Things, Stuffs and Junks.

Herrerasaurus by John Gurche

Posted on May 17, 2012 via Paleoillustration with 93 notes

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Kitten Loses Job at Nap Factory

Layoffs at the local nap factory have hit Suni the kitten hard. After budget cuts at the plant forced a round of layoffs in early May, Suni found herself without a paying job for the first time in years. According to friends, the kitten hasn’t taken it very well. ”Oh she’s been sending out resumes, sure,” said Linda Conroy, a source close to the situation, “but I don’t think she’s slept in weeks.”

While most cats are living the high life, economists warn that kitties who do find themselves out of work will have an increasingly difficult time finding gainful employment because the demand for professional napping is at a 5-year low.

Via Llolker.

Posted on May 16, 2012 via The Fluffington Post with 104 notes

Source: thefluffingtonpost

npr:

Ooooo.

jtotheizzoe:

Genetics of the Beautiful “Glass Gem” Corn

Corn gone viral? You’re looking at an ear of a corn variety called “Glass Gem”, grown by Greg Schoen of Seeds Trust. This is real corn! How does it grow this way?

First you have to understand a few things about corn. Each corn kernel is actually a sort of unique plant. A corn plant’s male parts (the “tassels”) sit at the top of the stalk, and drop pollen downward. Unfertilized ears (the female parts) catch the pollen with the sticky ends of their corn silks. Each corn silk (I hate when that gets in my teeth) grabs a pollen grain, shuttles it allllllll the way down inside the ear, eventually creating one kernel for each pollen-silk-ovum combination. It’s one of the more interesting and inefficient breeding schemes I know of.

If you’ve taken genetics, you know that the parents’ genes will combine by chance, leading to certain ratios of inheritance in the offspring. This is the basis of Mendelian genetics (great Khan Academy video here).

With corn, we’ve simply carefully bred all the interestingness out of them. Native Americans were used to multi-colored corn, because corn plants held many varieties of color genes that could combine at random. Now all we are left with are one-color clones.

This “Glass Gem” corn is the other extreme of the spectrum, a combination of corn color hybrid genes and random pollination. It’s almost too pretty to eat!

(via Discover Magazine)