Such a fine place for old pussies to hang out!

Homeleigh retirement village is a perfect place to spend the twilight years, with staff to clean and cook, a garden and immaculate quarters. But forget about signing up – unless you are a cat.
Inside a fully functional house next to Keysborough Animal Shelter in outer Melbourne, [...]

A swordfish attack punctured an oil loading pipe in Angola recently, causing a three-day delay in tanker shipments of Girassol crude. Total, the French oil company which operates the pipeline, declared force majeure on shipments. Total later said that swordfish had damaged a flexible loading pipe. Declaring force majeure frees an operator from supply obligations [...]

How many ways can you spell YUMMY!

The day when restaurants will serve garlic grasshoppers or beetle larva skewers is getting closer in Costa Rica, where scientists are “growing” insects for human consumption.
Entomologist Manuel Zumbado’s research into this alternative food source is inspired by practices in Africa, where insects have long been part of people’s diet.
With [...]

For those of you into exotic breads, the new “puppy loaf” is both creepy and quite tasty
You often hear people talk about the eye of a storm, but never about the ear, nose, and mouth of the storm. Today’s Top 10 Photos are all about the forgotten orifices of today’s society. (Pics)

Pig lungs could soon be transplanted into humans
Following a medical breakthrough, pig lungs could be transplanted into humans to overcome a shortage of donor organs, a media report said Thursday citing Australian scientists.  Scientists have paved the way for animal-human transplanted in as little as five years, after keeping pig lungs alive and functioning with human blood.

New research identifies the ’speed gene’ contributing to a specific athletic trait in thoroughbred horses.
Groundbreaking research led by Dr Emmeline Hill, a leading horse genomics researcher at University College Dublin’s (UCD) School of Agriculture, Food Science and Veterinary Medicine has resulted in the identification of the ’speed gene’ in thoroughbred horses.

Dogs that wag their tails to the left may be more friendly
Everyone knows that if a dog’s ears are up and its tail is wagging vigorously, it is definitely pleased to see you.  Now, scientists using a robot have found that the way dogs use their tails is more subtle than we thought and that [...]

Stealing Goosey was just way harder than he thought
The week began with a lonely button lying on the side of the road. Then the stock market went crazy, the economy jumped up and down, many people lost their jobs, and the President made a series of speeches about things that no one cared about. Throughout [...]

Hawaiian bobtail squid
The genetic interplay between the Hawaiian bobtail squid (pictured) and the symbiotic bacteria that colonize its predator-fooling light organ have been charted to reveal a daily rhythm that sets the stage for a balanced, lifelong relationship.
Most humans are blissfully unaware that we owe our healthful existence to trillions of microbes that make [...]

Bonobo relaxing on a branch.
New research suggests that evolutionary changes in cognitive development underlie the extensive social and behavioral differences that exist between two closely related species of great apes. The study, published online on January 28th in Current Biology, a Cell Press publication, enhances our understanding of our two closest living relatives, chimpanzees and [...]

Reconstruction of two Sinosauropteryx.
The colour of some feathers on dinosaurs and early birds has been identified for the first time, reports a paper recently published in Nature.

Monarch butterflies resting in a tree.
Building on prior investigation into the biological mechanisms through which monarch butterflies are able to migrate up to 2,000 miles from eastern North America to a particular forest in Mexico each year, neurobiologists at the University of Massachusetts Medical School (UMMS) have linked two related photoreceptor proteins found in butterflies [...]

Scientists have found a striking similarity in the DNA that enables some bats and dolphins to echolocate.
A key gene that gives their ears the ability to detect high-frequency sound has produced the exact same amino acid changes over time in both creatures.
The researchers report their findings in the journal Current Biology.
It may be the first [...]

Punxsutawney Phil
The animal rights group PETA says Punxsutawney Phil is being badly treated by the crowds and noise at the annual Groundhog Day festival on Feb. 2 and should be replaced with a robotic groundhog .
 

Scientists keep discovering extinct species that hardly seem possible outside of cartoons. If they were still around, we might not be! Web Urbanist shows us some of the biggest, fiercest, and weirdest of animals that are no more. For instance, the whorl shark had its own “jaw saw”!
Whorl Sharkswere similar to their modern cousins despite [...]

The open windows of the metal-sulfide material allow cesium (Cs) ions to enter the structure. Like a Venus flytrap, the entrance of cesium ions in the cavity triggers a window-closing response to permanently encapsulate the ion.
Not every object is food to a Venus flytrap. Like the carnivorous plant, a new material developed at Northwestern University [...]

Whether or not you subscribe to the infinite monkey theorem (although you might like to know that Frooch is a Bonobo, Pete Pachal a Silverback, Charlie a Rhesus, and Leslie and I both Orang-utans — we spend our weekends picking bugs out of each other’s coats and eating them) at least be grateful that this [...]

The Bat can generate and use Biosonar Signals.
Researchers at The University of Western Ontario (Western) led an international and multi-disciplinary study that sheds new light on the way that bats echolocate. With echolocation, animals emit sounds and then listen to the reflected echoes of those sounds to form images of their surroundings in their brains.

Scientists from the University of Kansas have created a model of a microraptor to show its gliding capabilities.
A joint team from the University of Kansas and Northeastern University in China says that it has settled the long-standing question of how bird flight began.

An environmental campaigner protesting against the grim outcome of GM crops.

Fresh fears were raised over GM crops yesterday after a study showed they can cause liver and kidney damage.
According to the research, animals fed on three strains of genetically modified maize created by the U.S. biotech firm Monsanto suffered signs of organ damage after just [...]

Even though he had a heart of gold, literally, the rest of his wiring was totally shot
Our lives happen one incident at a time. If some incidents were somehow able to overlap other incidents, then we could finally learn to be in many places at one time. And we would catch ourselves coming and going. [...]

“Wolf jumping over fence”
The Natural History Museum’s wildlife photographer of the year has been stripped of his £10,000 prize, after judges found he was likely to have hired a tame Iberian wolf to stage the image of a species seen rarely in the wild.
 

Nature’s clues about about next generation armor
A recently discovered gastropod from the Kairei Indian hydrothermal vent, called Crysomallon squamiferum, has an unusual shell structure superbly suited for protecting it against penetration attack.
Deep within the Kairei Indian hydrothermal vent field, two-and-one-half miles below the central Indian Ocean, scientists have discovered a gastropod mollusk, whose armor could [...]

Two llama ignoring the view of Machu Picchu.
Scientists at the Southwest Foundation for Biomedical Research (SFBR) have for the first time developed a highly sensitive means of detecting the seven types of botulinum neurotoxins (BoNTs) simultaneously.

Crowned like a king, the spike-headed katydid, Panacanthus cuspidatus, is one of projected 100,000 insect species in Yasuni.
A team of scientists has documented that Yasuní National Park, in the core of the Ecuadorian Amazon, shatters world records for a wide array of plant and animal groups, from amphibians to trees to insects.