Environmentalists turn on nature
Anti-science activists about environmental issues are invariably predictable - and invariably hypocritical. While in the abstract, nature is supreme and any squirrel that might be impacted means a telescope has to be canceled or industry has to be run out of a region, when things get real for them, environmentalists are first in line to want Gaia to be shaped or torn apart.
With the Ebola scare just over a year ago, wealthy elites in coastal cities who deny vaccines for measles and whooping cough were the ones complaining the loudest that the National Institutes of Health had not spent any of its $330 billion in funding over the last 15 years on a vaccine. And now with Zika turning into a health concern, media and activists are promoting road maps for how science can destroy mosquitoes in droves.
What will be first in line to protect the public? The same GMO mosquito that environmentalists have consistently protested and conspicuous quantities of pesticides.
So much for living in harmony with nature.
The 99 million year old erection
Credit: Jason Dunlop/MfN Berlin
Two ancient daddy longlegs spiders were caught in flagrante delicto - and then somehow caught in amber.
The fossil left behind offers a rare example of Cretaceous copulation, including one ancient arachnid at the moment its penis was fully extended.
Male harvestmen have a retractable penis that spends most of its time tucked away inside its body and this new mid-coitus fossil gives researchers a unique look at how ancient harvestmen are related to the species that exist today.
A new study describes the fossil and places it in a new, extinct family of harvestmen, based partially on its unusual penis, which sports a spatula-shaped tip.
