Interesting stuff (6/29/2011)

• Every day, we seem to learn more about animals that lived tens of millions of years ago.  Including the approximate body temperature of sauropods.  This feeds into the story about dinosaurs being warm blooded or cold-blooded, but to me the real question is how an organism so large kept its body heat down.  
• I think hyenas are really interesting (and apparently so do others).  Did you know they are more closely related to cats than dogs?
• The neat thing about Tet Zoo, is that every now and then an animal comes up on there that is contemporary, and yet I didn't even imagine such a thing existed.  Like a bearded pig.
• A lot of people complain about scientists over-stating climate change (IMO, a lot of people who don't know anything anyway).  In reality, climate models are very, very conservative in terms of the rate at which actual climate change happened in the past.  Apparently I'm not the only one who has noticed this.
• I'm fascinated by cases of scientific fraud and not only is this an interesting case of which I wasn't previously aware, but it reminded me of the Baltimore case (mentioned in the comments of that article).  Which is a case of fraud where the participants were eventually exonerated (sort of), even though everyone (including that commentator) seems to feel like someone was guilty and things aren't quite right.
• I just get the feeling that bugs (the non-technical term) just sprang, fully-formed from the earth.  I mean, there are really old fossils of, essentially, gnats and Hey look.  They had fully functional and sophisticated eyes 515 million years ago.