Do NOT Forget to Flush

Have you ever knocked a spider into the toilet and watched him drown? Remember that feeling of relief that it's dead?

Don't be too sure . . .

Like zombies, spiders in a lab twitched back to life hours after "drowning"—and the scientists were as surprised as anyone. The spiders, it seems, enter comas to survive for hours underwater, according to a new study.

Scientists at the University of Rennes in France collected three species of wolf spider—two from salt marshes, one from a forest. The team immersed 120 females of each species in seawater, jostling the spiders with brushes every two hours to see if they responded.

As expected, all the forest wolf spiders apparently died after 24 hours. The two salt marsh-dwelling species took longer—28 hours for P. purbeckensis and 36 hours for A. fulvolineata.

36 Hours !!! That's freaky enough, but it gets better . . .

After the "drownings," the researchers, hoping to weigh the spiders later, left them out to dry. That's when things began to get weird.

Hours later, the spiders began twitching and were soon back on their eight feet.

As I said, do NOT forget to flush.

Now excuse me while I shudder and scratch the tickles crawling up my legs . . .

A Thinking Celebrity

No, it's not necessarily a contradiction in terms . . .

A wonderful quote from Kathy Ireland, of SI swimsuit fame. She always considered herself pro-choice growing up, but "became a Christian" at age 18, and began studying the science of human reproduction:

"What I read was astounding and I learned that at the moment of conception a new life comes into being. The complete genetic blueprint is there, the DNA is determined, the blood type is determined, the sex is determined, the unique set of fingerprints that nobody has had or ever will have is already there."

However Ireland admitted that she did everything she could to avoid becoming a believer in pro-life.

"I called Planned Parenthood and begged them to give me their best argument and all they could come up with that it is really just a clump of cells and if you get it early enough it doesn’t even look like a baby. Well, we’re all clumps of cells and the unborn does not look like a baby the same way the baby does not look like a teenager, a teenager does not look like a senior citizen. That unborn baby looks exactly the way human beings are supposed to look at that stage of development. It doesn’t suddenly become a human being at a certain point in time," Ireland argued. "I’ve also asked leading scientists across our country to please show me some shred of evidence that the unborn is not a human being. I didn’t want to be pro-life, but this is not a woman’s rights issue but a human rights issue."

A little oddly phrased ("didn't want to be pro-life") but very well said. It's refreshing to hear someone go through a sincere internal struggle about an important issue and combine reason and faith to come to the only logical conclusion.