And if you were in the New York area and had a chance to catch the Q&A after final performance with writer/director Gulivur Stranuss, you’ll be happy to know that Mr. Stranuss is planning on releasing his DIY bird mimicry book later this year.

Excerpts from the play are featured in the Encyclopedia of Life Podcast this month. You can also listen to the episode here:

To commemorate the Ides of March (and Caesar’s untimely but apparently not unpredicted death) here’s a piece on the awkwardness of Roman numerals. Yes, there’s a connection because Brutus and the rest of the senators who presumably knifed Caesar in the Theatre of Pompey, were Romans and therefore used Roman numerals.  So how awkward are these numerals that are actually letters used as numbers? Try singing “99 Bottle of Beer on the Wall” using roman numerals (letters).

(Lifted from the Imaginary Foundation)

His latest endeavor (working title: Node Project) focuses on those points on a plant from which leaves and branches sprout. “Each of the little nodes—they just felt like they could be an armature for an image,” he says. To create the effect shown here, Charland spray-painted a shrub black, then highlighted each node with glow-in-the-dark paint. Next, he stuck the plant in a ceramic pot and rotated it under a black light, exposing a sheet of 4 x 5 film to an illuminated pattern of potential growth. As Charland puts it, “I like the idea of taking something simple and ordinary and making it mesmerizing.”

The full article with more photos is here.

Here’s a proof-of-concept we threw together for a segment about the naming of genes. The background: fruit fly geneticists display signs of humor by sometimes come up with joke names for the genes they discover. A gene that increases the lifespan of a fly, for example, is called the INDY gene (short for I’m Not Dead Yet – an almost quote from Monty Python’s Holy Grail) and a gene that produces fruit flies without external genitalia: “Ken and Barbie.” We thought this would make a great vaudeville act (yes, we know, it’s way too hard hitting and in-depth for a science segment).  Some people find that gene jokes are not as funny as we did. The NPR segment makes this clear. We still think genes are funny. Genes. Heh.

If you’re a lobster, death can come in many ways. You might, for example, get eaten by an octopus, smashed into rocks, or get caught by humans and pressurized to death in the Big Mother Shucker. One thing you don’t have to worry about, though, is dying of old age. Apparently, lobsters show no signs of aging; their metabolisms don’t slow down, they don’t get weaker, and they don’t lose reproductive ability – they just get bigger and bigger. In fact, the only indication of a lobster’s age is it’s size. So in theory, there could be a HUGE lobster that has survived simply by being careful enough to live a long, happy life, uninterrupted by sudden death. In theory he could then share his wisdom through song, and, in theory, be called Leroy. Here’s the NPR piece featuring the song and here’s a totally anticlimactic video of a lobster molting (molting of course being THE KEY to getting really big).