Tag Archives: Science & Nature

The Long Weekend, Overstimulation, & Frogs With Pointy Teeth

I’m awake, and I’ve been lax of late with the blog, so I figured I’d type at you a bit.

As the last couple of entries indicate, this has been the weekend of both my big convention and my book festival debuts, at DragonCon (largest SF con in the world, I’m told) and the Decatur Book Festival (largest book fest in the US, right here walking distance from my front door).

It has been fun and exciting and stressful and exhausting, and I’ll revisit it in another post once it’s truly over (I still have a DragonCon panel at 4 pm tomorrow…uh, today. Monday.), hopefully with pictures from at least one of my appearances.

I’m not sure if it’s just the over-stimulation of it all, the public speaking, the meeting of cool new people, the armies of amazingly hot women in cool costumes, or lingering full moon energy, but I got maybe two hours of sleep so far tonight. And I have an earworm of Felicia Day’s lovely voice singing “Do you want to date my avatar?” over and over in my head.

Scanning the news as I sat here in my drawers, wishing I was a-slumber, I came across this headline from The Guardian: “Lost World of Fanged Frogs and Giant Rats Discovered in Papua New Guinea.”

Fanged frogs!

I already wrote about the discovery in the Andes of the world’s tiniest frogs a while back, indication that perhaps the evil Frogs of Doom were up to new tricks after their defeat by Spartacus Wilde and his kids (as chronicled in my novel Doc Wilde and The Frogs of Doom). And now this.

Fanged frogs. In a lost world.

They also discovered a species of rat as big as a cat, kangaroos that live in trees, and a fish that grunts. Among many other new critters.

See? There really is pulp in our world.

UPDATE: For another report on the lost world and its denizens, with several pictures, check out The Daily Mail here.

Bobby McFerrin’s Amazing Musical Mind Control!

In an appearance on a panel at the World Science Festival, Bobby McFerrin uses his superpowers to turn a crowd into a huge musical instrument. Fascinating and entertaining.

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Bat vs. Spider

Batman, however, would still find a way to take out Spider-Man. Because he’s Batman.

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The Souls of Dogs

Travis 1995-2007

Travis 1995-2007

There’s a good short piece in the Seattle Times about the ethical/emotional lives of dogs. It’s not going to provide any groundbreaking insight to anyone who has ever lived with a dog, but it’s a nice break from the usual Cartesian philosophy that animals are guided entirely by instinct and have no emotions.

One thing I was very interested to find out:

“Dogs apparently laugh,” Page said. The same brain structures show the same activity in laughing humans and in dogs that are enjoying themselves. A dog’s laugh is a rhythmic pant.

I know that pant. You naturally know it means happy, but I had no idea it’s actual laughter, physiologically speaking.

Go here to read.

Some Amazing Kinetic Art

This video is about the artist Reuben Margolin, and his amazing kinetic sculptures based on waveforms in nature. His work is incredible in its complexity, and gloriously beautiful to gaze upon.

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Tiny Frogs of Doom Discovered

Many of you know I have a book about to come out (Doc Wilde and The Frogs of Doom) chronicling Doctor Spartacus Wilde’s dire battle with mutated eldritch amphibians in the jungles of South America.

Not to spoil anything, but the Wildes saved the day, as is their wont. But you know that already, because the earth still exists, and you’re reading this.

The threat may not be over, however. Scientists recently discovered a tiny beast, the smallest frog known in the world, in the Peruvian Andes (perhaps not far from the area of the Wildes’ final battle with the Frogs of Doom).

What evil lurks in the heart of this frog?

What evil lurks in the heart of this frog?

From National Geographic:

…But scientists searching the Andes mountains’ upper Cosnipata Valley in southern Peru, near Cusco, spotted the coin-size creature–a member of the Noblella genus–in the leaf litter of a cloud forest between 9,925 and 10,466 feet…

“The most distinctive character of the new species,” scientists write in the February issue of the journal Copeia, “is its diminutive size.” Females grow to 0.49 inch (12.4 millimeters) at most. Males make it to only 0.44 inch (11.1 millimeters).

What’s most surprising is that the frog lives at such high elevations…In general, larger animals are found at greater heights.

Yes, in general. But if these tiny monsters are indeed another variety of the Frogs of Doom, perhaps they are arcanely adapted to the higher elevation.

And if so…what sinister purpose do they have in our world?

Sophisticated Beehavior

Interesting article at Scientific American about the nature of consciousness, using bees as an example:

Although these experiments do not tell us that bees are conscious, they caution us that we have no principled reason at this point to reject this assertion. Bees are highly adaptive and sophisticated creatures with a bit fewer than one million neurons, which are interconnected in ways that are beyond our current understanding, jammed into less than one cubic millimeter of brain tissue. The neural density in the bee’s brain is about 10 times higher than that in a mammalian ce­rebral cortex, which most of us take to be the pinnacle of evolu­tion on this planet. In humans, widespread loss of cerebral cortex, as in the vegetative patient Terri Schiavo, leads to an irreversible loss of con­scious­ness. That is not to say that a cerebral cortex is necessary for consciousness in creatures with a different evolutionary heritage.

Very interesting stuff.