I recently posted the only existing video of Anne Frank, a Dutch Jew who lived in hiding from 1942 until 1944. She, as well as her family and others cloistered in the “secret annex” of a friend’s house, were arrested in 1944 and transported to the camps. Of the seven arrested, only one (Otto, Anne’s […]
I guess I hadn’t realized that wolf spiders schlep their young around on their backs. But the ever-reliable Wikipedia (Greg will dissent, and is preparing a post on the iniquities of Wikipedia) says this: Wolf spiders are unique in the way that they carry their eggs. The egg sac, a round silken globe, is attached […]
Only a Drosophila worker can truly appreciate this cartoon, because one of the banes of our existence is mites in our fly cultures. There’s nothing worse in a fly lab than a mite infestation. Anyway, for your delectation:
BBC viewers: don’t forget to watch The Secret Life of Cats tonight at 2100 BST on BBC 2. That’s just three hours from now, and I expect a report or two. The show documents the lives of cats as seen from videocameras mounted on their collars, which include a GPS sensor to track their movements. […]
This just happened, and information is sketchy, but the U.S. Supreme Court has ruled unanimously that naturally-occurring genes can’t be patented. This ruling came from a case in which the company Myriad Genetics was challenged because it holds the patents on the breast cancer genes BRCA1 and BRCA2. Those patents mean that no other organization, […]
I engage in name-calling only when I’m pushed to the limit, but a new piece in the Spectator by Britain’s Chief Rabbi Jonathan Sacks has brought me to that point. (As a secular Jew, I can’t help thinking that even religious Jews should behave better than members of other faiths.) Once again I am painfully […]
Sunset, Monday (click all photos to enlarge): Evening, Tuesday: Last night we were predicted to have a godawful storm, with hailstones the size of ping-pong balls. Well, they closed our airports, and there was a storm, but it wasn’t nearly as fierce as predicted. Nevertheless, it offered some dramatic views and a lot of lightning. […]
She was only one of ten million victims of the Holocaust, but somehow her story, as recorded in her diary, can move us more than pondering the huge number of victims who left no testimony. Let her story, then, be multiplied by ten million, for though not every victim was young, all were loved. This […]
UK readers, note that tomorrow at 21:00 British Summer Time (BST), BBC2 television will be presenting a very important show: For some reason the Scots have to wait until 23:20. There’s a clip on the website, and on another page you can read about the special feline-directed GPS technology—a technology so sophisticated that it can […]
Reader Dom spotted this interesting volume on a list of weird books. It causes me huge cognitive dissonance, because it touts cats as a way of finding God. I’ll grant that only insofar as cats consider themselves gods, and that’s the end of the line. The blurbs: Here are a few others from the list […]
