I was walking to my car earlier today and reached into my pocket to get the car keys. While pulling them out I spilled everything that was in it: some change, a couple of business cards, my office keys. And I thought: where did people put these things before the invention of pockets? Of course,…
Author: Piotr Naskrecki
An auditory cyclops
Although these days most of our life is spent in front of devices that cram the world into a convenient, two-dimensional space, the moment when we peel our eyes off the screen brings the realization that we still live in a universe that has a pesky third dimension. Sights, sounds, and smells come to us…
Solifugids – arachnid teddybears (with big teeth)
Like everybody else, I have a soft spot for things that are fuzzy and look at me with expressive, big eyes. But of course being furry and having eyes isn’t necessarily equivalent to being cuddly, as I learned during a painful lesson delivered to me once by a silky anteater, whom I had foolishly picked…
The ultimate couch potatoes
The one big difference between terrestrial and aquatic environments is that it is really difficult to be a sedentary animal on land. Under water, with a constant stream of plankton and organic debris floating around, it is just so much easier to sit down, open your mouth, and let things just fall in. Entire phyla…
Scary, scary stuff
As the tradition dictates, every year on this day we like to scare the living crap out of each other. One common way of doing it is to pick a random, small animal, and pretend that it is somehow dangerous or deadly. The top of this list of innocent victims is usually occupied by bats,…
The Smaller Majority 