Step 1: Make these 1024x1024. Step 2: Rename them iPad backgrounds. Step 3: Profit! (Seriously, though, these would make nice desktops if you can make them into landscape [and/or wide-screen] formats.)

Perhaps I'm unusual in the 'give up and go away' behavior, but it's ironic that turning on anonymous comments might actually reduce the total number of comments you get.

That would make for a great ad for Duck (if they could confirm it was their brand).

He sounds bitter: “This is actual science, not ‘Avatar,’ ” said Richard O. Prum, an evolutionary biologist at Yale and co-author of the new study, published in Science.

I momentarily thought Michael Jackson had dinosaur tattoos.

Looks like he already got his two front teeth for Christmas.

It's hard to take her seriously after she admits to regularly pouring eggnog in her coffee. But seriously, I think the take here is along the lines of your hypocrisy hypothesis, but in that she's trying to justify her arbitrariness and inconsistency by insisting that anyone making any choices is making arbitrary and inconsistent ones. The funny thing is, I agree with her, but not because of this plant hoo-ha. It's more that once you start tracking down animal use in foods, you inevitably realize you're going to have to draw a line somewhere. Do you eat foods transported to the grocery store by vehicles using trucks that have vulcanized rubber tires? "Although not present in the finished product, animal fats are typically used as lubricants in the vulcanization process." It's likely impossible to live completely, truly vegan (especially if you consider insects, or especially bacteria), but there are better arguments for that than to suggest that it's unethical to eat a plant because it responds to stimuli.