Check out this huge, 20-meter deep sinkhole that opened up in that appeared overnight in Schmalkalden, Germany. Officials are unsure what caused the crater that took a car and parts of a garage, but say they plan to fill the gaping hole with gravel. Kind of boring if you ask me.

A hybrid zebra/donkey was born this past week at the Chestatee Wildlife Preserve in Dahlonega, Georgia.

According to the Preserve’s staff, “zedonks” (as the hybrids are known) are very rare. Turns out zebras usually find donkeys “out of their league.” Darn prissy zebras! You know they always settle for a donkey after they turn 30.

[Gainsville Times]

This baby was recently born in California with 6 perfectly functional fingers and toes on each hand and foot, respectively.  The condition, known as polydactylism, is not uncommon. What is unique about this case is that the baby’s extra fingers and toes are all proportional and work perfectly. One thing is for sure, you don’t want to play this kid in Mortal Kombat.

And while we are talking about mutations, do the muttonchops on the Doctor in this video count as a mutation? Like Wolverine needed another power…

We all remember a couple of years ago when all the bees started disappearing. Now it seems non-winged animals are also taking flight.

A new study has revealed that eight species of snakes have seen their number dwindle since the mid-90′s. Some populations have lost 90% of their members. Researchers are baffled as to why this is happening. Some blame El Nino, while others see it as a broader trend among animal populations as a response to pollution and global warming.

Unfortunately nobody has suggested the most obvious solution: Check the Plane.

[BBC News]

With all the talk of flooding in Tennessee, it helps to look back into history to gain perspective. After all, at least it wasn’t the megaflood that completely redefined that Alaskan landscape 15,000 years ago.

One of at least four megafloods from ancient Glacial Lake Atna, the deluge breached ice dams and covered more than 3,500 square miles (9,065 square kilometers) of land of what is today the Copper River Basin northeast of Anchorage. (The lake would’ve covered Rhode Island three times.)

Megafloods by definition have a flow of at least 264 million gallons of water per second (1,000 million liters of water per second). The largest known freshwater megaflood released about 4,500 million gallons of water per second (17,000 million liters of water per second) and originated out of Glacial Lake Missoula in Montana.

The megaflood from Atna likely had a flow of about 792 million gallons of water per second (3,000 million liters of water per second), and released a total of as much as 336 cubic miles (1,400 cubic kilometers) of water – enough to cover an area the size of Washington, D.C., to a depth of 5 miles (8 km).

So, at least they have that going for them.

In all seriousness, if you’d like to help by donating money or time to the relief effort in Tennessee, head here for more information.

[Live Science]

A five-part series that tries to explain how to make the science of Star Trek real…

In an episode of Star Trek the Next Generation called the “The Chase” a long running problem in Star Trek was finally solved – Why do all the aliens in Star Trek look humanoid. The answer was not “budget”. It was that a race that lived 4.5 billion years ago seeded the galaxy with its DNA. Humans, Vulcans, klingons etc., all got their imprint from them. We kind of look like each other because we all look like some alien race from 4.5 billion years ago. Problem solved. But is Intelligent Design really a satisfying answer?

If we find aliens that look like us, what other explanations could account for them?

Kidnapping
Having to deal with a slightly more sophisticated audience that grew up watching Star Trek, the producers of Stargate and the producers of the television series had to come up with a simple explanation for there being humans all over the galaxy in present day time. Their solution was a popular one in sci-fi literature: We were kidnapped. Over the last 100,000 years humans have been relocated to the distant corners of our universe. Once there, they go about their business. Building monuments to their gods (Star Trek and Stargate) or becoming thriving interstellar civilizations more advanced than us on earth (Iain Banks’s The Culture).

Plastic surgery
Let’s face it, we’re one sexy species. Of course we’re biologically programmed to think this, otherwise evolution would come to a stand still if we spent all our time trying to reproduce with some other species just as sexy in its own way (like sexy, sexy moss). But lets assume that we’re universally considered sexy. Then it makes sense that sophisticated civilizations would want to look like us – or at least some of them would. History is replete with examples of one culture adopting the style of another (sometimes less sophisticated one); Romans copying Egyptian fashion. Revolutionary France emulating the American Frontiersmen and Native Americans. British punks emulating Caribbean culture and Native American, etc.

Shape-shifting
Any civilization that can travel interstellar distances should also possess the ability to shift shape. We can do this in some small form through surgery and prosthetics. Eventually, nanotechnology should give us the ability to radically change our shapes, colors and features. It’s not impossible to think that if we ever meet some other species we might adopt their shape to fit in just like we do the wardrobe of other countries. Because nothing screams tourist on Epsilon XII like only one pair of arms and concealed genitals.

Coincidence
This is a hard one to accept initially. Our planet is filled with billions of different life forms. The only ones that ever came close to looking like us are distant relatives. But given a universe filled with over 70 sextillion stars (that’s 1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 stars), if intelligent life happens a lot and knowing that nature favors certain solutions (eyes, wings, flippers, feet) it’s not too hard to accept that somewhere out there are a lot of roughly humanoid looking species. But for every one of those would be a billion squidlings that think we’re very unsexy.

Synchronicity
This is a concept used in sci-fi to explain why patterns often repeat themselves. It’s not a matter of coincidence, it’s that there’s some property of the universe that makes systems move to the same metronome. A kind of galactic zeitgeist. In pop culture there have been a number of crank theories like Morphic-Resonance and The Hundredth Monkey that try to prove this. They fail because their own examples are easily debunked. They try to explain phenomena that don’t require a sophisticated explanation and supply a mechanism without really saying what it is.

Ignoring the crackpot examples, there are other examples of synchronicity fully understood and some that aren’t. Quantum entanglement is one form of it. It’s spooky action at a distance shows how previously connected particles are still mysteriously connected. Since the universe started out as a tiny point, we’re all connected in some way. In more mundane physics you can do fun experiments with tuning forks and other objects and observe how similar shapes can make each other resonate at a distance.

If at some level matter can influence other matter at a far off distance like two tuning forks, then maybe that influence can scale up to systems and cause co-evolution over similar paths. This could result in humanoids in the most far off places. For a great exploration of this idea, check out Anathem by Neil Stephenson.

Check out the rest of the series on making the science of Star Trek possible

Bubbly Creek looks placid enough in the photo above, but its shallow depths hold a gruesome secret. This small section of the Chicago River was named Bubbly Creek because of the bubbling gas coming off the riverbed below that has been present for the last hundred years.

So what makes the creek bubble? Rotting blood.

The Union Stockyards earned Chicago the nickname “hog butcher for the world” and made the Windy City the center of the American Meat Industry from 1865 to the 1920s. At the time Bubbly Creek was an open sewer for the stockyards. And what gets discarded when you’re slaughtering thousands of pigs? Tons of blood and entrails. So much that the creek started bubbling hydrogen sulfide and methane from the ongoing decomposition below.

Image of the Union Stockyards with row upon row of pig pens

You’d think that the creek would have stopped bubbling when the Stockyards closed in 1971, or at least wouldn’t still be bubbling more than thirty years later, but the creek bubbles on. Masses of blood worms still gorge on the six feet of rotting blood that makes up the floor of the creek. During the 90s, the blood worms were the only animal able to survive in the oxygen depleted creek, but now thanks to efforts to oxygenate the creek, fish are able to frolic with the blood worms as well.