I exist and new website!

It's been an extremely long time now, but here it is my new website:

Animacules.

I decided to make a shift to new software and a new way of doing things, because I found the interface here (requiring two seperate sites for full management) was becoming far too clunky. Wordpress offers a few more options and such as well, but ultimately I enjoyed my time on this site and it was good times had by all. But now it is time to move on and such forth.

Anyway, update links as you will good ladies and gents and head on over to Animacules.

Insert ominous music here

Oh Verizon

Since when did .002 cents become the same as .002 dollars? I wish I could multiply cents and get the same figure in dollars (somehow).

I'd be a lot richer :/

Oh Hwang

First he gets done for fraud, then we find out he tried to get eggs from his research assistants and now it turns out he was even going to associate himself with the Russian Mafia:

The defense also said the embezzlement charges, involving funds provided by corporate sponsors, should be dropped, as most of the funds in question are accounted for or still in the bank. Hwang stood by his previous claims that suspicious personal items--such as a car for himself and his wife--were bought with money earned from lectures and publications. Hwang said that some of the allegedly misappropriated money was used for expenses in pursuing unsuccessful projects, which included an effort to clone a mammoth that involved the Russian mafia, and another project to clone a Siberian tiger native to North Korea. In official documents, he claimed to have used the money to buy cows for research.

That's sure a long way to fall from the top of the mountain to...well... this. The only thing I want to know is, what on earth were the Russian mafia wanting with a Wooly Mammoth?

What a mouthful!

There is something almost disturbing about watching this video of a pelican eating a pidgeon (I kid you not). I didn't know that pelicans were even prone to attacking pidgeons, but I tell you what, that pidgeon seems to have put up one hell of a fight before going down (literally). The amazing things that animals do.

Treadmills and Shrimps!

For some reason, this really amuses me.



I have no idea why.

Nutrigenetics sting

While perusing the American Journal of Bioethics, I noticed this really quite amusing piece by Ricky Lewis on nutrigenetics. Some companies are apparently taking samples of peoples DNA and then using the resulting data to try to customise diets to them based on their genes. Sounds like a fairly neat idea in theory, but the Government Accountability Office (GAO) decided to put one such company to the test:

Here’s how the GAO targeted four nutrigenetics company websites. They took DNA from a 9-month-old girl and from a 48-year-old man. Then they concocted diet/lifestyle profiles for 14 “fictitious consumers,” 12 from the baby’s DNA, and 2 from the man’s. For example, the baby girl was transmogrified into a 6-foot-tall, 210-pound 45-year-old man who smokes and doesn’t exercise, drinks a lot of coffee, and eats a lot of fat. The baby also became a 72-year-old woman who weighs 100 pounds and stands 4’9”, regularly exercises, never smoked, doesn’t drink coffee, and eats fried foods. To make it interesting, the researchers also submitted cat and dog DNA but did not disclose whether the cat preferred Friskies to Fancy Feast or the dog Alpo to Purina so as not to tip their hand.

You'll have to read the whole thing, because spoiling the result would really ruin all the fun.