Non-Prophet

Big Trees

This lecture will take your breath away.

Punk Turtle Sports Mohawk

This has to be the greatest great ever. This Mary River Turtle is such a non-conformist that he breathes through his tail. Really.

DailyMail

Black Panthers are Melanistic Variants

Before today I thought that black panthers were a separate species of jaguar, not a variation in big cats that runs across a bunch of species of big cats.

Wikipedia:

A black panther is a black (melanistic) color variant of one of several species of larger cat which are often known by the term panther. "Panther" in North America is most commonly used for the cougar (genus Puma)[citation needed], in Latin America it is most often used to mean a jaguar and elsewhere in the world it usually refers to the leopard (both genus Panthera).

Cow Tech

This is interesting. I wonder what the mechanism for cows being able to sense direction. The sun perhaps? The article hints at, but more or less dismisses that reasoning. It seems like a much more logical hypothesis than cows being able to sense a magnetic field, but I wouldn't rule that out. This begs the question of "why align?"

Yahoo! news:

WASHINGTON - Talk about animal magnetism, cows seem to have a built-in compass. No bull: Somehow, cattle seem to know how to find north and south, say researchers who studied satellite photos of thousands of cows around the world.

Painting Elephant

More neat stuff.

Dugongs

Closely related to elephants, and live in salt water instead of fresh like a manatee.

Dugongs, or sea cows as they are sometimes called, are marine animals which can grow to about three metres in length and weigh as much as 400 kilograms. They are the only marine mammals in Australia that live mainly on plants. The name sea cow refers to the fact that they graze on the seagrass, which form meadows in sheltered coastal waters. As dugongs feed, whole plants are uprooted and a telltale feeding trail is left.

Encyclopedia of Life Goes Live!

Yes! Finally!!! I've been waiting for this for what has felt like a forever! EOL.ORG!! EOL.ORG!!! Yeah! The wait is over! This site is going to be the greatest great ever!

Wait! Problem! The site is clogged due to extremely high traffic and I can't see a thing. Curses! Foiled! (We need an encyclopedia of life mirror, eol mirror, eol.org mirror.)

From the non-clogged Wikipedia:

Encyclopedia of Life (EOL) is a free, online collaborative encyclopedia intended to document all of the 1.8 million known species of living organisms known to science, which went live on February 26, 2008 with over one million entries.[2]. It is compiled from existing databases and from contributions by experts and non-experts throughout the world.[3][4] It aims to build one "infinitely expandable" page for each species, including video, sound, images, graphics, as well as text.[5] In addition, the Encyclopedia will incorporate the Biodiversity Heritage Library, which will contain the digitized print collections from the world's major natural history libraries."

Amazon Pictures

I have a whole mes of pictures up on flickr.com from my trip to the Amazon rainforest. I split the pictures into several sets such as animals, people, Iquitos and jungle. Hope you enjoy perusing these shots. There are probably too many photos in those sets, but if you dig in you'll find a couple of real gems.

Amazon Adventure!

Hey everyone. We're back -- actually been back but busy -- and it is time for me to start blogging again. Thanks to everyone who helped out while I was gone, and thanks to N8 for the new banner!

The trip was fantastic. I can't even begin to put into words how much of an amazing adventure it was. It was exactly what I needed to unwind for a few weeks in a far away and strange land. My wife and I quite literally had the time of our lives.

Here is the iMovie that we made that describes the trip in gory detail. If anyone wants a regular DVD copy of it send me an email and I'll ship one out to you. The video looks great in full resolution. If you have a problem hearing the audio commentary pan your speakers to the right a bit. Some of it didn't come out as I planned. Sorry it is so painfully long, especially in spots. This is my debut as a video editor.

Don't know, Don't Want To.

I'm planing on skipping this.