This beautiful video from Auvergne, France shows people flying with birds.

Since 1995 Christian Moullec has been working with geese and cranes, pioneering ultralight flights with them and assisting rare birds on migration.

His company, Voler Avec Les Oiseaux, now offers ultralight flights to the public with his own small flocks of birds.

Read more on his website Voler Avec Les Oiseaux (in French).  See videos on his YouTube channel.

(video from Voler Avec Les Oiseaux on YouTube)

p.s. Thanks to Bob Donnan for sharing this video.

Last Monday I wrote about the weird world of slime molds.

They’re not plants.  They’re not animals.  They’re not even fungi.  They’re single-celled organisms as much as 10 feet long … and they move!

It gets weirder.

Though they have no brain, slime molds remember where they’ve been and don’t go back there.   This video shows that they can solve a maze!

If you missed last week’s slime mold blog, read amazing facts about them at: Plant Or Animal?

(video from It’s Okay To Be Smart on YouTube)

This beautiful photograph from Wikimedia Commons is a living organism magnified 2000 times by an electronic microscope, then colored using computer graphics.  Can you guess what it is?

The description says:  “Internal surface of the peridium of the rare myxomycete Tubifera dudkae is covered with folds resembling sea waves. Among them oval shaped reticulate spores occur.”

In other words, the blue waves and brown beads are part of the same organism, a slime mold called Tubifera dudkae.  It is a rare member of the Myxomycete class.  I don’t know if it occurs in North America but I do know it lives in Crimea (thanks to the photos from Wikimedia Commons) and in Tasmania, Australia (thanks to the Myxomycetes website by Sarah Lloyd, an expert in slime molds).

In the photo, the blue waves are the inner surface of the protective layer that holds the spores until they’re ready to release.  This layer is called the peridium.

The brown beads with squiggly lines on them (i.e. reticulated) are the spores.

Here’s what this slime mold looks like from the outside at normal size, sitting in a matchbox.

And here’s the amazing thing:  Are slime molds plants or animals?

Neither.  They’re not even fungi.  Slime molds are such weird organisms that scientists keep changing their minds about their classification.  Here’s why, with thanks to Ann Jone’s article The Blob:

• In their reproductive stage, slime molds release spores.
• When the spores settle down they become one-celled organisms similar to amoebas that move around looking for food. They don’t need to swim in water to do this.
• At some point in their life cycle, the amoeba-like individuals are drawn to each other and meld into one big cell with millions of nuclei.  Yes, there’s only one cell wall.  This cell is called a plasmodium and it’s slimy.
• The plasmodium can move! In fact it oozes across the forest looking for food: bacteria, fungi, other slime molds. Some slime molds can stretch 10 feet.
• Though they have no brain, slime molds remember where they’ve been and don’t go back there.

Watch a slime mold move in this Deep Look video on YouTube.

Read more about slime molds in Ann Jone’s Australian radio article:  The Blob, but smaller: Tasmania’s slime molds.

And learn about Sarah Lloyd, a birder, gardener, and self-taught slime mold expert who lives in the wet eucalypt forest of northern Tasmania.

(Featured photo from Wikimedia Commons; click on the image to see the original)
p.s. I’m using the American English spelling of mold, which is also spelled mould.

Two weeks ago I read in The Guardian that big, damaging earthquakes could increase in 2018 because Earth’s rotation has slowed slightly.  Then yesterday afternoon there was an earthquake at Bombay Hook, Delaware, a place where earthquakes are rare.  Are the two related?

In a study published last summer in Geophysical Research Letters, geophysicists Rebecca Bendick and Roger Bilham examined a century of data on major earthquakes (7.0 and above) looking for patterns that might indicate what causes them.  They found that there are indeed periods of increased seismic activity when there are up to 20 major earthquakes per year instead of 8 to 10.

They then looked for Earth attributes that fluctuate on a similar time scale. Nothing fit until they found a match with the periodic slowing of Earth’s rotation.

Earth’s rotation slows very slightly — only a millisecond — about every three decades. It’s so slight that you need an atomic clock to notice it, but Earth’s crust appears to notice as well.  About five years after rotation enters a slow cycle, there are more frequent major earthquakes around the world.

2018 is five years after Earth entered a slow-rotation period so perhaps there will be more intense earthquakes next year.  We’ll have to wait and see.

Meanwhile, what does this finding have to do with the mild 4.1 earthquake at Bombay Hook yesterday?  Maybe nothing.  But I wonder about it because earthquakes are so rare in Delaware.

Read more about The real science behind the unreal predictions of major earthquakes in 2018 and news of the Delaware earthquake in the Washington Post.

(USGS map of 30 Nov 2017 earthquake centered at Bombay Hook, Delaware; click on the image to see the original)

Feeling sleepy today?  Did you hit the snooze button on your alarm clock?

I recently learned from a New Yorker article by Maria Konnikova that Snoozers Are In Fact Losers.  When you hit the snooze button that 10-minute interval is just long enough to begin a new sleep cycle but it jolts you awake again at the worst moment — the beginning of the cycle.

The interruptions make your brain think you had a lousy night’s sleep even though the bad part was actually that last 10 minutes — or more if you hit the button several times.  The more you snooze the more you lose.

So what’s the answer?  Don’t use the snooze button.  Get up right away when the alarm goes off.   (Oh no!)

But it’s more complicated than that. Read Konnikova’s December 2013 New Yorker article Snoozers Are In Fact Losers for more information on why …

• The best way to sleep-&-wake is by using our own internal clock (circadian rhythm) and external light cues (sunrise/sunset).
• The majority of us suffer from social jetlag.  Our bodies’ preferred wake up time is an hour+ different than our social lives dictate (work, school, etc).
• It’s bad to wake up in the dark.
• The brain doesn’t really hit its stride until 2-4 hours after you wake up. Yikes!

We’re the only animals on earth that jolt ourselves awake like this.

Egads, I want a nap!

(photo from Wikimedia Commons; click on the image to see the original)