Amazing, if this research pans out and is verified - from the abstract:

We document Indigenous Ecological Knowledge and non-Indigenous observations of intentional fire-spreading by the fire-foraging raptors Black Kite (Milvus migrans), Whistling Kite (Haliastur sphenurus), and Brown Falcon (Falco berigora) in tropical Australian savannas. Observers report both solo and cooperative attempts, often successful, to spread wildfires intentionally via single-occasion or repeated transport of burning sticks in talons or beaks.

I'm not saying it's the Deep Ones, but..... Did bioluminescent pyrosomes start the Vietnam War?

Film of a square-rigged ship!

News of the 21st Century: the Navy is synthesizing hagfish slime and contemplating its potential.

“From a tactical standpoint, it would be interesting to have a material that can change the properties of the water at dilute concentrations in a matter of seconds,” Ryan Kincer, a materials engineer at Naval Surface Warfare Center, Panama City Division, said in a statement.

The Navy also envisions using the material in products to protect firefighters and divers, as an anti-shark spray, and as a coating for ships to protect against algae, barnacles and other aquatic life that typically attach to them.

Incomprehensible phrases from Maltese - not quite the Monty Python Hungarian phrasebook, but close!

“Therefore penis, Mr Parish Priest!”

Data from forests in the Alaska panhandle translated into music - the results are very nice:

"To represent the changing forests of the Alexander Archipelago in music, Sawe used a different instrument or group of instruments for each of the five conifer species Oakes measured—piano for yellow-cedar, flute for western hemlock, cello and bass for Sitka spruce, violin and viola for mountain hemlock, and clarinet for shore pine. In the clip above, each note represents a tree, and its pitch and how hard it’s hit corresponds with tree’s height and diameter. (Lower, shorter notes stand for younger trees, while higher, longer notes stand for older ones.) Dead trees are represented by dropped notes—gaps of silence that widen as the sonification moves from the cooler study plots in the north to the warmer plots in the south."

When passing to the other world, the soul of a person who has hit a dog “shall fly howling louder and more sorely grieved than the sheep does in the lofty forest when the wolf ranges.” A man who kills a dog is required by the Avesta to perform a list of penances eighteen lines long. One of the penances is to kill a thousand cats.

From a fascinating book review by Chas Clifton. Another for the reading list!

The Tatooine Cycle.
There was once a great queen of Alt Da Rann and Leia was her name. War had sprung up between her people and those of Da Thféider. She sent messengers to ask for aid from the wildman, Cenn Obi. He lived in the wilderness far to the west. These were the messengers she sent: Síd Tríphe Óg, who knew all the languages of man and beast,(2) and the dwarf, Artú.
(ht)

A biofluorescent sea turtle!

Learn Tuvan with Songs

Great website! It's appealing even if you're not trying to learn Tuvan, but would just like to look at some lyrics and translations to famous throat-singing numbers.

A well-known Jysk tongue-twister, a æ u å æ ø i æ å, means “I am on the island in the stream” and contains no consonants.

A Guide to Endangered Languages

Abyaneh, the red village (great photos in the link!): 

At the foot of the hill, the fort of Hanjan is enthroned above the here already dry wadi. A veritable Fort of the Tatar Steppe: it has awaited the enemy for two thousand years, but the enemy has not come. The invaders forgot the valley hidden among the mountains in the middle of the desert. While the seventh-century Arab conquerors forced their religion and language onto almost all Persia, the inhabitants of the valley remained Zoroastrians until the 16th century, when the central power of the Safavid dynasty was established, and they still speak the Middle Persian language of the pre-conquest Sasanian empire.

Good Lord, it's a fire tornado!

Goannas are the best burrowers! Also, a conclusion that heartily pleases me:

....these new finds have shown that living reptiles.... are doing some incredibly complex things. Co-operatively built family burrows (McAlpin et al. 2011), warrens formed of numerous individual burrows, and – now – deep, deep, spiralling corkscrew-like burrows. The expectation that complex structures of this sort can only be attributed to mammals.... ha, it’s dead.

Full endothermy in a fish!

Cambrai was divided in two equal parts and each half installed in either the right or left side of the choir of the church. An entry in the capitulary acts of February 4, 1473, shows that on only three days of the year did the singers come together to perform in the middle of the aisle: Maundy Thursday, Holy Saturday, and Pentecost…On all other days, they sang from either side, each half grouped around its own lectern, and performing from its own music book. A bizarre confirmation of the existing space between the two sides comes from an entry of September 9, 1493, that reprimands the lesser vicars for throwing meat and bones from one side of the choir to the other during the divine service

Emphasis mine. Via Unquiet Thoughts (whose music as the duet Mignarda I highly recommend).

Oh, look! It's the Gods of the Copybook Headings! They seem pissed.

Two new species of pseudoscorpions discovered in Grand Canyon-Parashant. GC-Parashant is still decidedly not well known to anyone, and it's no surprise there are still new things to be found out there.

An interview with Tim Powers, about the wellsprings of his ideas, his research methods and writing process.

Soviet geology: an exotic and romantic business:

Large sections of the country were still waiting to be explored and mapped. Foreign travel was still impossible for most Soviets, so idealistic youths were drawn to geology for the thrill of adventure and exploration. Some of them really thought they could find personal freedom, if not by going west, then in the distant corners of the wild east....

They mapped, carried loads of samples, fished and hunted, wrote poetry, drank vodka, and sang songs around the campfire. In fact, many Russian musicians and poets (Nobel laureate Joseph Brodsky included) started out as geologists or worked as technicians in those parties. Few outside of Russia know that it was geologists who started an important movement in modern poetry in St. Petersburg in the 1960s, called the “Geological School.” Furthermore, geologist authors dominated a genre of unofficial, often politically risqué songs (“bard songs”). The songs were about cloud shadows in the tundra, windy mountain passes, shamans and dervishes in time-forgotten villages, apatite [sic..... unless they mean the mineral], camaraderie, lack of cigarettes, and nostalgia for home and love during long field seasons.....


Even until the late 1980s, saying you were a geologist to girls in St. Petersburg was a great pick-up line — often greeted with admiring smiles and questions about exotic places and wild excesses in the field. Yet when I told my father that I was going to become a geologist he said: “Do you want to be one of those inebriated loudmouths with backpacks and guitars who bellow songs on night trains?”

Apparently, the composer Giya Kancheli (recommended) came out of such a background.
 

Death Valley's moving rocks have finally been documented in action

Minoan priestess Barbie
(Scroll down)

Riding the brief pulse of the Colorado to the sea

Tibetan altitude adaptations via Denisovan DNA?

International Buffalo Bodypainting Festival: not false advertising, I'm happy to report!

The Mozart Effect in practice:

Progeny (age 2): "What's this song about?" [It was Guy Clark, for the record.]
Me: "I don't know, we have to listen and see."
Progeny: "It's about a guy getting attacked by a big snake!"

Not actually an unreasonable guess around here.

A problem with northern New Mexico written all over it: Go organic, cause a nuclear waste accident.

The Colorado River has reached the ocean!

People say American taxes are too complicated, but I have no idea what they could be talking about. Nope, no clue:

A very estimable python

A new class of regular polyhedra?

Abominable coffee drinks matched to their corresponding heresies

HT: Dreher

Dogs poop in alignment with the earth's magnetic field

Newly discovered sarcophagi of the Chachapoya, fascinating archaeology in a spectacular setting.

Via the excellent Bones Don't Lie.

How to coax a bullfrog into winning the Calaveras County jumping competition? Mimic a predator, of course.

Oarfish in California!

What to do next time you're bored on a plane? Take 15th-Century Flemish-style self portraits in the lavatory, of course!

Holy moly! An earthquake in Pakistan just created a new island! It's a small island, but still.... Now that I'm living in a place where I can see fault scarps cutting our very small and young alluvial fans, this makes my flesh crawl a bit.

Functioning mechanical gears found in insects

Malaysian pen-tailed tree shrews subsist on "a diet roughly equivalent to 100 percent beer".