Giant cannibalistic carnivorous squid-bats

If you have been paying attention to squids, you probably noticed the mighty humbolt squid has invaded california. The NYT and AP had high profile stories on it of late.
This weeks nature-news online had a nice little article on the squid here (I guess it is subscribers only, dammit), which had little new to note except this stunning video of the squids in action. I love the completely chaotic squid disco at the end of the video.


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These are photogenic little buggers, with creepy photos from the AP

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and the NYT:

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Also a boring video linked through the nytimes here and a much better one with the humbolt squid masticating/crushulating its kill here

Great stuff, go squids, may you start eating surfers soon so squid panic strikes the land and there is a large resurgence in squid horror films.

Boring same old folding bike santa fe post

Hit the Lamy trail last week, took the same pics as always, enjoy

thought it was DRY mud:

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not so dry:

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open car with train wheels

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with housings!

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While the zia caboose slowly decays

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In the arroyo there are not roadrunner footprints:

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Mutant chicken? Raven? Pheasant? Velociraptor? Nagini?

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Thanks to a recent article in Naturwissenschaften 94, 657–665 (2007)I learned that they found nice roadrunner like fossil footprints in China. How did they know they were roadrunner like? They had zygodactyl toes. Which means one of the front three toes is rotated clockwise so there are two forward and two back, giving footprints like a nice X look when they hit the ground. Unlike the mystery snake footprints I found above. Hopefully the article link is available to all, as they have some nice pictures of bird footyprints.

Indexing icicles

Selections from the recent literature

Put a live creature in the beamline, get a nature paper. Thats one of the odd truths inherent in boring accelerator research. It is not your core materials research that gets you the fancy paper. It is the time the biologist convinces you to glue an ant to the stage and do radiography of the trapped critter drinking.

It seems some ultrasonic researchers caught on to this and got this puppy published:
from XieW. J., et al. Appl. Phys. Lett., 89 . 214102 (2006).



Living creatures levitated by ultrasonic waves. Woo! None the worse for the wear apparently, except for the fish, quoting from the abstract:

" The vitality of ant and ladybug is not evidently influenced during the acoustic levitation, whereas that of the young fish is reduced because of the inadequacy of water supply."

Got it? Fish need water to live. Oh yeah, and if your acoustic waves are strong enough and around the size of tiny lightweight things, you can levitate them. They use this for materials and physics research, but did they get any press for that? Nope, only when they put the the ant, ladybug and young fish in the contraption.

Nice job gentlemen. I file this under people who have more fun doing research than me.

Read the nature summary here

Selections from the recent literature

Apparently ground up llamas are useful to see if the local coffee jerks are shorting you a buzz. If I am reading it right, I recommend a pet llama and a meat grinder for those who are concerned about such things.

Kitty litter makes me very very angry

Ok back to cats briefly. Here is a nice synopses of some recent research showing that cat shit controls every aspect of our lives!!! Triffids have nothing on them. I knew I never should have lived with cats. Crap crap crap crap crap, oh no, I said crap, now I am infected with rage!!!! I think I was thirty before I emptied a litter box. Lo, what a horrible stinky brain parasite inducing mistake that was.

At least we are not rats

Yuk!

A good week for science

Ok, UC and partners won the lab contract. Given the constraints, this was the best possible outcome. This is not an overwhelming victory for science, but it is much better than the alternative. The lab will change for sure, for science in america's sake, I hope it is a good change.

Also the Monkeys won in the second monkey trial in Pennsylvania. Yeah monkeys. Almost as good as cows, really, maybe better, as monkeys can help the disabled, and cows, to my knowledge, can not, at least not until someone elects me as god.

Unfortunately this issue will not die anytime soon as Americans as a whole have no concept of the dangers of creeping fundamentalism. Hopefully this will keep religion out of science classes, but I am not confident non-monkey derived people will stop until they have neutered the curiousity of american children.

A sad note, this ruling also kills the case for introducing the the flying spaghetti monster into classrooms. If the non-monkey derived people won, I was really hoping that the FSM would also win and be forced to be taught alongside whatever the hell non-monkey derived people think science is.

Ok, enough of that lest I become a drooling reactionary, more bike and cat minutia promised in the months ahead, including new cats, with more than 5 fingers per paw even!