theage.com.au => Murderous marsupial in mystery cave

FOR the giant animals of ancient Australia – and sometimes the people – it meant sudden, bone-crunching death. A silent stalker with the most powerful jaws of any mammal in the world, it could remain invisible until the second it dropped from a tree or leapt from behind a log to deal death with a single, spine-severing bite.

Meet thylacoleo, the “marsupial lion” that terrorised Australia for millions of years and moved the 19th-century British paleontologist Sir Richard Owen to describe it as “the fellest of predatory beasts”.

Found intact in a cave in Australia, a complete Thylacoleo skeleton! How cool is that? Australia had the really nifty Pleistocene killers.

Technorati Tags: Blog, Natural Sciences, Paleontology, Science

Scientific American => Landscape Influences Human Social Interaction

I’ve lived in Arizona all my life, and for most of my life I’ve lived in homes built in the 1940′s. In that era, and well into the 70′s, we (the state in general) lived a fantasy world where people could bring the midwest or east to Arizona, and so all the homes of that era have non-native trees and lawns.

Considering that we have no actual water here, those things are really parasites.

Since I purchased my current home in 1990, I’ve made a darned good effort at killing the lawn – although I refuse to kill the big trees.

Now, according to this article, it turns out that my “native” front yard is why I don’t socialize with my neighbors. Who’d have thought? I just thought I was anti-social.

Technorati Tags: Blog, Natural Sciences

Yet another Tech Blog => Swiss Public Toilet

This is just brilliant.

Do you think people intentionally walk past it and stare as if they are looking at you?

Technorati Tags: Blog, Toilet

I’m glad the new Doctor has taken to changing his clothes.

In the good old, pre JNT days, the Doctor often changed clothes (although generally keeping the same basic “style”) and that made him more realistic.

This, however, is the best of the pictures. In the other pictures, the poorly realized breast pocket makes him look like the Maytag Repair man.

Of course, in a way, he IS the repair man…

Technorati Tags: Blog, Doctor Who