Soren wrote:http://www.npr.org/blogs/krulwich/2012/10/02/162147810/are-those-spidery-black-things-on-mars-dangerous-yup

Stuffing cigarette butts into the lining of nests may seem unwholesome. But a team of ecologists says that far from being unnatural, the use of smoked cigarettes by city birds may be an urban variation of an ancient adaptation.

Birds have long been known to line their nests with vegetation rich in compounds that drive away parasites. Chemicals in tobacco leaves are known to repel arthropods such as parasitic mites, so Monserrat Suárez-Rodríguez, an ecologist at the National Autonomous University of Mexico in Mexico City, and her colleagues wondered whether city birds were using cigarette butts in the same way.

In a study published today in Biology Letters1, the researchers examined the nests of two bird species common on the North American continent. They measured the amount of cellulose acetate (a component of cigarette butts) in the nests, and found that the more there was, the fewer parasitic mites the nest contained.

When Bob Marley sang, “I am redder than red,” he probably did not imagine that chemists would one day capture this imagined hue. But researchers have taken a step in that direction, by tweaking a colour-sensing pigment from the human eye to absorb reds of longer wavelengths than those that we can see.

“We didn’t expect to get redder than red,” says Babak Borhan, a chemist at Michigan State University in East Lansing, who led the study published today in Science1.

...

And this engineered pigment absorbed far ‘redder’ wavelengths — 644 nm — than a natural red-sensing rhodopsin would 'see'.

...

For Borhan, one tantalizing detail remains elusive: a glimpse into what life looks like with photoreceptors that absorb 644-nm wavelengths of light. “I guess we’d see far into red, but not so red that we’d see heat signatures,” he says. “We’d see reds in greater definition, but really, I can’t know for sure.”

Bucky wrote:you'd be like that blind black guy from chappelle that hated himself

U.S. scientists said the carnivorous olinguito looks like a cross between a house cat and a teddy bear but is a member of the same family as raccoons

The creature, which has wooly orange brown, fur lives in the cloud forests of Colombia and Ecuador, and is named 'neblina,' which means fog in Spanish

Scientists at the Smithsonian said the mammal is most active at night, eats mainly fruit, rarely comes out of the trees and has one baby at a time