Behold the Ant Lion

...CWkfAyfBDHE Cunning. Efficient. Voracious. This is the ant lion. This is a baby ant lion, the larval stage. It makes you shudder to think what it’s like when it’s grown up, right? Behold the adult ant lion: It looks like a damselfly or dragonfly but is not related to either. The adult ant lion is sometimes called an antlion lacewing. They are not much seen by humans, because despite those beautiful wings, they are weak fliers, and mostly lurch aro...

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The Sound of Fast Food

...ickly coming to a close. There was a day when cellphones, cordless phones, baby monitors and all kinds of other radio transmissions were accessible to anyone with a cheap scanner. Even police and fire departments are starting to encrypt transmissions. This particular In and Out got so popular that they switched to having an employee in the parking lot with a tablet to take orders which brought an end to our office fun. I invite any musicians in th...

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Meet the Amazing Sierra Newt

...e’s the best part–he was breathing through his skin. The gills he had as a baby are long gone, traded for fledgling lungs when he left his birth pool. But once back in the water, he dispenses with those clumsy organs altogether and draws oxygen out of the water straight through his skin, in a process called diffusion. That’s right. This handsome orange show-off breathes in three different ways over the course of his life: by gills, by lungs and, c...

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Bad Forager: Mistaking Hemlock for Fennel

...ies, and are hard to fool. Some notes on hemlock: I’ve always been wary of baby hemlock. It likes to grow where chickweed grows, so its easy to pull up a few hemlock sprouts along with young chickweed, and it doesn’t take much fresh hemlock in your salad to make you very sick. The main poison in hemlock coniine, which is similar to nicotine in both its chemical structure and pharmacological properties. It takes about 100 mg of coniine to kill an a...

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