Via Baby Sea Lion Born In Australia’s Adelaide Zoo (VIDEO).

There’s some talk that perhaps, just perhaps, a unidentified missile was launched off the California coast on November 8th. It wasn’t a missile. It was a jet contrail, viewed from an angle. There’s a fine website about contrails, contrailcience.com, with an overflow site that establishes — conclusively — that the supposed missile was a contrail…

See, Video: Doctors battle to save baby koala – Telegraph. Hat tip to Huffington Post for the link.

Modern science’s equivalent of a sweet tooth — Why people prefer certain foods over others depends largely on a combination of taste and texture. While taste sensations are fairly well understood, scientists are just beginning to unravel the mystery of food texture. Now, researchers at the Monell Chemical Senses Center in Philadelphia have found that…

Via, ‘Looting The Seas’ Documentary Exposes Bluefin Tuna Black Market (VIDEO).

Magnificent and wild, the grizzly bear of the American west has a fearsome reputation. But as a population boom forces them from their deep wilderness habitat of the Rocky Mountains, their increasingly close encounters with humans are altering their lifestyles, making them lazy and fat, conservation experts say. Via Grizzly bears enjoy the good life…

Lucy Cooke “posted a short video [she] made called “Meet the sloth” that features some of the sleepy residents of the Aviarios del Caribe, the world’s only sloth orphanage in Costa Rica. The world then went nuts for sloths, the video went viral and has now been watched by more than 2 million people around…

Perhaps there are no old standards, anymore — For 130 years, the kilogram has weighed precisely one kilogram. Hasn’t it? The U.S. government isnt so sure.The precise weight of the kilogram is based on a platinum-iridium cylinder manufactured 130 years ago; it’s kept in a vault in France at the International Bureau of Weights and…

A five-month-old lamb named Spin was born with a spinal injury that left her hind limbs lame. But that doesn’t keep her down on the farm, thanks to a wheelchair from Eddie’s Wheels. WSJ’s Tim Aeppel reports Link: http://online.wsj.com/video/why-letting-the-dollar-fall-could-be-a-good-thing/CEFF770C-429C-45F0-9602-582FC173FEAD.html Via Video – Pet Wheelchair Helps Spin, a Disabled Lamb – WSJ.com.

Household robots could become a reality sooner than we think. But the first hurdle they would have to clear is to prove they can make great pancakes. After all, the breakfast is the most important meal of the day. A demo posted by Willow Garage, a Palo Alto, California, robotic company, shows two robots working…

From scientists at the Georgia Institute of Technology, there’s research leading to an interesting story about dogs — Physics of Wet Dogs Shake Out in High-Speed Videos. [Andrew] Dickerson, along with some colleagues from the Georgia Institute of Technology, has written “The Wet-Dog Shake,” published in Fluid Dynamics. They attempt to calculate the optimum speed…

In Edison Gets the Bright Light Right, Wired‘s Randy Alfred writes that, on October 21st, 1879, Thomas Edison crowns 14 months of testing with an incandescent electric light bulb that lasts 13+ hours. Sir Humphrey Davy had produced incandescent electric light in 1808 by passing battery current through a platinum wire. But the voltaic pile…

Today’s posts bring two outer space topics. Earlier today I embedded a video from father-son team about their launch of a balloon and video camera about nineteen miles above the earth’s surface. Over at Physics Buzz, from PhysicsCentral there is a recent post about a simulated alien’s eye view of our solar system. See, An…