Ross is love.

Delicious.

Oldest. Clam. Ever.

You heard me.

(Oh, and be sure to read all about Wrong Turn 2. It has Henry Rollins, and y'all know I'm sucker.)

Weekend stuff.

¶ Here's a cute video about this woman and a lion who apparently make out a lot. It's not dirty or anything.

¶ In addition to shopping carts and Okies, I find giant flowers uniquely terrifying. Perhaps it's a Little Shop of Horrors thing. Here's a story about the genetic roots of the rafflesias, which can weight around 15 pounds. Yeegh.

¶ Also, scientists have reconstructed what they think is the likely face of Dante. You can look him in the eye here.

¶ Based upon growing environmental and nuclear threats, scientists are preparing to move the Doomsday Clock, now at seven minutes to midnight, forward. That's bad.

Finally, Salon.com's Kerry Lauerman gives us this 4-minute long recap of the week that has been. It includes that lion thing from above, but I found it on my own first, so Kerry Lauerman can just shut the hell up.

Global warming today.

According to the government's National Climatic Data Center, last year was the warmest in 112 years of recorded data, and continues a nine-year warming streak "unprecedented in the historical record." All indications are that the warming is only speeding up. If you don't agree with me that this is the single, greatest threat to mankind...you will.

"Pillars of Creation"

New images from the Eagle Nebula - from whence this rather famous shot comes, indicate that these pillars have most likely been long since toppled by a nearby supernova. The tallest pillar is about 24 trillion miles high, and gas and dust from the scattered pillars will likely give birth to a new generation of stars. Cool pictures on the story link, here.

Oldest Computer

Two cool science-y stories caught my eye today, both of them indicating that humans were far smarter, far earlier than previously thought. And probably much smarter than we are now.

  The Antikythera Mechanism was discovered around 1900 about 40 meters down off the coast of a Greek island. There's been speculation ever since as to what it actually did. It was clearly one of the earliest geared mechanisms in the world, but until very recently people could only guess at what it did. Apparently, it does about everything people thought it did and more. I'd heard of this before, but scientists have been actually able to recreate the full mechanism. Acc. to CNN, it could "add, multiply, divide and subtract. It was also able to align the number of lunar months with years and display where the sun and the moon were in the zodiac." It also predicted eclipses. It's especially interesting because the science of the thing is about 1,000 years too early, suggesting that the Greeks may have been even smarter than we thought.

Archaeologists also discovered a 70,000 giant carved python in Botswana. That, along with various indications of ritualistic tools and implements indicates that the earliest human rituals happened about 30,000 years before previously believed.