April Tweets & Pins

Here’s the monthly roundup of our favorite tweets and pins for your perusing pleasure. Be sure to follow us on Twitter and Pinterest if you like what you see!

Astronomers pinpoint the exact date and time that Monet’s “Sunset” was painted.
This penguin slips on the ice and then I’m pretty sure he cusses.
What happens to your body without a spacesuit? NOTHING GOOD
Animal Planet’s “Call of the Wildman” is accused of animal mistreatment.
Photos: Camera-trapped predators of India.
Teach yourself to dream lucidly but, uh, watch out for the demons.
Spectacular renditions of superheroes in Pacific Northwestern indigenous art styles.
Two snakes of the same species can have surprisingly different venoms.
Video: 1-year old anteater has a fuzzy freakout over a log. You’re welcome.
Monsanto is returning to cross-breeding plants because people think GMOs are icky.

March Tweets & Pins

Here’s the monthly roundup of our favorite tweets and pins for your perusing pleasure. Be sure to follow us on Twitter and Pinterest if you like what you see!

Polluted Milan is planning to construct a vertical forest by planting 900 trees on the balconies of two towering buildings.
A new supernova was discovered, which is important because supernovas can help refine distance measurements in our big gigantic universe.
Chinese researchers discover that ball lightning has to do with dirt. UFOlogists all over the world cry.
Activism has inherent risks, the worst of which are murder.
Umbra at Grist gives some pointers for tackling home mold problems before calling in pros.
All it takes is a mutation in one gene to turn a protein into a toxic venom.
Black widows, like rattlesnakes, can decide how much venom to inject when under threat.
I’ve probably said this before, but don’t feed deer corn in the winter.
Swedish people made this. I like them.
Science is learning how to make power out of.. heartbeats.

February Tweets & Pins

Here’s the monthly roundup of our favorite tweets and pins for your perusing pleasure. Be sure to follow us on Twitter and Pinterest if you like what you see!

The Dodo is a new, awesome site all about animals that you should definitely check out.
Do you know what your plants are doing when you’re not watching?
This huge bee hotel is not only eco-awesome, it’s gorgeous and I want it. Now.
Mother Earth News gives you 65 ways to save money through self-reliance.
The Clymene dolphin is a cross between two other dolphins.
Top carnivores are more important than we ever could have imagined, because obviously.
Ten of the rarest animals on earth are stunning and fascinating.
#BestBigBug hastag reveals incredible and occasionally horrifyingly huge insects.
Cow poop can tell us things.
Were you under the impression that birds sleep in their nests?
The rare and spectacular snow leopard was captured on film in Pakistan by camera traps.
Do you need a giant animal made? Talk to this guy.

January Tweets & Pins

Here’s the monthly roundup of our favorite tweets and pins for your perusing pleasure. Be sure to follow us on Twitter and Pinterest if you like what you see!

This trout ate a whole bunch of shrews. Wut.
Your eyeballs will love this list of beautiful moths.
A phenomenon known as ‘earthquake lights‘ may be linked to rift zones.
More than 300 sharks armed with transmitters tweet (as in, on Twitter) when they get near the beach.
The cancer-resistant and spectacularly ugly Naked Mole Rat was named Vertebrate of the Year.
An ancient tree-dwelling critter is the great grandmommy of the carnivore family.
Here’s Optimus Prime made out of gingerbread.
Flowers are blooming in New York.
Here are some animals that handled the polar vortex LIKE A BOSS.
This ancient piece of amber contains flowers frozen in the act of reproduction, giving botanists studying the origin of flower sex a reason to party.

Some awesome April tweets!

There have been some superawesomeamazing tweets bubbling around so I thought I’d share some with you.

Apartment Therapy posted 25 awesome terrarium ideas, some you can do yourself and others you can purchase. This goes perfectly with my succulent addiction.

X-ray origami birds – so awesome. From the site: “‘oritsunagumono’ (translated as ‘things folded and connected’) is a collection of origami works by artist Takayuki Hori, created to highlight the environmental threat of pollution to a number of species native to Japan’s coastal waterways.”

I love pheromones, nature-made chemicals and poisons, and the animals that use them. Check out this spectacular post at the Artful Ameoba on Bombardier Beetles, Bee Purple, and the Sirens of the Night.

This article from Matt Soniak talks about the special armor worn by harvestmen (which are arachnids but not spiders). Best part of the article? This line, on differentiating harvestmen from daddylonglegs and spiders: “One, harvestmen do not scare the living shit out of me and I do not need to have my girlfriend to kill any that wander into our house.” Hee!

A Mindful Carnivore is one of my new favorite blogs – it’s authored by a vegan-turned-hunter. In this post reviewing a film called Mother Nature’s Child, the author muses on the relationship between child and nature when hunting is the activity tying the two together. I’m loving this blog.

Really awesome stuff going around this week. Leave any other goodies you’ve found in the comments for all to enjoy!

Tweets & Links

I found these two fun nuggets and thought I’d share them with you here since I tweeted them earlier today.

Cornell Lab of Ornithology did this nifty little study to see if Black-Capped Chickadees would be more interested in nesting in tubes rather than houses, since tubes better resemble their preferred nesting sites of excavated snags. The results? They way preferred the tubes over traditional bird houses! So if you’re into providing nests for your birds, especially cavity nesters like chickadees, you may be inspired to try this method out. I bet with some glue and tree bark, those PVC tubes could look AWESOME.

NatGeo did a little report on a study published in 2005 in the journal Ecology Letters that looked at why some bird eggs are speckled when the speckles provide no camouflage. It turns out that the building blocks of the speckles’ darker pigmentation acts like a glue in areas of the eggshell that are weaker from calcium deficiency. NEATO!

And this.

Taken from somewhere on ICanHasCheezburger.

Nature News & Tweets for December

So, since only the primitive portion of my brain (responsible for breathing and peeing in a private facility rather than on the floor) is functioning from four days of poor nutrition and an awful lot of Netflix Instant, I thought I’d share some neato things going on in the world of.. well. The world.

A 400,000 year old tooth was discovered in Israel. One doc says “HUMAN!”, another says “Probably not, you over-zealous sonofabitch.” Typical. (According to the article, the oldest Homo sapiens tooth discovered so far is half that old so if it IS human, well, it’s a big deal.) I’d like to suggest that for just a few minutes, sit back and picture what it would be like to have another HOMINID SPECIES (not another race, culture, or other kind of group) wandering around. Another hominid species. Hominid. Mind-blowing.

Tickling may have some evolutionary benefit. Or at least, it may have used to. It may have been a way for families and friends to bond and taught youngsters to protect vulnerable parts of their bodies during play-fighting, like the neck and belly. Primates that participate in tickling pant a certain way, and the article suggests we may have the roots of modern-day laughter in this vocal behavior. Still doesn’t explain why I occasionally laugh so hard that I pee my pants.

Ed Yong reports on research that points to the absorption of marine bacteria into human guts to help process sushi. Japanese people utilize seaweed like nori in a variety of dishes, and the high prevalence of seaweed in their evolutionary diets provided for sushi-eating bacteria to enter into – and survive! – their digestive tracts. Which means that Japanese people can actually better digest seaweeds thanks to a bacteria that wasn’t originally there (and isn’t there in other groups). Unfortunately there are no cupcake-eating bacteria that can help me with my, erm, problem.

Bryan over at FieldHerper wows me again with his intense photos. It was hard to pick just one to highlight, but I’m SERIOUSLY partial to thunderstorm photos. I swear to God his photos are like naturalist porn. (Maybe that brings to mind something different than I’m thinking. That would be weird. *ponder* Super weird.)

HAPPY TUESDAY!! :)

Link Love and Tweetles

How about some links and fun Twitter-pated geekery? Check it out! :)

Browse the 2010 Gallery of photos entered for NatGeo’s Photography Contest. (Warning: you could spend up to an estimated time of three months looking through these galleries.)

So, what you’re saying is, I could have avoided all that mathematically-induced PTSD if the nuns had just given me a little cattle prod every morning after prayers? Huh. Shit.

Ed Yong is one of my favorite bloggers and this past week he posted about one of the world’s tiniest frogs, which also happens to be highly poisonous. You’ll be pleasantly surprised to know where the toxins come from – super cool.

The Frog Blog reports on fossils so tiny they can be clustered together on the head of a pin! (Yes, obviously I am geeking out right now.)

First it was in our plastic water bottles and now it’s in.. receipts?

And I’m finishing with gratuitous cuteness: baby otters learning to swim.

Have an excellent day everybody! :)

{News Flash} Microhyla is the Tiniest, Cutest Thing You’ll Ever See

Okay, okay, I am *freaking out* right now. Look. At. This.

Microhyla nepenthicola, via NatGeo.

{News Flash} Sperm of the Snot Otter

Go ahead. Say it out loud.

Okay okay, I’m not going to lie to you guys: I literally laughed out loud when I read the words “snot otter” and saw this rather-adorable-in-an-ugly-way creature below the headline:

Cryptobranchus alleganiensis, via NatGeo