Stannous Flouride's Book of Truthiness

“These are the fastest-known arachnids so far,” says the study’s lead author, Hannah Wood, curator of spiders at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History. And they are the only ones known to catch prey in a way similar to trap-jaw ants. As such, Wood is calling these spiders, from the family Mecysmaucheniidae, “trap-jaw spiders.

http://player.ooyala.com/iframe.js#pbid=MGQxZGQ1N2VlMDRjNGJmNmFmN2QwY2U2&ec=BsdG9tMjE6F0xo12_zmWk3jgLDGN6GaeThis Semysmauchenius spider can make a strike with its chelicerae in just 0.56 milliseconds. The spider was recorded at 3,000 frames per second (fps), but the video is playing at 20 fps, so in real life its movements would be 150 times as fast as seen here.
”Mecysmaucheniidae spiders are especially secretive creatures, tiny and difficult to spot on the forest floor in their native New Zealand and southern South America. Experts have described 25 species in the family, but another 11 await descriptions—and still more are likely waiting to be discovered.

Source: Tiny Spiders Are the Fastest Known on Earth | Science | Smithsonian

And, for my fellow arachnophiles, here’s an album of our insect preying friends:

As the state of California has suffered through four years of drought, Shasta Lake has stood as a potent symbol of the water shortage.

The largest reservoir in the state—a critical source of water for human consumption and for the fertile farmland of the Central Valley—dropped to just 29 percent of its capacity by December 2015. Water levels stood more than 100 feet below normal.

Now, after a rain-soaked March, Shasta Lake holds 109 percent of its long-term average supply for this time of year.

As of March 29, the 21-mile long reservoir held 4.004 million acre-feet of water, well above the historical average of 3.668 million acre-feet. The amount of water in Shasta Lake has tripled since December, and the lake level has risen 134 feet.

Source: Water Levels Rise on Shasta Lake : Image of the Day

I’d like to see our System restored to nine planets like the one that I grew up with.

The hunt is on to find “Planet Nine”—a large undiscovered world, perhaps 10 times as massive as Earth and four times its size—that scientists think could be lurking in the outer solar system. After Konstantin Batygin and Mike Brown, two planetary scientists from the California Institute of Technology, presented evidence for its existence this January, other teams have searched for further proof by analyzing archived images and proposing new observations to find it with the world’s largest telescopes.

Just this month, evidence from the Cassini spacecraft orbiting Saturn helped close in on the missing planet. Many experts suspect that within as little as a year someone will spot the unseen world, which would be a monumental discovery that changes the way we view our solar system and our place in the cosmos. “Evidence is mounting that something unusual is out there—there’s a story that’s hard to explain with just the standard picture,” says David Gerdes, a cosmologist at the University of Michigan who never expected to find himself working on Planet Nine. He is just one of many scientists who leapt at the chance to prove—or disprove—the team’s careful calculations.

Source: Mysterious Gravitational Tug on Orbiter May Help Find Planet Nine – Scientific American

A couple of years ago one of the neighbors for whom I take out the trash bins and sweep every week, threw away several young plants that weren’t doing very well.
I rescued them and stuck them in the ground. The other 3, two rosemary and another kale, didn’t make it but one did.
And today it blossomed with these lovely flowers.
I also added a few jade plants and, as you can see, those are doing great.

The director of Russia’s renowned Hermitage Museum, which has an important collection of sculptures from Palmyra, has offered its expertise to help restore the Syrian city destroyed by religious fanatics.
“We will have to record where every stone was found before taking a decision on how to restore these historic monuments,” he said of the painstaking work required.

The Hermitage director insisted that only an “international association” including UNESCO member countries and Syria’s Directorate General of Antiquities and Museums should carry out the restoration of Palmyra.

Syria’s antiquities chief Maamoun Abdulkarim on Friday told AFP journalists at Palmyra that he was appealing for “archaeologists and experts everywhere to come work with us because this site is part of the heritage of all humanity.”

Source: Russia’s Hermitage Museum offers help to restore ancient Syrian city of Palmyra

I lived in this 2 room SRO apartment for about a year when I first moved to San Francisco. I think I paid $125.00/month.

As the story would have it, Peruvian producers who relied on the pseudo-grain struggled to eat it due to rising quinoa prices that pushed its cost higher than that of chicken and other staples.But that wasn’t borne out by the numbers. Using a database of Peruvian household information that includes crop and consumption information, the economists were able to look at the relationship between rising quinoa prices and what Peruvian families ate and grew. They compared three groups: people who don’t grow or eat it, people who eat it but don’t grow it, and people who do both.

They found that as the purchase price of quinoa rose, so did household welfare in all three groups. The welfare of those who produced and consumed quinoa rose more quickly than the other two groups, but even families who didn’t produce quinoa saw an effect.

That suggests that rising prices are good for Peruvians across the board.

A quinoa plantation in Llica, in the vicinity of the Uyuni salt flat, southern Bolivia on March 10, 2013. The Bolivian government promotes the “quinoa road”, a 1500 km (940 miles) network of roads linking the departments of La Paz, Oruro and Potosi, where 48,500 tons of the cereal are planted each year. The goal is to reach one million tons of quinoa, worth one billion dollars, per year in the next ten years, officials said. Bolivia produces 70% of the world’s quinoa. FAO recognizes the crop is an strategic food to erradicate hunger iand declared 2013 as “International Year of the Quinoa”. AFP PHOTO/Aizar Raldes (Photo credit should read AIZAR RALDES/AFP/Getty Images)

Source: Don’t Worry: Eating Quinoa Doesn’t Hurt Peruvian Farmers | Smart News | Smithsonian

More fun with pachyderms including a maneuverable 3D image of a fossil baby mammoth tooth. (that page has some amazing interactive 3D stuff)

More fun comics:

The Argyle Sweater

clv18

I found Charlie Brown’s kite-eating tree. It’s gotten hungrier it seems.