Renaissance-Era Drawings Reveal Early Ideas About Evolution.

Brian the Mentally Ill Bonobo, and How He Healed: It took a troop of apes, and a psychiatrist, and a little Paxil.

Erotica Written By An Alien Pretending Not To Be Horrified By The Human Body. Erotica Written By Someone With An Appropriate Sense of Privacy.

Chimpanzees Are Better at Strategic Reasoning Than Humans Are.

Reviving the art of Filipino tribal tattoos. [Via]

Truppe Fledermaus & The Carnival at the End of the World. 100 Views of a Drowning World by Kahn & Selesnick.

You're funny. No, YOU'RE funny! Too much cute. Baby Dad Laugh

MetaFilter's Downfall.

To think, or not to think, that is the question. Atheism says G-D is not. What about thinking? Is mental existence real, or is it too a not? Absolute science promises only relativity instead. More or less. more inside

H.R. Ginger falls away from us, but his work remains truly unusual even after our loss. more inside

Remove the CD47 Don't Eat Me coating off cancer cells in order to kill those cells. Stanford University researcher Dr. Weissman saves mice from tumors. That's his experiment. People already live a lot longer than mice, so they can wait and suffer longer... more inside

Tour of North America to come from Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds, end of July for Philly and next day NYC! Truly Australia has arrived!

High CO2 levels during the Eocene put Antarctic temperatures into a place of warmth that likens it to California. And more. The sea around it was 22 degrees Celsius (72 F), like the Florida coast is today... more inside

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.