Just to give everyone a bit of a laugh today, cause god knows I need one, these two things were in the paper yesterday:
MAN ACCUSED OF USING PET ALLIGATOR AS WEAPON
A man is facing battery charges after sheriff's officials say he swung a three-foot alligator at his girlfriend during an argument.
David Havenner, 41, was scheduled for a bond hearing Saturday in Volusia County; he was held overnight Friday at the county's Branch Jail on misdemeanor charges of battery and possession of an alligator, officials said.
"This will be one more Volusia story that makes the national news," Volusia sheriff's spokesman Gary Davidson said.
CHIPMUNKS SURVIVED ICE AGE
Chipmunks are hardier than we thought, say scientists at the University of Illinois. The furry animals weathered the ice age 18,000 years ago in a northern refuge, rather than follow the great migration south.
Using DNA samples from 224 chipmunks in Illinois and Wisconsin, researchers constructed a family tree, showing that chipmunks migrated farther south only after the glaciers had receded.
The study, published this week in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, challenges the scientific dogma that the cold would have forced such small mammals south.
How they managed to stay alive, though, is not clear.
Kevin Rowe, the study's lead author, said chipmunks may have survived the cold because they're really tough, or their northern refuge may not have been as frigid as previously thought, despite its proximity to a half-mile-thick ice sheet.
Rowe determined the chipmunks' migration routes by analyzing mutations in their genes.
The longer a group of animals remains in one place, the more mutations accumulate, increasing their genetic diversity.
When a few animals leave the refuge for a new area, they take only a small number of the changes, so the new group has less variety in their genes, he said.
Chipmunk populations in northern Illinois and Wisconsin had the largest genetic diversity, indicating they had been there the longest, while groups farther south had fewer mutations, showing that they had more recently arrived.
(This is nuts, what they put in the papers these days! Hope you had a good laugh. Happy 19th, happy anniversary Erik. I love you baby.) |