From almost a mile and a half under the ocean, comes the discovery of a blind furry lobster.

Scientists said the animal, which they named Kiwa hirsuta, was so distinct from other species that they created a new family and genus for it.

The divers found the animal in waters 7,540 feet deep at a site 900 miles south of Easter Island last year, according to Michel Segonzac of the French Institute for Sea Exploration.

The new crustacean is described in the journal of the National Museum of Natural History in Paris.

The animal is white and just shy of 6 inches long — about the size of a salad plate.

In what Segonzac described as a “surprising characteristic,” the animal’s pincers are covered with sinuous, hair-like strands.

It is also blind. The researchers found it had only “the vestige of a membrane” in place of eyes, Segonzac said.

How cool is that!

Last night, the wife and I felt like a little world domination before going to bed. So like any couple in the mood (for world domination), we pulled out Risk.

A gift at our wedding, we hadn’t even opened the box. We laboriously counted out the appropriate armies and read the rules for two players. And then we realized we had problem. We only had 37 of the 42 country cards that are supposed to be included. Our game was defective! To Target we went, arriving at 10:08pm — you guessed it — 8 minutes after they closed.

So we came back and setup a 1,000 piece puzzle. We’ve got to finish it if we want to eat on our table anytime soon. World domination will just have to wait.

I went birding with my wife yesterday, and we made the short drive up to a remote area in Coke County, Texas. There are a couple of loops that take you through ghost towns and have extensive rangeland along the road. In most places, there’s not even fences, and this is one of the reasons the birding’s so good — you can walk into the habitat a bit if you see or hear something worth checking up on.

So there we were, walking along the road when a gargantuan white pickup truck drove up and approached up. I expected the worse but hoped for the best. He was a young guy about my age, with a huge cowboy hat and a handle bar mustache.

Me: Good morning!

Him: What are yall doing out here.

[I disliked him immediately.]

Me: Oh, we’re just looking for birds, out enjoying this beautiful day.

[He looks away from us, off towards the horizon. Apparently it was so difficult for him to talk with pot-smoking, tree-hunging hippies that he couln't look us in the eye...]

Him: This is private property out here… Be sure you don’t leave the road.

Me: This is a public road. Thanks for saying hi.

He drove off and I stayed mad for about 10 minutes before enjoying the rest of the glorious morning. It’s not the first time this has happened to me either. A few years ago, out near Delta, Colorado, south of Grand Junction (far southwest corner of Colorado) looking for Sage Sparrow on county roads, I had a guy drive up and share his love for private property rights, only this time with dozens of F words per sentence. He was a much scarier redneck too. Everything from the trailer with a dozen non-working cars that he drove up from, to the multiple guns visible in the car, to the wife that stared at the floorboard the entire time and never made eye contact with us — like a dog that’s been beaten (I’m sure she had) — told us that this guy just wasn’t to be argued with.

I just don’t understand my culture sometimes. We pride ourselves on friendliness, but there are some that clearly extend this friendliness only as far as others are like them. We all sing songs at church extolling the beauty of nature, but those that would actually enjoy it are looked at suspiciously. There is a very strong pioneer sentiment that’s hung around 100 years too long. Nature is something to be distrusted, something to be abused and conquered.

In fairness, not everyone has this problem. We had multiple people wave and say hi that morning. One guy (in another gargantuan white pickup truck) drove up to see what we were doing, but once he found out was very friendly and asked about the birds we’d seen.

All’s well that ends well too. We saw what we came for — some excellent looks at Black-throated Sparrows. (Picture from the web…)

A couple of winter plumaged Dunlin, not too common in west Texas, also made for a nice surprise at the end of the day.

Maybe my cat isn’t your thing. Maybe you’re just not a cat person (you would be if you knew Bruce…) Maybe you’re saying to yourself this morning — “If he posts one more picture of that stupid cat, I’ll never come back again.” If that’s the case, I’ve got something you might enjoy.

Somewhere between studying and working, I came across a site with just about everything you’d want to know about echindas. It even has a picture gallery with some beautiful pictures too.

These amazing animals are monotremes — egg laying mammals, like the Duck-billed Platypus. In addition to egg-laying, they also have a cloaca — a single opening through which urine and feces pass. These two characteristics are so interesting because they are traits shared with reptiles and birds, and represent the state of mammals early in their evolutionary history. Monotremes truly are relics to a time long ago.

Finally, if you don’t look at all the pictures, be sure to check out the picture of its penis. (I’ll let you decide if this link’s safe for work or not…) One of the great joys of studying biology is realizing that not everything works like you do.

One of the weird things about The Bruce is the positions he sometimes contorts himself into. Lately, he’s been twisting himself in half, so that his legs are pointing in opposite directions. I personally would find the strain on my torso to be unbearable, but he apparently doesn’t mind.

My previous attempts to get a picture have been thwarted, as he always seems to untwist himself just when I grab the camera, but I was successful this week.

I’m coming to this conversation about two weeks late. But it’s one that I wanted to hit on. A while back, Randy Olson showed up over at The Loom and left comments on things evolutionary biologists should do to improve communication with the general public. As you may recall, Olson is the maker of the film Flock of Dodos.

Olson’s list basically boils down to the following ten points:

1. Quality Control — put greater effort into raising the quality of evolution education materials. Boring science presentations to the general public get ignored.
2. Attitude — in the public battle, don’t call your opponents idiots. You lose credibility and people stop listening.
3. Concision — the shorter and more concise your message, the more likely people are to listen to it and remember it.
4. Modernization — the modern world gets its information from television. Embrace that medium and use it. Don’t put emphasis into writing at the expense of TV communication
5. Prioritization — communication costs real money, and we’d better budget at least a little bit for communication, instead of viewing it as an afterthought to real science.
6. Understanding — intellectuals are trained to think, not act. Olson suggests learning to better act for your audience. Essentially, he’s saying you have to understand that your audience is not “intellectual” in the same way a college class is intellectual.
7. Risk Taking/Innovation — don’t fall into the trap of having a boring and completely homogenous argument.
8. Humor – lighten up evolutionists. The guy who’s funny is the guy who’s listened to.
9. Unscripted Media and the Mass Audience — be more spontaneous. The guy who pulls his notes and reads verbatim is not as interesting as the guy who can shoot from the hip and actually say something worth hearing.
10. Sincerity — have passion and let that passion show that you care.

This list ended up creating a little bit of controversy. More than one blogger was upset with his suggestions. PZ Myers of Pharyngula in particular wrote:

Maybe it’s my own high dork factor talking, but I’m not too receptive to people telling me I need movie star qualities to be able to support science, or that we have to pander to superficial sensibilities to communicate a message. Our strengths are depth, intelligence, evidence, history, the whole damn natural world, and just plain having the best and most powerful explanation for its existence. Don’t tell us to dumb it down and glitz it up—I think people should be smart enough to understand it, and there’s grandeur enough in it that dressing it up in rhinestones is just silly. We need to know how to communicate real science, not Hollywood cartoon science, to people.

I like Olson’s comments in so far as they’re a suggestion that someone needs to tackle these points, not everyone. It should be obvious that science will have popularizers. Carl Sagan was an excellent popularizer. Ken Miller is one today.

Popularizers must — more or less — meet Olson’s challenge. The magic of our genes is really cool. Explaining the chemical composition of cytosine, guanine adenine, and thyamine (the four bases in DNA) isn’t going to sway many in the general public. In the same way, if faced with a lay audience, we should tailor our message about evolution to try and hit the high points that capture people’s interest and avoid losing their interest. We have a real challenge. Some of the concepts are not light and fluffy. We also have a public (at least a large segment of it) that’s opposed to the idea from the start.

That doesn’t mean we can’t use the suggestions above to try and better connect with our audience.