In a scene out of Little Shop of Horrors (pick your favorite version), a team of British botanists lead by Stewart McPherson and Alastair Robinson have discovered a rare new plant on the slopes of Mount Victoria in the Philippines.  That plant, christened Nepenthes attenboroughii after Sir David Attenborough, is a new species of carnivorous plant large enough to feast on local rodents!

Personally, I would’ve called it Audrey III, even though it’s not quite big enough to be a man-eater (yet).  Still, it’s amazing just how little we know about the wild world around us, and how much we discover daily about plants and animals.  Even after the plant was reported in 2000 by wandering missionaries, it wasn’t discovered by scientists until 2009.  That’s nine years of searching by professional scientists who knew what they were looking for; who knows how long the plant would’ve remained undiscovered if it wasn’t for dumb luck?

To think that a meat-eating plant of this size could’ve remained undiscovered until now is pretty awesome and pretty frightening.  I mean, who knows what’s out there?  For all we really know, there could be a mermaid in Israel!

Tags: nature, plants, unusual plants, carnivorous plant, rat-eating plant, Nepenthes attenboroughii, Stewart McPherson, Alastair Robinson, Mount Victoria, Philippines, undiscovered plants

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 […]