Should a Chimp Be Able to Sue Its Owner? "Steven Wise is arguing for the legal 'personhood' of chimps and other animals. And no one is laughing him out of the courtroom." [Via]

Imagine how to hold tiny moving Plank level micro objects together. What would that look like exaggerated to the size of furniture? more inside

The Future.

Did big life start on land or under water? That's a new question to me... Some evidence shows life was terrestrial 650,000,000 years ago, as presented in Gregory Retallack's paper in Nature. I've seen some of these kinds of layers at Wilpena Pound in South Australia, and they looked like ancient low water sediments to me. In fact what looked like a long worm Dickinsonia stared at me from under a smooth layer in a bluff there – but these layers could have dried from time to time past. Might plants have pronged up then, some with hold fasts?

Testing on niche MonkeyFilter is (after a false start) now running on our new 'niche' (http://github.com/nzmichaelh/niche) engine.
Note to self: always benchmark and load test a site before repointing the doman.

Some youthful looking ancient life seems to beckon us all. Why give up? Become a blip longer on earth. Still a blip though. Time is relative, isn't it?

Beautiful Death. Beautiful Game of Thrones Posters Lament One Death from Each Episode.

The new generation of eagle hunters of Mongolia. [Via]

Cells the size of grapes crawl some ocean floors. These leave tracks matching some Precambrian fossil tracks as far back as 1.8 billion years old.

TheNextWeb - OPENSSL vulnerability Found a critical vulnerability security in OPENSSL. "may affect as much as 66 percent of Internet sites...". oO

These gloves will "change the way we make music," says Imogen Heap. [Via]

What to do with all the beautiful pictures

When female capuchin monkeys want sex, they throw stones at the males.

Bibo. "It started as an idea about a lonely robot who sells ice cream. In order to survive in a severe reality he recreates an imaginary world where he lives every day, like he did during the best time of his life." [Via]

Kirsty Mitchell Photography. "After Losing Mother To Brain Cancer, Artist Finds Peace In Surreal Photography." [Via Blort, previously on MeFi]

Nietzsche and the Burbs. [Via]

How Europeans Imagined Exotic Animals Centuries Ago, Based on Hearsay.

Robot dogs, foldable tablets and mongoose bloggers: sci-fi visions of the media future.

On the Trail of Florida's Bigfoot—the Skunk Ape. [Via]

The ethics of genetically enhanced monkey-slaves. [Via]