture of me at the north rim:

Me, Mind Being Melted.

At the visitors center, on the side of an awesome miniature model of the canyon, there is this amazing quote from geologist Clarence Dutton (1841-1912) that sums up quite well how I feel when standing on the edge of the canyon:

Dimension means nothing to the senses, and all we are left with is a troubled sense of immensity

Slow and steady wins the race

I've been thinking a lot recently about time scales, how quickly and/or slowly things happen, and how we humans perceive that.

Look at how slowly this mudslide happens!!!! Way more slowly than I thought mudslides would ever happen. This is from southern italy, where 200 residents were evacuated to avoid this really slow mud.



According to howstuffworks.com, mudslides can sometimes reach speeds of up to 60 miles per hour. The speed of the mudslide increases as the soil contains more water or the slope is more steep. So, just based on what we can see visually from this video, the mud looks a lot like dirt, meaning there is not much water, and the slope is not that steep, so it makes sense that this mudslide is relatively slow. It also makes sense that the slower a mudslide is, the more likely it is to be caught on video, which might be one reason that this is the only mudslide video i can find on the internet. EVERYTHING MAKES SENSE!!!!!!!