millions of years ago, a mutant dinosaur was born with more feathers and lighter bones. its improved survivability led to more dinosaurs with more feathers and lighter bones, onward and onward, until they were no longer dinosaurs at all.

millions of years ago, a cork tree developed an especially thick bark, impermeable and buoyant, useful in a variety of applications. a hooved ungulate developed a thick skin. a cotton shrub developed a system of cellulose fibers to protect its seeds, fibers that are woven into yarn. a mass of zooplankton and algae sank to the bottom of a lake. intense heat and pressure built and led to the formation of petroleum, used to make synthetic rubber. a hundred years ago, all of these were combined into a white ball with distinctive red stitching.

16 years ago today, the two met, briefly and fatally.

15 years ago today, Randy Johnson ended a bird’s life with a fastball

Six hibernating turtles believed dead in Woodland Park Zoo fire

Six small turtles at Woodland Park Zoo in Seattle are believed to be dead after a fire Thursday in the building where they were hibernating for winter, zoo staff said Friday.

six small turtles lived together and died together. living shells absorb heat. from inside the shell all is darkness. a fragment of light and warmth inside protected from everything in the world outside. for months all is darkness and stillness.

According to the zoo, the turtles were in the basement of The Night Exhibit, which formerly housed nocturnal animals, when the fire started around 3:15 p.m.

and then it’s not. the warmth is absorbed to the shell, and then heat. and then the smoke and the roar and the alarm become part of the shell.

“The keepers entered the building and hooked and bagged snakes by headlamp. They waded into pools to rescue turtles and crocodiles,”

a thick shell absorbs anything, even fear, even panic. a sleeping turtle wakes to find its shell sodden with someone else’s dread.

The black-breasted leaf turtles, a male and a female, were 26 years old, according to zoo spokeswoman Gigi Allianic. Of the four Indochinese box turtles, two males were 16 years old; one male was 4 years old and the youngest, of undetermined sex, was 2 years old.

all six slept. all six died. their shells absorbed all, recorded all, in no order. here my life began, here the fire began, here i mated, here i moved, here i was moved. here i hatched. here i grew. here there was pain. here there was hunger. here there was neither. the outside life of the turtle plain and impenetrable in keratin and bone

“Any loss of life is hard, but this loss is especially heartbreaking given the tireless work of our staff to evacuate all of the animals they could reach,” the zoo said in the blog post.

only six died. the ones left behind now record grief in their shells every time they are fed.

http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/shuttle/behindscenes/avian_radar.html

Birds come with the territory at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida, which usually doesn’t mind when any of the nearby Merritt Island National Wildlife Refuge’s 310 species of birds swoop through for a visit.

to fly to reach its a joy you know and so do the others. you fly with them and you beat the air back beat gravity back with each pull and keep the ground away for one more moment. you touch it when you have to but it can be pushed away kept away until you are too tired to keep pushing. the ground will not allow you to stay away forever, you cannot bear to stay away from the ground forever, the force that comes equally from you and the ground will pull always keep both of you together. you are not strong enough to break the bind and the ground is so large that it will not move. the same result every time:

you move to it. never the other way.

While birds might seem harmless, there’s a good reason for the concern. During the July 2005 launch of Discovery on mission STS-114, a vulture soaring around the launch pad impacted the shuttle’s external tank just after liftoff.

when you fly there is not much time to think of other things, you must you have to keep the ground away. you must you have to watch for the fallen. find the fallen, they let you keep the ground away for one more moment. another one keeping the ground away hello goodbye there is no time

The vultures are more active during the day as they search for food and circle high into the bright blue Florida sky, soaring on the thermal gradients.

there are times when the ground helps you push away, the hot air comes and you can keep away for hours and not worry about keeping away keep away while watching. the warmth grows with brightness and they keep you from the ground and never ask anything back never try to pull you down. the darkness and cold come and you must touch the ground it is not time, there is no warmth

The launch of Discovery will provide the first test for the technology during an actual shuttle launch.

and then the warmth comes and it is great too great to comprehend you cannot avoid it you cannot keep it away you are drawn to it and pulled and the heat and the brightness carry you forever and you’ll never touch the ground again. the brightness and the heat go to run away from the earth together and you cannot come with them but you will never push the ground away again

there is a loud bang like a gunshot. there are sixty people in the bar and we all jump. after we finish jumping we hang, unsure if we are now witnesses to another news story. if news of our secondary pain will cause tertiary pain to others. it will not. whitney gamely finishes reading question eight of round three of bar trivia. tonight’s theme is les miserables.

a man who had been on the sidewalk walks in and tells us he didn’t do it, but people shot some fireworks down the street. he is wrong–a few of us saw it the brief black flutter on its way to the ground.

between rounds we go out and across the street to look at it. there is nothing to say so we say something. “is that blood?” “poor thing.” “must have flown into the transformer.” it is a crow; it flew into the power transformer and the power transformed it into the sad corpse lying perfectly here in the gutter. none of us is so gauche as to take a picture of a mangled sudden corpse, but a couple of us take pictures from across the street. a spatter of blood and a mangled black lump.

an hour later the utilities truck arrives. there was no power outage, not even momentary. the interruption of the crow’s flight was permanent on one side and not even so brief as to be fleeting on the other. with no damage done their job is easy. they leave shortly.

the black lump remained.

Article

Source: NASA Wallops Flight Facility/Chris Perry
Published: 11 September 2013
A still camera on a sound trigger captured this intriguing photo of an airborne frog as NASA’s LADEE spacecraft lifts off from Pad 0B at Wallops Flight Facility in Virginia. The photo team confirms the frog is real and was captured in a single frame by one of the remote cameras used to photograph the launch. The condition of the frog, however, is uncertain.

LADEE. lunar atmosphere and dust environment explorer. a short-lived mission – 7 months in operation around the moon before it was intentionally crashed into the far side. built to test modular design and assembly line-style production for spacecraft.

…

here i was expecting to draw a comparison between spacecraft and frog – the frog, manufactured by evolution and short-lived itself, built to test the survival skills of its DNA, hurled skyward, etc – but readers, my research on the frog itself came up short. the above photo and caption appear to be the only evidence that this frog ever existed. all articles associated rely on that caption as the entirety of their source material, excepting a single discovery channel blog post that made the dubious claim that the frog’s name is “frank”.

i cannot tell you for sure whether the frog’s name was frank.

i cannot even tell you for sure what kind of frog it is, or if it even is a frog. the Virginia Herpetological Society lists more than a dozen frogs and toads native to the state along with maps, but all of these maps neglect to include the portion of the state on the delmarva peninsula (which is comprised mostly of delaware and part of maryland but also a little bit of virginian territory, including the Wallops Flight Facility). even with that information, it seems there would be too many potential kinds of frogs to do anything more than guess. the maryland and delaware herpetological societies have much less well-made websites.

i will continue to call it a frog for simplicity’s sake.

as NASA points out, the condition of the frog is unknown. very small animals can often be flung great distances without harm, but the conditions at a rocket’s launch are enormously hazardous. the sound itself is so much as to be dangerous to the rocket itself without sophisticated dampening technology (big tanks of water–a lot of the big white plume at the bottom of a space shuttle launch was actually vapor from the sound system).

the frog’s hearing would probably be damaged or destroyed. if it survived, it might still be alive – there are common varieties of frog that live up to fifteen years, and the LADEE launch took place in 2013.

if the LADEE frog is still out there, it’s outlived its tormentor. the great rocket, spent within minutes, crashed down to the earth. the satellite payload, heaved into the far side of the moon. if it was traumatized or killed by a future launch at the Wallops Flight Facility, at least this time its pain wasn’t captured by automatic camera.

if the LADEE frog perished in the launch, i salute it, and apologize. whatever kind of frog or toad you were, whatever your native habitat: evolution did not make you for this, and it was not fair of us to. we made a modular spacecraft and chucked it into the moon when we were done; we did not even make you and we threw you into the sky by mistake and a robot caught one of your final moments. at least we didn’t know your name.

Article

Power is back on for nearly 39,000 Seattle City Light customers after a raccoon got into an electrical substation and knocked out power.

the cities came up around us and we adapted. isn’t that what you do? isn’t that how you build cities? if we had not changed we would have all died. you tell stories about the ones that didn’t change. you lament your shortsightedness – how could we not have known? how did we kill the last one? how could we be so foolish? you mourn the ones that didn’t change.

Jeffrey Pierce, who lives in Fremont, said he woke up to the sound of an explosion. He walked to a nearby power substation and saw crews walking around inside the fence.

we heard it too. we are not all together in a net like you, but we heard it. we are not clever or tall like you but we have ears and we heard it. we were not asleep.

“I realized there were two workers in hard hats with flashlights with a raccoon between them,” said Pierce. “They were like, ‘This guy is really dazed,’ and I was like, ‘He is?’ And they said, ‘Yes, he’s the one that knocked out all the power,’ and I was amazed.”

it was not him. the net killed the one who touched it. it was not him and he was afraid. he had heard it and he did not know about the net, none of us know about the net, but the one who touched it is dead. we have noses and we know the one who touched the net is dead.

Seattle City Light spokesman Scott Thomson later told KIRO 7 that the raccoon responsible for the outage was electrocuted and was not the same one whom neighbors saw.

the ones who tend the net know it too. the one who touched the net is dead. we adapt and you hate us. we adapt and you keep all the extra food for yourselves. you let it rot in boxes and hunt us when we try to eat it. the one who touched the net did not adapt enough and now the one who touched the net is dead. that is the choice you have left us with: be hated or die. we are not clever like you and we cannot choose. we do not know about the net.

“Everything was completely dark, completely still,” said Chansanchai. “I looked outside and I realized all the lights were out.”

when the one who touched the net touched the net it broke apart and there was darkness. the one and the net both broke apart. we will adapt to the broken net. we adapt and you hate us but if we do not adapt we will become a fond memory.

Seattle City Light got electricity restored to all customers by about 5:30 a.m.

we do not know about the net.

Article

The Large Hadron Collider, a 17-mile superconducting machine designed to smash protons together at close to the speed of light, went offline overnight.

boil the water all you want, it will never get hotter than 212 degrees fahrenheit 100 degrees celsius 373 kelvin. it will disappear rather than give you the satisfaction. energy gathered and forced into just a few infinitesimal particles, bounded by magnetism. too energetic, too wild to touch anything. close to the speed of light. never there. pour all the energy you want into those protons, they will never get faster than 300,000 kilometers per second. they will make a 17 mile marathon under geneva ten thousand times a second but they will not tolerate 10001. they will get heavier, denser, slower, decay, disappear, rather than give you the satisfaction.

Engineers investigating the mishap found the charred remains of a furry creature near a gnawed-through power cable.

underground, concrete all around. wires by the thousand. conduits. an animal burrows down, escaping the surface. the surface contains so much which is so much bigger than it. it finds an enormous contraption beyond comprehension bringing hadrons to their boiling point. a abhorrent apparatus to push the smallest of small things to their limit. to dash them apart and photograph their remains. computers in 35 countries will pore over every detail of the deaths of these particles. with perfect empathy, the animal selects a cable and begins to chew.

Although they had not conducted a thorough analysis of the remains, Marsollier says they believe the creature was “a weasel, probably.”

with perfect empathy, the weasel selects a cable and begins to chew.

(Update: An official briefing document from CERN indicates the creature may have been a marten.)

with perfect empathy, the marten selects a cable and begins to chew. it’s the work of only a few minutes. the flow of electrons finds a new more conductive path. select particles of the marten’s body are greatly accelerated, and the rest are halted.

Unfortunately, Marsollier says, scientists will have to wait while workers bring the machine back online. Repairs will take a few days, but getting the machine fully ready to smash might take another week or two. “It may be mid-May,” he says.

within seconds, the electrons have unwittingly destroyed both their new path and the old and must stop. the collider grinds to a halt. it will be repaired. only a matter of weeks. the parts of the marten that could resist or flee are gone; they disappeared, rather than give you the satisfaction.