Waiting for my first comment to be moderated, but in the mean time I have to wonder how/if they get the gut bacteria they need to break down their diet of leaves in the wild. Normally sloths get that from eating their mothers' faecal material, much the same as koalas.

Sloth fun fact: Nearly all mammals have 7 neck bones (from giraffes to mice to elephants), but sloths are exceptional. 2-toed sloths have 6 cervical vertebrae, and 3-toed sloths have 9.

I doubt he was the driver. Even 23-year-olds have some sense of preserving their offspring, even if they don't have a sense of self-preservation.

On a side note, wtf is up with the people on that site's comments? They're all off on some census rant...

Awww, it's sad that a place like that has to exist, but since it does...*squee* at the scene of the sloths eating off the plates together!

I could see my partner doing that when I get into my funks. Luckily it's only a few times a year, but it's almost always in the car. I wouldn't blame him, either.

I love that zombie cake. Definitely getting something similar when I graduate next year. Awesome cake.

Interesting! I read about that in my asian history text, but it was talking about the 1800s...I didn't know that continued for so long. There are several Japanese exchange students in one of my classes and they're always giggling and smiling, and when I saw their travel pictures from their other trips, they were smiling and doing the "peace" sign all the time.

They're beautiful advertisements, but I'm wondering if dudes in Japan are against women smiling? There's one poster where she's just barely smiling, but isn't elegance supposed to be relaxing and enjoyable, even if it isn't what's traditionally found to be "fun"?

I know for a fact that The Pill is the main reason my mom felt that she could attain a doctorate in economics and not be tied down as soon as she was out of high school. I was born a few years after she got her Masters degree, after she met my dad (her student, actually :P). She was 29 years old by then.
Her PhD was finished by the time I was 7 years old, but if the pill hadn't held off my birth and then my brother's birth, she said that it never would have happened.

o-O Reduced male fertility in humans, rather

While a lot of the terror about environmental synthetic estrogens is overblown, I've read a few very large studies that show a lot of historical correlation between areas with greatly increased environmental estrogens (especially since The Pill came out, and women started flushing them down the toilet to dispose of unwanted ones) and decreased male fertility.

Of course, correlation doesn't necessarily mean causation (and it would be hard to ethically truly *prove* causation of reduced male fertility in males), and there may be other environmental factors that coincide with increased estrogen (like obesity, processed foods, or anything associated mainly with the developed world), I find that to be much more worrying than environmental exposures of the mother.

I would "blame" the mother for decreased sperm count if it was caused by her smoking during pregnancy, but otherwise, what can you really do? Unless you want to cordon yourself off from modern society, there are certain environmental exposures that will take a lot of time and a lot of innovation to eliminate.

Frankly, until decreased sperm count *directly* starts resulting in fewer babies being born than people dying, I can't see anyone putting that much effort into it, and I really think we have more important issues to focus on.

I'd say Silent Stalker, except that I never actually "friended" the vast majority of the people on my friends list...I don't accept total strangers, but for some reason most of my high school friended me (after they spat on me in school? I don't know)...I just watch them and am fascinated as to what counts as big news for some.

I already knew most of them, but Cracked always entertains me. HeLa cells have been a boon to science...but at the same time they've been the bane of almost every lab that's worked with them. They contaminate EVERYTHING and had been shown to contaminate over 40 supposedly ground-breaking studies back in 1995-2005.

The article does say that the smallpox in Russia is under round-the-clock security, which isn't true. Yes, the building in Atlanta where our smallpox is kept has armed guards and epic security, but it's fairly well-known that the stuff in russia isn't that well-guarded.

That looks so uncomfortable...I've worked with that stuff before and it's bad enough on your hands...

That one would be perfect for suits if it weren't for how it opened...

also, maybe settle on a layout for more than a couple months? I may be mistaken, but I feel like there was a fairly large layout change recently-ish. Not saying stay static for years, just maybe a bit longer than before.

Or maybe I'm just going insane and have been following this blog for WAY too long, and can't judge time on it anymore.