• Lonesome George is the last known Pinta Island Tortoise. There may never be another tortoise of his subspeices after George. However, George has recently mated with a female of a similar species of Galápagos Tortoise. If the eggs hatch, the offspring would be ‘intergrades’. (via mefi)
• Certain forms of cancer are contagious and can be transmitted from animal to animal:
  

  Cancer is not an infectious disease. And the axiom is (usually) correct. But there are exceptions. Those exceptions point toward a broader reality that scientists have begun to explore: Cancers, like species, evolve. And one way they can evolve is toward the capacity to be transmitted between individuals.

  (via bb)

• The Berkeley Pit, one of the largest Superfund sites, is an abandoned copper mine in Montana that has flooded and become extremely acidic. No plants or animals were thought to be able to live in it, but single-celled algae was found living in the pit in 1995. Since then, more than 160 species of extremophiles have been discovered in the pit. From the wiki:
  

  New fungal and bacterial species have been found to have adapted to the harsh conditions inside the pit. Intense competition for the limited resources caused these species to evolve the production of highly toxic compounds to improve survivability; natural products such as Berkeleydione, berkeleytrione and Berkeley acid have been isolated from these organisms which show selective activity against cancer cell lines.

• Fraternal twins can have multiple fathers. This is known as heteropaternal superfecundation and is rare in humans, but more common in other animals. Dogs and cats can have ‘multiple-sired litters’. (via Jess)
• Viruses can infect other viruses. This supports the idea that viruses are alive. (via ./)
• Bonus random thing: A wholphin is a hybrid between a bottlenose dolphin and a ‘false killer whale’, which is also a species of dolphin. Wholphin is also the name of McSweeney’s DVD Magazine of Unseen Films. We’ve been watching these on KenFlix, and they are awesome. I love the ’secret’ films hidden in the DVD title animations.
  

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Tagged: 5randomthings , cancer , LonsomeGeorge , tortoise , virus , wholphin

• Graham Crackers were invented by Sylvester Graham as part of a vegetarian diet designed to keep people from masturbating. lol wut?
• There is a species of freshwater dolphin that lives in the Ganges River.
• California uses more gasoline than all of China. Also, the US uses more gas per day than the rest of the world combined.
• In 1954, the United States organized a coup d’état that overthrew the democratically-elected government of Guatemala. The reason for the coup: the United Fruit Company, now known as Chiquita Brands International, lobbied the Truman and Eisenhower administrations to overthrow President Jacobo Arbenz Guzmán in response to his land redistribution program.
• In the 2004 presidential election, it is believed that ballot boxes in rural counties in Ohio were tampered with. Evidence that points to this tampering in known as the Connally Anomaly. Robert F. Kennedy wrote about it in this Rolling Stone article:
  

Take the case of Ellen Connally, a Democrat who lost her race for chief justice of the state Supreme Court. When the ballots were counted, Kerry should have drawn far more votes than Connally — a liberal black judge who supports gay rights and campaigned on a shoestring budget. And that’s exactly what happened statewide: Kerry tallied 667,000 more votes for president than Connally did for chief justice, outpolling her by a margin of thirty-two percent. Yet in these twelve off-the-radar counties, Connally somehow managed to outperform the best-funded Democrat in history, thumping Kerry by a grand total of 19,621 votes — a margin of ten percent.(181) The Conyers report — recognizing that thousands of rural Bush voters were unlikely to have backed a gay-friendly black judge roundly rejected in Democratic precincts — suggests that ”thousands of votes for Senator Kerry were lost.”(182)

Kucinich, a veteran of elections in the state, puts it even more bluntly. ”Down-ticket candidates shouldn’t outperform presidential candidates like that,” he says. ”That just doesn’t happen. The question is: Where did the votes for Kerry go?”

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