Another one-up in the deadly game of Cutest Animal Ever brinksmanship. Via New Scientist:

This tree frog has a long protuberance on its nose. It points upwards when the male is calling, but deflates and points downwards when he is less active.

The frog is thought to be a member of the Litoria genus, also known as Australasian tree frogs. It joins around 150 other known species.

(Image: Tim Laman/National Geographic)

(New Scientist: Pinocchio frog and dwarf wallaby: New species found)

This was the most insane hail storm or storm in general I have ever seen! it was may 16th 2010. Sorry about all of the oh my Gods. I was speechless.

(via Unique Daily)

It always ends in tears.

Thanks, Greg!

I think Jason Louv’s red panda has some serious competition here. From Vimeo user Amphibian Avenger:

I filmed this at the Aviaros del Caribe sloth sanctuary in Costa Rica - the world’s only sloth orphanage. Baby 2 and 3 toed sloths, whose mother’s have either been run over or zapped by power lines, are brought to the centre to be cared for by sloth whisperer Judy Arroyo.

(via Das Kraftfuttermischwerk)

 
“Our dog named Hope likes to ride this random turtle we found who we named Carl”
 
Previously on Dangerous Minds:
The Dalmation Needs A Bike

GOOD Magazine on the impact illegal drugs have on the environment. I’ll give you three guesses which one is best for the planet.

A Slate reader recently asked the Green Latern which illegal drug was the least harmful to the environment. If you not only care about your carbon footprint but also enjoy the occasional recreational high, you might find the Lantern’s response enlightening.

Let’s be frank: Most highs for you are kind of a downer for the planet. The conditions under which illegal drugs are produced make it impossible for the government to enforce any sort of clean manufacturing regulations, and the long-standing “War on Drugs” inflicts its own environmental damage. (Think of the RoundUp herbicide sprayed on 120,000 hectares of rural Colombia each year.) There are some ways to measure the eco-credentials of various narcotics, though. To understand how various drugs affect the environment, we need to take a close look at where each one comes from and compare the ways they’re harvested or synthesized.

Ecstasy, which is derived from the sassafras oil of endangered rainforest trees, and crystal meth, which comes from either Asian grasses or the pharmaceutical chemicals ephedrine and pseudoephedrine, are among the most environmentally damaging. Meth’s production is particularly toxic: “In California’s Central Valley, law enforcement estimates between 4 million and 7 million pounds of lab waste were poured into canals and on properties between 2000 and 2004.”

(GOOD: Which Drugs Are Best for the Environment?)

 
Not to further harsh yer mellow or anything, there’s been plenty of bleak environmental reporting all over the place today. I read an article this morning in Foreign Policy that chilled me, because it’s about a brand spankin’ new horseman of the Apocalpyse: “Peak Phosphorous.”

Phosphorous is a non-metallic element thought by the alchemists of the Middle Ages to be able to contain light because it glowed in the dark, hence the word phosphorescent. It’s a major component in industrial fertilizer and perhaps the primary reason why the world has been able to sustain such a massive several billion persons population growth since the 1950s. Guess what? There is probably only about 40 years worth of it left:

From Kansas to China’s Sichuan province, farmers treat their fields with phosphorus-rich fertilizer to increase the yield of their crops. What happens next, however, receives relatively little attention. Large amounts of this resource are lost from farm fields, through soil erosion and runoff, and down swirling toilets, through our urine and feces. Although seemingly mundane, this process cannot continue indefinitely. Our dwindling supply of phosphorus, a primary component underlying the growth of global agricultural production, threatens to disrupt food security across the planet during the coming century. This is the gravest natural resource shortage you’ve never heard of.

The root of this problem has previously been the subject of presidential concern. In a message to Congress in 1938, U.S. President Franklin D. Roosevelt warned that the phosphorus content of American agricultural land “has greatly diminished.” This shortage, Roosevelt warned, could cause low crop yields and poor-quality produce, detrimentally affecting “the physical health and economic security of the people of the nation.”

Phosphorus is used extensively for a variety of key functions in all living things, including the construction of DNA and cell membranes. As it is relatively rare in the Earth’s crust, a lack of phosphorus is often the limiting factor in the growth of plants and algae. In humans, it plays an essential role in bone formation. Without a steady supply of this resource, global agricultural production will face a bottleneck, and humankind’s growing population will suffer a serious nutrition shortage.

Peak Phosphorus (Foreign Policy)

An Earth Day video courtesy of Everything is Terrible. This makes me have Nam-style flashbacks of my undergrad years at UC Santa Cruz.

(Everything is Terrible: Happy Earth Day Eve!)

Red pandas are the cutest animal in existence on this planet. This is indisputable. It may not be argued. It may not be contradicted. It is fact. I don’t make these rules. I merely report them. And I report red panda sightings on the Internet:

These guys are native to the forests in the Himalayas, and there are only 10,000 to 20,000 of them worldwide. In the past they had been misclassified as being in the same families as raccoons and bears, but have recently been reclassified in a family all their own; they are considered “living fossils”, which means they’re more closely related to animals found in fossils than any living species. The people native to the red panda’s region call them “Wha” after the sound they make. They are slightly bigger than a house cat and eat a diet of mostly bamboo shoots and leaves. They spend most of the day time napping in the tree tops, and are most active at dusk and dawn.

(Red Pandas: Adorable, Ancient Animals on Snuzzy)

(Farley the Red Panda (Footprint Reading Library Level 2))

Clips:
Planet Earth
PBS NOVA Judgment Day: Intelligent Design on Trial
Human Animal
Darwin’s Dangerous Idea
Charles Darwin and the Tree of Life
Life of Mammals
National Geographic - Ape Genius
Yann Arthus Bertrand - Home
TEDTalks: Susan Savage-Rumbaugh: Apes that write, start fires and play Pac-Man
What Darwin Didn’t Know

Quotes:
Mike Huckabee
Ken Ham
David Attenborough
Desmond Morris
Steven Pinker
Kenneth Miller

(via Arbroath)