the wolf at the door

Jan 23

I swear to god if I see “queer means anything non-heteronormative” one more time I’m going to turn into a tornado and just suck everything up in my vortex of destruction.

(via partysoft)

Jan 19

rhamphotheca:

Tripodfish

It might look like this tripod fish is “standing” on the edge of the Moon, but he is actually facing into the current on the top of a ridge at 1,960 meters depth in the Northeast Providence Channel near Eleuthera Island, Bahamas.

Image courtesy of Bahamas Deep-Sea Coral Expedition Science Party, NOAA-OE.

Jan 18

argh it’s too cute

(via violinslows)

Gabriel Gárcia Márquez on: Pet grooming

lordsteeb:

The heavyset dog looked over its shoulder at Jamon. Its doleful expression recalled an earlier era, in which mystic tinkers had roamed the streets and in which the ladies of the twilight had been more accommodating, more kind. The redolent air was heavy with spice and the promise of easy living.

Years later, remembering the moment, Jamon would swear on the Virgin that the hound had spoke to him, and said: “Your fortune will only ever be as long as my coat, and to cut it would be foolishness.” Jamon was young then and hotblooded and took this only as a challenge.

“Give me the shears,” he cried, as of yet unaware that he was flirting with the very Mother of the Dead herself, his distant cousin on his father’s side, who would come again one day to claim him.

(Source: orbsteeb)

Dec 24

smithsonianlibraries:

From Hans Christian Oersted’s Der Geist in der Natur (1850) (via Smithsonian Institution Libraries : Color patterns 2003-28012)

Dec 23

smithsonianlibraries:

DYK reindeer are the only deer species in which both males and females have antlers? From Die Säugthiere in Abbildungen nach der Natur . Factoid courtesy eol.org.

(via scientificillustration)

“Did you know that half of all adults who have had a near-death experience can not wear a watch? The increased electrical activity in their bodies renders the watches on their wrists inoperable.” — let’s talk about how very excellent the tv science was on The X-Files

Dec 22

“‘Swallows certainly sleep all winter. A number conglobulate together, by flying round and round, and then all in a heap throw themselves under the water and lie in the bed of the river.’

Thus, in the year 1768, Samuel Johnson explained the disappearance of these birds in the fall to his biographer, Boswell. He was expressing—with Johnsonian finality—the prevalent belief of his time. In The Natural History of Selborne, Johnson’s contemporary, Gilbert White, noted that one eminent Swedish naturalist of the period talked ‘as familiarly of swallows going under water in the beginning of September as he would of his poultry going to roost a little before sunset.’ With the passage of time, the absurdity of this idea grew obvious. A better understanding of migration explained the mystifying disappearance of birds in fall and Johnson’s ‘conglobulating’ swallows became recognized as a classic misconception. Through the nineteenth century and the first decades of the twentieth century, the belief in hibernating birds stood as a symbol of human credulity.

It was against this background that Dr. Edmund C. Jaeger, in the Chuckwalla Mountains of the Colorado Desert, on December 29, 1946, discovered a hibernating bird.”

-from Wandering Through Winter: A Naturalist’s Record of a 20,000-Mile Journey Through the North American Winter by Edwin Way Teale, winner of the 1966 Pulitzer for General Non-Fiction. I’m reading it now and it is just full of little gems like the above, which opens chapter four (“A Desert Wind”). Teale goes on to describe how he, his wife Nellie, a friend, and Dr. Jaeger spent a night in the canyon where Jaeger discovered the hibernating Common Poorwill (Phalaenoptilus nuttallii).

Birds go through a daily torpor (a period where their body heat and metabolism drop to conserve energy) that lasts less than 24 hours, but the Common Poorwill is the only bird known to go into torpor for as long as weeks or months.