Can’t touch this

Birds. Bees. How about giant squid?

I cannot beat their headline, either.

Weird sex: Giant squid do it deeper

“But males get round their inferior size by being endowed with a particularly long penis, which means they can inject the female without having to get too close to her chomping beak. The male’s sexual organ is actually a bit like a high-pressure fire hose and is normally nearly as long as his body – excluding legs and head.

“But having such a big penis does have one drawback: it seems that co-ordinating eight legs, two feeding tentacles and a huge penis, whilst fending off an irate female, is a bit too much to ask, and one of the two males stranded on the Spanish coast had accidentally injected himself with sperm packages in the legs and body. And this does not seem to have been an isolated incident…

Hey, watch where you point that thing!

found via Boing, Boing.

Habitrail

When I was a kid, we had some hampsters.

They were our pets, and as pets go, they were OK. They used to escape quite often and we would find them hiding under a bed or in a closet. I remember one long-time escapee that we finally found because he had dragged a lollipop into my closet and was crunching it at 2:00 AM.

The conversation went something like this:

*crunch crunch*

“Dad, there’s something in my closet!”

“Hush, honey, it’s just your imagination.”

*crunch crunch*

“Da-ad, there’s something…”

“Quiet! It’s time to go to sleep!”

etc.

Finally, in the middle of the night, I guess he finally heard it, too (I had finally drifted off to dream of monsters crunching on bones or somesuch) and he rescued him and put the little guy back in the cage.

Anyway, that’s not what this is about.

Another thing our hampsters did was follow each other around the habitrail. You know, the long yellow and red tubes and stuff? Well, sometimes one of them would decide to park his furry little ass in the middle of a tube. And another one would come along, and want him (or her) to move. And bite them on the butt.

Sometimes, if they were facing the wrong way, they’d bite them on the face. (Our favorite hampster had one eye, btw).

I’m feeling a bit like one of those hampsters right now. Just for being here, I’m getting gnawed on. On all sides. Things are not happy right now in the habitrail, and I don’t know what to do to make them better. Everybody hurts.

I certainly understand the temptation to escape and munch on a lollipop in the middle of the night in a closet, though.

holy spit

Found at Boing, Boing.

Already there are saliva-based antibody tests to detect human immunodeficiency virus, or HIV, and hepatitis infections, (University of Rochester Medical Center researcher Fred Hagan said). He said this protein map will provide new targets.

“Monitoring disease as well as drug use could be more easily done with saliva as opposed to blood or urine,” he said.

Other groups are working on a saliva-based test for breast cancer that would detect a protein fragment from the HER2 protein. Hagan said such tests could eventually replace uncomfortable and costly mammograms.

“We envision in the future spitting in a tube and looking for a marker like this breast cancer marker. It would be much easier to do, potentially at home,” he said.

link, link