Here’s how we end our dependency on fossil fuels: once it gets hot enough, we won’t be able to pump gas anymore!

The country’s all-time record of 123.26 degrees Fahrenheit was set in 1960 at the Oodnadatta Airport in Southern Australia, but it’s already so hot that people can’t even pump gas. Nikki Staskiewicz and Angela Blomeley were stranded in Oodnadatta — which bills itself as “the driest town [in] the driest state of the driest country” in the world — when they tried to fill up their tank, only to find the fuel vaporizing in the triple-digit heat.

I think gasoline vaporizes at around 60°C…so that’s plausible if their car had been baking in the sun for a while. Watch out for sparks!

It looks like it’s getting a bit warm down under. They had to add new colors to the temperature spectrum.

In the course of writing a piece this week for KCET on the possibly upcoming Joshua tree mating season, I found a paper entitled “Asymmetric hybridization and gene flow between Joshua trees reflect differences in pollinator host specificity,” published in the most recent issue of Molecular Ecology*. You know the feeling you get when your area of expertise gets upended and you have to fit a new, fun piece of information into your worldview? This paper did that for me.

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(via Smashingl Lists)

Out of the blue, my wife told me she’d really like to participate in this study of gut flora — we could find out what’s inhabiting our colons, together!

I’m still trying to figure out if that’s really romantic, or weird, or what. But it’s real science and might help people learn something, so it’s probably worth doing anyway.

I’m not. Definitely not. But even I look at that chemical structure on the right and cringe. Or duck. Or run from the room. Something dramatic, anyway.

But there are chemists who cheerfully work with N-amino azidotetrazole? Maaadneeeesssss!

(via RENCTAS, an organization that fights wild animal trafficking in Brazil)

It’s a Monday in January. Nothing can rescue this day…except maybe some Wild Sex.

Bondar mentions the detachable penis episode: she tells me that it’s coming up this week, and it involves a cephalopod, so now you’ll have to visit the site every day anxiously waiting for it.

It’s an interesting video from Peter Sinclair that claims that Americans are finally waking up from their refusal to recognized the evidence for global climate change. We’ll see. I wouldn’t be surprised to see a few of the usual idiots popping up in the comments shrieking about “Warmists!”.

But who knows? Maybe they’ll realize they’re living in the Anthropocene.