I Am a Big Fat NERD

I've seen Green Lantern and will be writing a post on it, but not yet. Not today. Instead, I'm doing an Awesome Science post, because I haven't done one in a while and I didn't want to spam my Twitter feed last night. So here are some links that've caught my eye lately:

All non-African humans are part Neanderthal. I can't describe how happy this makes me, on several levels. First off, we have definite proof of interbreeding now. I was always kind of in favour of that theory, and the periodic announcements of "maybe we did interbreed" got me pretty excited too. Nothing compared to this, though. And then of course we have the feat by which we got this proof—comparing modern human genomes to DNA derived from 50,000-year-old bones. Science is amazing.

A gorgeous Bornean rainbow toad, thought to be extinct.

An electron microscope photo of a hydrothermal worm. Warning: clicking will give you nightmares.

Three-billion-year-old life in the Great Lakes. Except I'm not totally convinced the microbes date that far back. Couldn't they have evolved from aerobic to anaerobic as they discovered a new environment?

Microscopic food photography.

A short documentary on karakuri, also known as traditional Japanese robots automatons. Very lovely. I want my future to have robots like these.

Karakuri from Matthew Allard on Vimeo.

Have you heard of any neat science lately? Share it in the comments!