Another Mittwoch, another week halfway through.

I find it more than a little disappointing that the Smithsonian magazine, a publication nominally concerned with science, would stoop to this:  On the Trail of Florida’s Bigfoot – The Skunk Ape.  Excerpt:

The first time Dave Shealy saw a skunk ape, he says, he was ten years old. It was 1974, a few years after his father had come upon a set of footprints left by the creature—an Everglades version of Bigfoot named for its supposedly pungent odor. Dave was out deer hunting with his older brother, Jack, in the swamp behind his house, in what’s now Big Cypress National Preserve, when he encountered the ape incarnate.

“It was walking across the swamp, and my brother spotted it first. But I couldn’t see it over the grass—I wasn’t tall enough,” Shealy says. “My brother picked me up, and I saw it, about 100 yards away. We were just kids, but we’d heard about it, and knew for sure what we were looking at. It looked like a man, but completely covered with hair.” He and his brother stared at the creature, mouths agape, but almost at the same time, as he tells it, the skies opened and rain poured down. The ape hurried away, into the cypress hummocks scattered amongst the marsh. “Holy crap,” he remembers thinking. “I finally saw this damn thing, and it got away, just like that.”

Here’s the point:  He didn’t see a skunk ape.

There aren’t any skunk apes.

There aren’t any Bigfoots (Bigfeet?) Yetis, or any other mysterious, hairy, bipedal apes.

Why so confident, you ask?  Simply this:  Biology.  There can’t be just a few of these creatures running around – there has to be a population.  A genetically viable, breeding population – thousands of animals.  In the heavily settled Southeast, it’s staggeringly unlikely that a population of thousands of giant, hairy bipedal apes exists and yet not one has been killed by a car, or shot by a hunter, or died and left remains anywhere where a human could stumble across them.

A corpse, now that would be proof – inarguable proof.  But we don’t have a corpse, we’ve never had a corpse, and unless the dumbfoundingly unlikely actually happens, we won’t have a corpse.  And what’s more, in this era where every cell phone has a camera, nobody manages to get an unarguable photo.  Let a cop start smacking around a gang punk and everyone and their brother is taking video, but a giant, bipedal hairy ape?  Somehow we’re still stuck with grainy, crappy video that could be anything from a man in a gorilla suit to a rerun of I Love Lucy.

Extraordinary claims require extraordinary proof.  In this case, there just isn’t any.

But still – videos keep surfacing:

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Once more into the Hump Day breach!

One wonders about all the implications of this science-y tidbit:  Dad May Join Two Moms for Disease-Free Designer Babies.  Excerpt:

A new technology aimed at eliminating genetic disease in newborns would combine the DNA of three people, instead of just two, to create a child, potentially redrawing ethical lines for designer babies.

The process works by replacing potentially variant DNA in the unfertilized eggs of a hopeful mother with disease-free genes from a donor. U.S. regulators today will begin weighing whether the procedure, used only in monkeys so far, is safe enough to be tested in humans.

Because the process would change only a small, specific part of genetic code, scientists say a baby would largely retain the physical characteristics of the parents. Still, DNA from all three — mother, father and donor — would remain with the child throughout a lifetime, opening questions about long-term effects for this generation, and potentially the next. Ethicists worry that allowing pre-birth gene manipulation may one day lead to build-to-order designer babies.

It takes some doing to wrap the brain around this one.

We’re only really beginning to unravel the mysteries of genetics.  At the moment we can’t guess at what all may be possible – although a lot of ink and pixels have been burned up in speculation, both in fiction and non-fiction.  Robert Heinlein’s entertaining work Friday is one such, the story of a genetically engineered superwoman trained as a combat courier.   A common saying among the artificial humans in that work is this:  “My mother was a test tube – my father was a knife.”

At the present, here in the real world, there’s no evidence that genetic manipulation could be used to produce designer babies, much less supermen.  But fifty years from now?

Who knows?

Louisiana Woman Forced Out of Apartment by Bats.  Bela Lugosi was unavailable for comment.  Excerpt:

Kiara Keasely, who was living in an apartment in the New Orleans suburb was basically forced out of her home when bats that had been living outside the building decided to move inside. She told WVUE, “I decided to move out, pack my stuff and move out because the exterminator wanted to open the vents to free the bats but I didn’t want them to be over my furniture so I moved everything out.”

An exterminator has removed more than 200 of the little guys from the apartment, and plans to release them outside of town, as is required by state law that mandates the bats not be killed. In the meantime, building owner Wendy Whitsett is working on preventing more from coming in.

She told the station, “We closed the windows, we sealed up the building wherever they had holes so they can’t come into the building. We caulked the whole building.”

Bats are normally pretty inoffensive little creatures who spend balmy summer nights gulping down millions of mosquitoes and other nasty insects.  On the other hand, they are a known rabies vector.  You really don’t want a few thousand of them bumming around your apartment, drinking your beer and eating all your Cheetos.

In other sort-of science news:  Getting Shot in the Face is Bad.  I believe the appropriate response is “no shit, Sherlock.”  Excerpt:

Published this month in the Journal of Trauma and Acute Care Surgery, “Gunshot wounds and blast injuries to the face are associated with significant morbidity and mortality: Results of an 11-year multi-institutional study of 720 patients” brings scientific precision to the common-sense proposition that bullets to the face are really bad.

Well, at least that’s cleared up.

Some tidbits from the wonderful world of science!

A Precursor to RNA?  Excerpt:

If RNA was indeed the first biological molecule, discovering how it first formed would illuminate the birth of life. The basic building blocks of RNA were available on prebiotic Earth, but chemists, including (Georgia Institute of Technology chemist Nicholas) Hud, have spent years trying to assemble them into an RNA molecule with little success. About 15 years ago, Hud grew frustrated with that search and decided to explore an alternative idea: Perhaps the first biological molecule was not RNA, but a precursor that possessed similar characteristics and could more easily assemble itself from prebiotic ingredients. Perhaps RNA evolved from this more ancient molecule, just as DNA evolved from RNA.

What’s interesting about this?  We really don’t know much about how life came to be on Earth.  We know quite a lot about what happened once there was life, but the study of life’s origins – abiogenesis – is still working out the basic details.  This may be a step towards a better understanding, maybe even a hypothesis.

Mating With Neandertals Was Hard.  I’ll forgo the obvious joke.  Excerpt:

While past studies have suggested that interbreeding improved immunity and genetics related to disease resistance, it turns out that Neanderthals might have actually passed along some harmful genes, as well.  Studies suggested that genes associated with increased risk of lupus, biliary cirrhosis, Crohn’s disease, and smoking addiction were all inherited from the Neanderthals.

Whoops.  While it’s interesting to know that there are traces of these hardy, resilient humans left, we could probably do without the disease aspects.

One more, this one presenting the possibility of a revolutionary material:  Lighter Than Water, Stronger Than Steel.   Excerpt:

Materials shape human progress – think stone age or bronze age. The 21st century has been referred to as the molecular age, a time when scientists are beginning to manipulate materials at the atomic level to create new substances with astounding properties.

Taking a step in that direction, Jens Bauer at the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT) and his colleagues have developed a bone-like material that is less dense than water, but as strong as some forms of steel. “This is the first experimental proof that such materials can exist,” Bauer said.

Hank Rearden could not be reached for comment.

On that note, we return you to your Thursday, already in progress.

A compendium of random notes today.

From Gallup:  65% Dissatisfied With How Government Works.  No shit.   Excerpt:

Republicans and independents are largely responsible for the overall decrease in satisfaction with government effectiveness in recent years. Satisfaction among Republicans and independents began to wane during President George W. Bush’s final year in office. This may have reflected mounting public dissatisfaction with the Iraq war, coupled with the Democratic takeover of Congress after the 2006 midterm elections. Both groups’ satisfaction plummeted still more between 2008 and 2011, and has since dipped further.

With the performance of the Imperial Federal government over the last decade or so, what’s really amazing is that the number that are satisfied is still as high as it is.   Is it possible that 35% just aren’t paying attention?

Related:  Obama’s Polls Fall As Middle Class Gets His Number.  Excerpt:

Are you dazed and confused by Barack Obama, the nominal Democrat, whose conduct as president since 2009 has seen him sink from nearly 70 percent to 40 percent or less in the national polling, from which he has seemed to learn nothing, but still marches on?

Fear not, the doctor is in: Fred Siegel of the Manhattan Institute, whose latest book, The Revolt Against The Masses: How Liberalism Has Undermined the Middle Class, explains all you wanted to know about Obama, and much else. It explains why he never became the new Franklin D. Roosevelt, John F. Kennedy or Lyndon B. Johnson at his best, as he and they belong to quite different wings of their party.

Read the whole thing.  It’s worth the time.

Finally, a science note:  CoGeNT Gives Further Backing to Annual Dark-Matter Variation.  Excerpt:

A long-standing and controversial claim by the DAMA collaboration in Italy that it has observed dark matter has received fresh support from a US-based experiment. Like DAMA, the CoGeNT collaboration says that it continues to see a seasonal variation in the number of events registered in its detector. Such a variation would be expected if the Milky Way galaxy were shrouded in a “halo” of dark matter, but several other dark-matter searches have failed to see the effect.

Dark matter is one of the great mysteries in physics; now, we may be a bit closer to understanding exactly that that mysterious substance is.

And, on that note, we return you to your Thursday, already in progress.

Thanks to Robert Stacy and Smitty for the Rule Five links!

I’m not sure why certain pundits insist on discussing the 2016 Presidential race this far out.  At this point in the 2008 election cycle, for example, everyone knew the race would be between Hillary Clinton and Rudy Giuliani.  Look how that one ended up.

So, with that said, National Journal‘s Ron Fournier is wondering aloud if a Donald Trump Presidential run is in the works, due in no small part to the ongoing Christie TrafficGate flapdoodle.

My thoughts?  Trump is no dummy, but he is a buffoon.  If the GOP really wants to lose this race, nominating Trump would be the way to go.

Still.  2016 is an eternity away, election-wise.

Were I to pick my own candidate for President, I’d take a long shot and push former Colorado Governor Bill Owens for the job.  Bill was, once upon a time, our state representative, before he was Colorado Treasurer and then Governor.  Down side:  Bill has no intention of getting back into politics.

Still, he’s about as likely as Trump – or Christie – at this point.

A couple of tidbits:

Mike Tyson Calls Dennis Rodman an Idiot.  Pot, meet Kettle.  Kettle, Pot.

Supreme Court Appears Poised to Overturn Obama Recess Appointments.   We’ll see.

Sex Makes You Smarter.  Well, that explains my own particular genius.  (Mrs. Animal may disagree.)

And, finally, I found this interesting:  How Fish Moved Onto Land, Bone by Bone.  And yes, the juxtaposition of those last two stories was deliberate.  Heh.

Well, OK, that was four tidbits.  Oh well.  Have a superior Tuesday, True Believers.