Mind Soup

As if we need further confirmation. Last month was the hottest June ever recorded worldwide and the fourth consecutive month that the combined global land and sea temperature records have been broken, according to the US government’s climate data centre. The figures released last night by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) suggest that 2010 is now on course to be the warmest year since records began in 1880. The trend to a warmer world is now incontrovertible. According to NOAA, June was the 304th consecutive month with a combined global land and surface temperature above the 20th-century average. The last month with below-average temperatures was February 1985. Each of the 10 warmest average global temperatures recorded since 1880 have occurred in the last 15 years with the previous warmest first half of a year in 1998. { via }

This article about an albino dolphin is relatively old (it's from March 2009), but I still felt it was worth sharing. I had no idea that such dolphins existed. I've reposted the article below and if you want to see the original one by the Daily Mail, just click here . " Caught on camera: Is this the world's only PINK dolphin? These are the stunning pictures of a rare pink bottlenose dolphin spotted swimming in a Louisiana lake. The mammal was pictured by local charter boat captain Erik Rue, who has been studying the dolphin since it first surfaced in Lake Calcasieu, an inland saltwater estuary, north of the Gulf of Mexico in Southwestern USA. Since it was spotted with its pod of normal coloured dolphins last year the animal has been wowing visitors on the lake. Capt Rue, 42, originally saw the dolphin, which also has reddish eyes, swimming with a pod of four other dolphins, with one appearing to be its mother which never left its side. Stunning sight: The rare albino d...

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You’ve heard jokes like these all your life:  What do you get if you cross an octopus with a cow? An animal that can milk itself.  I didn’t find such an animal, but the world has plenty of strange species that at first glance appear to be hybrids of unrelated species because they have attributes that surprise us. However, we are only surprised because our personal experiences don’t encompass all that nature offers. 1. Turtle + Hedgehog = Armadillo Rudyard Kipling wrote the story  The Beginning of the Armadillos , in which the animal came from a tortoise and a hedgehog. They didn’t join to give birth to armadillos; instead, they taught each other their talents. The hedgehog helped the tortoise learn to curl into a ball, and the tortoise taught the hedgehog to swim, which toughened up his spines into armor. Before they knew it, both had turned into armadillos. Here in the real world,  armadillos  are related to both sloths and anteaters and are native to Latin ...