The Ed's Up #181
This Common Butterfly Has an Extraordinary Sex Life
I guarantee that this story about the sex life of the cabbage white butterf It features sperm packages of ungodly size. It involves genitals that double as a souped-up stomach. There’s even an honest-to-goodness vagina dentata. (Image: Nathan Morehouse)
The Great Thing About Mass Wildebeest Drownings
"The result is an annual mass drowning. “We’ve seen up to 300 carcasses wedged into the river bank in some places,” says Subalusky. “It’s quite a sensory experience. The smell is potent for a quarter mile, and lasts for weeks. There’s a ranger station nearby and they really hate it when the drownings happen.” She found that these drowning herds account for a shocking large proportion of the river’s nutrients. Disney symbolized the circle of life with a lion cub being held aloft by a monkey. It might have done better with a mound of rotting, sodden wildebeest carcasses." (Image: Thomas Mukoya)
Why Are Bird Eggs Egg-Shaped? An Eggsplainer
"Think about an egg and you’ll probably conjure up an ellipse that’s slightly fatter at one end—the classic chicken egg. But chickens are outliers. Hummingbirds lay eggs that look like Tic Tacs, owls lay nigh-perfect spheres, and sandpipers lay almost conical eggs that end in a rounded point. After analyzing hundreds of species, Stoddard showed that the most common shape—exemplified by an unremarkable songbird called the graceful prinia—is more pointed than a chicken’s. “We mapped egg shapes like astronomers map stars,” Stoddard says. “And our concept of an egg is on the periphery of egg shapes.” Beyond displacing chickens as the Platonic ideal of egg-dom, Stoddard’s data also helped her to solve a mystery that scientists have debated for centuries: Why exactly are eggs shaped the way they are?" (Image: Natalia Ablazhel)
The Mussels That Eat Oil
More good reads: science and technology
- “By searching the [Mormon] church's famed family trees, scientists have tracked down a cancer-causing gene that came west with a pioneer couple—just in time to save the lives of their great-great-great-great grandchildren.” Outstanding piece by Sarah Zhang.
- "This stuff is the blackest black. It is so black that it makes reality look Photoshopped." Totally delightful piece on the blackest black ever made, by Adam Rogers.
- How cats used humans to conquer the world, also by Sarah Zhang, who’s on fire this week.
- The world’s art is under attack by microbes
More good reads: politics and society
- "People watched that video and then voted to acquit?" Heartbreaking Trevor Noah segment on the murder of Philando Castile.
- A scientist whose research connected Litvinenko’s murder to the Kremlin was found stabbed to death with two knives. Police deemed it a suicide, but US intelligence officials suspect it was murder.
- The Supreme Court is going to take on partisan gerrymandering in Wisconsin—a really important and potentially landmark case.
- The inside story of secret struggle to punish Russia for Putin’s election assault.
- Between a decline in press conferences and the cloak-and-dagger nature of the new healthcare bill, the government is increasingly resorting to secrecy.
- The Senate’s new healthcare bill is finally out in the open. Quick version: it’ll give tax cuts to the rich and increase insurance premiums for the poor. And it might still have a tough road ahead.
- “You might also think that Face/Off would have things to say about religion, and/or Cartesian dualism, and/or the nature of the self, and/or the nature of the soul. But—and here is the true greatness of the movie—it really, really does not.”
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And that's it. Thanks for reading.
- Ed