Quiddity

Space Dog

Weird & disturbing collection of vintage space suits for dogs.

How field entomologists in Peru study dung beetles

Here's a very entertaining blog posts about how entomologists in Peru 'make bait' to attract dung beetles for them to study.

Imagine the scenario: dung is thin on the ground (literally) - we find no monkey dung, no big cat dung, in fact no dung other than dog-poo with which to entice those most industrious of organic recyclers, the dung beetles (sub family Scarabaeinae) in to our collecting pots. There is nothing else for it but to 'make' our own. Now, amongst entomologists this is common practice - perfectly normal, honestly, it is!

I couldn't do it.

Link via Bug Girl's Blog.

"Yeah, bitch! Magnets!"

Vince Gilligan talks about how he came up with the magnet idea for last night's season premiere of Breaking Bad (minor spoilers if you haven't seen it yet).  Would it work in real life?  He'd love for Mythbusters to test it.

“I remember being intrigued by this magnet and wondering if it was going to destroy my watch or sterilize me so that I could never have kids,” he said.

Link via monkeysee.

 

What happens to your brain when you pee?

The authors of this paper asked 12 women to voluntarily pee in an fMRI to find out.  Interestingly enough, some of the women just could not pee while lying down.  Can't imagine why they'd have a hard time.  

Rare & Wonderful Space Art

Great collection of space art from the 1950s.

Link via boingboing.

How Much Money You Need To Realistically Recreate The Scrooge McDuck ‘Gold Coin Swim’

How Much Money You Need To Realistically Recreate The Scrooge McDuck ‘Gold Coin Swim’?  That never did look like fun to me.  Wouldn't it be painful?

Link via drikoland.

 

Vintage Insect Wall Charts

Nice collection of vintage insect wall charts from bibliodyssey.  Many of them will probably be the source of many nightmares to come.

Link via violins & starships.

Mutant fish

Thanks to BP's chemicals, seafood from the Gulf of Mexico is becoming grotesquely mutated.  

Darla Rooks, a lifelong fisherperson from Port Sulfur, Louisiana, told Al Jazeera she is finding crabs "with holes in their shells, shells with all the points burned off so all the spikes on their shells and claws are gone, misshapen shells, and crabs that are dying from within … they are still alive, but you open them up and they smell like they've been dead for a week".

Link via amy's robot.

UPDATE: Here's an article that details how the oil spill is harming the people of this area.  BP is evil.

Gulf residents typically consume more seafood, and in a wider variety, than most Americans do, putting them at greater risk from seafood exposed to oil and Corexit. Children, women who are or may become pregnant, and subsistence fishers who eat much of what they catch are at greatest risk, explains Dr. Cornelis Elferink of the University of Texas Medical Branch, who is conducting the NIEHS study on seafood safety. He tells me that areas of concern include developmental issues for fetuses and children, as well as cellular toxicity and cancer.

Buy your own plastinated human body for just $100,000

How is this even legal?  It's like something straight out of a horror movie.  

Wind Map

The oddly soothing wind map.

The wind map is a personal art project, not associated with any company. We've done our best to make this as accurate as possible, but can't make any guarantees about the correctness of the data or our software. Please do not use the map or its data to fly a plane, sail a boat, or fight wildfires

:-)

Via coudal.

Hubble Fashion

Fashion using Hubble images.  Pretty.

Link via gravity lens.