World’s Largest Burger

A 185 pound burger is the latest Guinness World Record holder.

Cheese-Steak Sushi – This one actually makes D.Blawg want to vomit

Max Brenner’s Chocolate Pizza (D.Blawg bets this is actually pretty yummo … its like a GIANT smoore!)

Pizza topped with double melted chocolate chunks, melted marshmallows and candied hazelnut crunch bits.

Stop Laughing. That Water is Scalding Hot… the background banter is also extreme …. and so are the bubbles the puppy accidentally blows into the water dish ….

Freaky New Ghostshark ID’d Off California Coast

A new ghostshark species has been identified off the coast of Southern California, and it’s darker and weirder than any shark we know.

The purplish black ancient relative of the modern shark comes packed with a suite of odd features that give its taxonomical family the name chimaera, after the mythical beast made from the parts of many animals.

“It’s a big weird looking freaky thing,” said ichthyologist Doug Long of the California Academy of Sciences. “They have some shark characteristics and they have some that are very non-shark.”

Perhaps the most intriguing feature of the newly described species, Hydrolagus melanophasma, is a presumed sexual organ that extends from its forehead called a tentaculum.

“They have this club on the top of their head with spikes. People think it’s used for mating,” Long said. “It’s like a little mace with little spikes and hooks and it fits into their forehead. It’s jointed and it comes out. We’re not sure if it is used to stimulate the female or hold the female closer.”

The species is yet another example of the tremendous, unknown biodiversity that still exists near heavily populated regions like the Los Angeles coastline. It was actually “discovered” long ago in the sense that museum specimens of the fish existed at Scripps Oceanographic Institute. But it wasn’t until a team of researchers from the Pacific Shark Research Center and the California Academy of Sciences came together to examine the odd creatures that they realized they were looking at something new.

“There’s an old expression by a well-known paleontologist that the best place to find new dinosaurs is in a museum,” said Dave Ebert, a researcher at the Pacific Shark Research Center, and a co-author of the paper. “If you go to the California Academy of Sciences and go wandering through the fish collection, you’ll find new species just sitting on shelves there.”

In fact, he’s had his students do just that in various collections. They’ve found 11 new species of sharks, rays and chimaeras in the last three years. The latest description, lead-authored by student Kelsey C. James, was published in the journal Zootaxa this month. They made the identification not just from the formalin-preserved specimens like the one pictured above, but also from video of the living creature from a Monterrey Bay Aquarium Research Institute ROV.

Ebert also said that figuring out what species are actually living in the oceans isn’t just an academic task. It’s important to understand the biodiversity that ecologists are trying to protect from being accidentally killed by fishermen, even if those creatures are not as charming as dolphins or awe-inspiring as great whites.

“Ecosystem-based management is such a buzzword right now, but then you start looking at a lot of the fishes and we don’t even know what some of these are,” Ebert said. “A lot of skates and rays and the chimaeras are not as charismatic as white sharks or whale sharks or a manta ray, but these things are probably taken in far greater numbers in terms of by-catch.”

Until recent years, chimaeras hadn’t received much study, so people treated the similar-looking creatures found in different spots across the world as the same species. It’s hard to study or account for animals like the California chimaera if you don’t even know what they are.

“We didn’t have a name for this thing until now,” Ebert said.

Its genus name, hydrolagus, means “rabbit teeth” “water rabbit” after the chimaera’s crab- and clam-munching dental work. Nine specimens of the fish have been identified from the Sea of Cortez up the California coast.

Will anyone stand up for the “real” health care victims: the super-rich health insurance executives!?!

from Moveon.org

YARRR! As you all know, tomorrow is Talk Like a Pirate Day YARGHH! Which is awesome. So in honor of this most esteemed holiday, enjoy these pirate cats, because they are ridiculous :

Hopkins Student With Samurai Sword Kills Theft Suspect

Baltimore Sun
Wednesday, September 16, 2009

Hours earlier, someone had broken into John Pontolillo’s home and taken two laptops and a video-game console. Now it was past midnight, and Pontolillo heard noises coming from the garage out back.

The Johns Hopkins University undergraduate didn’t run. He didn’t call the police. He grabbed his samurai sword.

With the 3- to 5-foot-long weapon in hand, (was it like a go-go gadget sword???) Pontolillo crept toward the noise, police said. When a man inside lunged at him, police said, the confrontation was fatal.

The student “was backed up against a corner, and either out of fear or out of panic, he just struck the sword with force,” said city police spokesman Anthony Guglielmi.

Pontolillo, who rents the off-campus home, nearly severed the man’s left hand, inflicting what police called a “spear laceration.”

Donald D. Rice of Baltimore, 49, a repeat offender who had been released from jail Saturday, died at the scene.

Guglielmi said the state’s attorney’s office will decide whether to charge Pontolillo, 20, of Wall, N.J.

In a statement Tuesday, Hopkins officials told students that there had been more than a half-dozen recent burglaries in the area and that the police presence would be bolstered.

Diego Ardila, a student who lived with Pontolillo in the home this summer, said, “From what little I know of him, he wasn’t some guy going out to kill.”

University of Maryland law professor David Gray said prosecutors must weigh whether Pontolillo thought he was in danger or became the aggressor. If he thought he might be severely harmed, then he was within his rights to protect himself, Gray said. “It doesn’t matter if he used a gun, a sword or a frying pan.”

From Bri-Bri

Meet Nepenthes attenboroughii, the most recently discovered species of carnivorous pitcher plant. It’s been dubbed the “rat-eating plant.”

Named after British naturalist and filmmaker Sir David Attenborough, the plant grows only on the unforgiving summit of Mt. Victoria, a remote, 5,000-foot peak in the central Philippines. Unlike most pitcher plants, which subsist on insects, the oversized Nepenthes attenboroughii can trap and consume vertebrates as large as mice and rats.

Its cone-shaped pitcher traps, which come in shades of bright green, mottled purple or blackish red, can grow more than 11 inches wide. Prey attracted by the plant’s sweet nectar slip helplessly into its sticky interior, which is half full of acids and enzymes. After the digestive process, only the bones remain…

That’s where Stewart McPherson, the Indiana Jones of botany who discovered the exotic new breed of pitcher plant, comes in. In 2007, the British natural history explorer and two colleagues ascended Mt. Victoria, hoping to verify reports of enormous pitcher plants at the summit. After days of battling up the slope, at times hacking their way through untouched underbrush with machetes, they got their wish.

“We found thousands of giant pitcher plants covering the landscape,” says McPherson, who recently visited the States to unveil photos of the new species at several carnivorous plant conferences. (Wait, SEVERAL? carnivorous plant conferences?!? “I’d been lucky enough to have studied most of the known species worldwide, and it was instantly clear to us that not only was this a new species but it was also one of the biggest and most spectacular that had ever been found.” Nepenthes attenboroughii, which got its name due to McPherson’s admiration for the naturalist, is actually the second-largest pitcher plant in the world, but the fact that it remained unseen by human eyes until the 21st century is testament to nature’s remarkable diversity and mysterious depths…

Read more about this crazy plant & the rest of the article here.