In what is some of the crappiest news I’ve read today, scientists have discovered previously unknown colonies of emperor Penguins in the Antarctic.  Before you ask, I don’t think the news is crappy because I hate penguins.  I actually like those goofy flightless fish-eaters.  The news is crappy because the penguin colonies were discovered via satellite imaging of penguin poop trails.

While penguins themselves aren’t visible from space, scientists are able to pick out the reddish-brown droppings against the white sheets of ice, and they use the latrine trail to track the movement of the birds.  This has to be one of the strangest penguin-related stories since Pierre the Penguin got his designer coat!  It’s great that they’ve figured out a better way to track the birds, but that’s really kind of a strange thing to issue a press release about.  I wonder how they A) discovered they could see penguin doo-doo from space and B) who figured out that it WAS penguin remains they were tracking across the ice.

Tags: weird science, penguin tracking, Antarctic wildlife, satellite tracking, animal poop

Margaret O’Callaghan had a need for a new type of kitchen utensil.  The round-bottomed ladle and the spatula are just not good enough when you’re dealing with things like crock pots and serving dishes.  That’s why she invented the scrudle, a combination ladle and spatula designed to scrape the deliciousness from any sort of cooking […]

Every day, Tom Baker deals with the issue of traffic.  Given Southern California’s massive concentration of cars, it’s no wonder that Baker would get frustrated dealing with the daily traffic routine.  That inspiration resulted in these great images of Los Angeles without the cars.   Here’s the full image gallery, and it’s awesome.
I love the […]

Have you ever wondered where salt comes from?  I mean, salt is in everything from fertilizers (potassium chloride) to the dinner table (sodium chloride), but where does it actually come from?  Why, salt mines, of course!  They’re not just for horrible industrial accidents or mad scientist lairs anymore.  English Russia has a great look inside […]

For some reason, the kids these days love the Twilight saga.  Believe me, it pains me to call it the Twilight saga, because to me a saga is a great, sweeping work of masterful literature, not a teenage vampire romance novel.  Either way, the latest movie based on the Twilight books, New Moon (officially The […]

People worry about all kinds of crises as the world ends, but as the movie Zombieland taught us, sometimes it’s our snack foods that are most important to our happiness.  For Tallahassee, it was his beloved Hostess Twinkies.  If your favorite food is the humble Eggo waffle from General Mills, then you’d best head to […]

I love goofy little websites like this.  From the Wal-Martians to quality engineering, I love a nice, odd corner of the Internet to investigate.  If it’s something that can result in some comedy thanks to random word generation, even better.   That’s why when Mysterio offered to predict my holiday gifts, I jumped at the […]

Linguist d’Armond Speers is an odd bird.  How else could you explain someone that taught his son Klingon as his first language? For the first three years of his son’s life, Speers spoke to his son only in the fictional alien language Klingon from the Star Trek universe.  His reasoning?  It was an experiment to […]