At 190, Jonathan the Tortoise Is the World’s Oldest: He will likely celebrate with some of his favorite activities: sunbathing, sleeping, eating, and mating:
"In spite of his age, Jonathan still has good libido and is seen frequently to mate with Emma and sometimes Fred - animals are often not particularly gender-sensitive"
In the case of the ( Read more... )

(I could just about have managed to do the online seminar on Steinach and his sex-change rats, but it would have been a bit of a push.)

So, at the meeting of the working group, there was discussion of a projected co-edited volume, and co-editors, I remained silent, because my impression was, this was for The Younger Entry, who need it on their CV.

( Read more... )

Is there a lurking subtext here that they do not want the Cats Protection League to be associated with the concept of Crazy Cat Ladies, or perhaps, to be less gendered, Pathological Pet Hoarders?
Cat charity CEO quits over colleague keeping 18 cats in house: Charles Darley claims chair of trustees is not adhering to standards charity expects of ( Read more... )

Somehow I feel this is not going to be The Egg and I for the C21st, for lo, it does not sound like an entire barrel of laughs (I did not even know that 'backyard chickens' constituted a movement):
Review of Gina G. Warren. Hatched: Dispatches from the Backyard Chicken Movement. If you are interested in learning about a burgeoning and complex ( Read more... )

Women have a variety of methods for contraception, but only two methods are commonly available to men: condoms and vasectomies. Both methods have their drawbacks.
(And let's just not mention the very PiV-centric model going on here.)
But that wasn't actually the main that struck me about this: Heating Up Testicles With Nanoparticles Can Work as ( Read more... )

What I read
Samanth Subramanian, A Dominant Character: The Radical Science and Restless Politics of J.B.S. Haldane (2020), about which I posted at some length here. I read a review somewhere which somehow led me to expect a bit more from this than it delivered, but will concede that Haldane was a complex and confusing character and the archival ( Read more... )

Am a bit miffed to discover that I became a member of the National Trust just a bit too late to qualify for a vote in the forthcoming Council election. Sigh.
Though looking through the candidates' manifestos, there were some I was slightly side-eying for the possible dog-whistles about tradition, but most of them did at least indicate long ( Read more... )

Okay, a lot of people have already remarked on how dangerous it is to shoot anything so ominous as a white stag: Rare white stag killed by police after running through Merseyside streets.
As if the land was not lying Waste already, and Wally the Walrus left these shores for Iceland (sensible odobenid).
Where is the Fisher King lying with an ( Read more... )

This put a different spin on Lonely Goatherd for me: Old Irish goats return to County Dublin to protect hills from wildfires: Jeuken, 31, had an edge: she ran her own herd on her family farm, earning the nickname “the goat lady”. Last year she graduated as a veterinary nurse. She spent a few weeks at Mulranny getting to know the Old Irish goats, ( Read more... )

Northern Hairy-Nosed Wombat: still making that come back from the brink
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River of life: zoo’s yearly count finds seals thriving on Thames: In the 1950s, the Thames was declared biologically dead, and the Guardian reported in 1959: “The tidal reaches of the Thames constitute a badly managed open sewer.” But now seals can enjoy a varied diet of ( Read more... )