Sunday Fun Stuff

One of the aspects of my job during field season is to educate people, in particular stressing why it’s not a good thing to feed wild animals.   You’re not really doing them a favor, and it’s sometimes harmful.

I really should set a better example.

Here’s a job I wouldn’t want:  Being “mean” to be nice.

PLACERVILLE, Calif. — A Northern California animal rescue group is trying to help an orphaned bobcat kitten with a problem: She’s too nice.

The friendly baby bobcat was only a few weeks old and had burned paws and infected eyes when fire crews found her in August while battling a 75,000-acre fire in the Plumas National Forest. They named her Chips, after the wildfire.

Volunteers at the Sierra Wildlife Rescue in Placerville now are trying to toughen the kitten up, with plans to release her back into the wild next spring,

One look at the picture accompanying the article, and you’ll understand why it’s a tough job.

A movie I am really looking forward to this summer is Star Trek:  Into Darkness.  The trailers are out, and someone made a mash-up from the first trailer.

Every now and then, a genius comes along who is so far ahead of their time, it takes a century for anyone to catch up:

While on his death bed, the brilliant Indian mathematician Srinivasa Ramanujan cryptically wrote down functions he said came to him in dreams, with a hunch about how they behaved. Now 100 years later, researchers say they’ve proved he was right.

“We’ve solved the problems from his last mysterious letters. For people who work in this area of math, the problem has been open for 90 years,” Emory University mathematician Ken Ono said.

The Onion already has a lead on the top contender for the Republican ticket in 2016:

Gangnam Style is the most viewed video in YouTube’s history, with over a billion views to date.   It’s also spawned it’s share of spoofs and this one is truly great:  NASA Johnson Style

In the “new technology,” but not ready (yet) for market category, Stanford University has developed “peel and stick” solar cells.

For all their promise, solar cells have frustrated scientists in one crucial regard — most are rigid. They must be deployed in stiff, often heavy, fixed panels, limiting their applications. So researchers have been trying to get photovoltaics to loosen up. The ideal: flexible, decal-like solar panels that can be peeled off like band-aids and stuck to virtually any surface, from papers to window panes. Now the ideal is real. Stanford researchers have succeeded in developing the world’s first peel-and-stick thin-film solar cells. The breakthrough is described in a paper in the December 20th issue of Scientific Reports

Want to feel old?  Or even if you don’t?  Try the Museum of Endangered Sounds.  See how many of them you remember.

Ultimate nerd:  This is how you propose to your girlfriend when you’re a molecular biologist.

This particular fellow and his lady friend both happen to be biologists, so he decided to let his polymerase chain reaction products do the talking, giving his girlfriend a big surprise when she imaged his electrophoresis gel.

She said yes, by the way.