According to an Alaska State Troopers spokesperson, the man’s identity is not being released yet because it’s possible he may be charged with a crime – illegally feeding wildlife.

You see, our unknown attackee claims that he ventured into the woods on a bike ride around 5 pm on Saturday. As he left, he took some barbecue with him. Along the way, he came across a black bear.

Here’s where things start to turn horribly wrong for our biker. Apparently, he lobbed some barbecue at the bear – who happily ate it up. Our guy then offered some more meat to the bear, but at this point that bear was looking for a different kind of meat.

The bear attacked our biker, puncturing the skin around his jaw and on his back.

Surprisingly, alcohol may have been involved.

Park rangers reportedly found our guy washing blood off himself at the campground.

“He wasn’t terribly coherent,” said a spokesmen for the Alaska Department of Fish and Game. “He was unsure of where the attack actually happened.”

Don’t worry – they don’t think the bear has a history or a future in attacking campers.

“The bear was pretty much goaded into this,” said the spokesman.

The black bear, Ursus americanus, is the smallest of all the North American bears. Males can weigh up to 200 pounds. There are over a dozen sub-species of the American black bear, and over 100,000 estimated to inhabit the state of Alaska.

Don’t feed the bears. Seriously. It’s a pretty solid rule to live by.

[Anchorage Daily News]

A female snapping turtle found severely beaten in a sand bunker of a Delavan, Wisconsin golf course has died from her injuries.

Authorities believe that the turtle was probably attempting to lay her eggs in the bunker when she was beaten with what appears to be a golf club. Investigators are currently searching for the eggs, but have so far been unsuccessful.

“It happened at the Delbrook Golf Course in Delavan on June 10 between 7:30 and 9:30 a.m. The female turtle, looking for a place to lay her eggs, was found lying in the sand in a bunker with holes in its shell. It was also struck in the right eye, a wound which appeared to have been from a golf club,” said the Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources in a Facebook update.

The turtle was supposed to undergo surgery, which was to give her a 40%-60% chance of survival. Sadly, the turtle died before that was possible.

The Global Conservation Group, Wisconsin’s largest animal rights organization, has offered a $1,000 reward for information leading to the arrest of the person(s) responsible. And PETA has reportedly pledged an additional $5,000.

The photos of the turtle, post-attack, are pretty brutal. According to the people at the Pineview Wildlife Rehabilitation Center, the turtle (aged 10-13) was just too banged up to survive. Not only did the turtle sustain multiple gouges to its shell, but also sustained a severe blow to the head.

What the hell, people?

As of right now, only wild chimpanzees are considered an “endangered” species. Captive chimps, on the other hand, are simply listed as “threatened.” A new proposal from the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service looks to change that.

Under the proposal, all chimpanzees would be given the “endangered” tag.

The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service (FWS) says that the move was made to “reflect growing threats to the species.” Deforestation, poaching, capture for trading, and disease are all growing threats to wild chimpanzees. But it’s not simply these threats that moved the FWS to make this proposal.

“The rule proposed today would correct this inconsistency after the Service determined that the Endangered Species Act does not allow for captive-held animals to be assigned a separate legal status from their wild counterparts,” says the FWS.

The proposal actually sprung out of a 2010 petition from a handful of concerned organizations – one of which being the Jane Goodall Institute.

“I was so pleased to hear about the proposed rule. This is exceptional news for all chimpanzees and for all the petitioners, especially the Humane Society of the United States, who have worked so hard on this issue,” said Dr. Jane Goodall. “This decision gives me hope that we truly have begun to understand that our attitudes toward treatment of our closest living relatives must change. I congratulate the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service for this very important decision.”

The proposal entered a public comment period today, and will stay open for 60 days.

“Chimpanzees are in trouble, in the wild and in captivity, and this elevation in their protected status is a critical tool in saving them and in assuring that our children grow up in a world where chimps still live in their native habitats,” said Wayne Pacelle, President and CEO of The Humane Society of the United States.

Here’s the crux of what would change under the new protection:

If this proposal is finalized, certain activities would require a permit, including import and export of chimpanzees into and out of the United States, “take” (defined by the ESA as harm, harass, kill, injure, etc.) within the United States, and interstate and foreign commerce. Permits would be issued only for scientific purposes or to enhance the propagation or survival of the affected species, including habitat restoration and research on chimpanzees in the wild that contributes to improved management and recovery.

“The International Fund for Animal Welfare strongly supports protecting captive chimpanzees under the Endangered Species Act. The current split-listing is not only inconsistent with the purpose and intent of the Act, but it has also led to widespread commercial exploitation that greatly undermines efforts to save our closest living relatives from extinction. All chimpanzees, captive and wild, are entitled to protections warranted an endangered species. We commend the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service for re-examining the split-listing,” said North American regional director Jeff Flocken.

62-year-old Larry Goodwin died on Saturday after his tractor ran upon a hive of the killer bees while clearing brush for a neighbor. The bees had reportedly holed up inside an abandoned chicken coop. Goodwin was able to run away and attempt to remove the swarm with a garden hose, but it was too late. He died on the scene. According to NBC news, family members said Goodwin was stung so many times that “every inch of exposed skin was covered with stings.”

During the killer bee attack, a woman and her daughter attempted to come to Goodwin’s aid – but they were stung over 100 times in the process. One of them is reportedly in serious condition.

Killer bees are the colloquial terms for Africanized honey bees, a hybrid variety of bee that results from the cross-breeding of the African honey bee and European honey bees. These Africanized bees’ stings are no more potent than your average honey bee – what makes them “killer” is their extreme aggressiveness. Killer bees are more easily provoked and when that happens, they attack in large numbers. They are also relentless and can keep attacking a victim well away from the original area of disturbance.

These bees are agitated by the vibrations of large machines and other power equipment – tractors, mowers, etc.

The bees have been cleared by local company Bees Be Gone.

“You can’t believe how bad they are. They make me want to get out of this business,” Allen Miller, owner of Bees Be Gone, told The Waco Tribune. “They can get up under your clothes where no other insect can go. In a hive of ordinary European bees, about 10 percent will attack if the hive is threatened, but with African bees, all of them attack you.”

National Geographic reports that Santa Cruz resident Thomas Scott recently found himself face-to-face with a rattlesnake. He valiantly chopped its head off, but found that nature is never that easy to subdue:

Holy sh*t, did you see that? The head literally jumped a few inches forward. It even bared its fangs a few times. This is either a zombie snake, or a case of immortality being applied to the wrong animal.

National Geographic says that it’s neither. Instead, reptiles, unlike mammals, retain their hunting reflexes up to an hour after death. That means that a severed rattlesnake head can still kill you after it’s been beheaded.

Armed with this knowledge, I expect all hikers to be equipped with flamethrowers from now on. It’s the only to be sure that this hellspawn remains dead.

[h/t: Geekologie]

German-born Maria Sibylla Merian is known for both her plant and animal illustrations. As a botanic artist, Merian published three collections of plant engraving from 1675 to 1680. Shortly after that, Merian began to study insects. She is famous for her metamorphosis depictions where all stages of the insect’s life were depicted on the same page.

Closely studying insects wasn’t too common in her time, and her depictions of metamorphosis lead some to categorize her as an important figure in entomology.

In her time, Merian chronicled the metamorphosis of nearly 200 different species.

This painting, showing the metamorphosis of Thysania agrippina, was completed in 1705:

Merian also drew other creatures such as snakes, iguanas, spiders, and frogs – and these drawings are still highly collectible.

She died in 1717 after suffering a stroke a couple of years earlier. Erucarum Ortus Alimentum et Paradoxa Metamorphosis, a collection of her work, was published later by her daughter. Today’s Google Doodle celebrates her 366th birthday.

Nature.

Using NASA’s Nuclear Spectroscopic Telescope Array (NuSTAR) and the ESA’s XMM-Newton, astronomers were able to observe the black hole that lies at the center of the galaxy NGC 1365. The object was found to be spinning nearly as fast as physics will allow, providing researchers with new information about how black holes behave.

“This is hugely important to the field of black hole science,” said Lou Kaluzienski, a NuSTAR program scientist at NASA Headquarters.

The measurements, to be published in the journal Nature, also provide clear evidence for Einstein’s theory of general relativity. The data shows that X-rays around the black hole are being warped by the object’s high gravity.

“We can trace matter as it swirls into a black hole using X-rays emitted from regions very close to the black hole,” said Fiona Harrison, coauthor of a new study, NuSTAR principal investigator of the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena. “The radiation we see is warped and distorted by the motions of particles and the black hole’s incredibly strong gravity.”

Both the NuSTAR and XMM-Newton telescopes were needed to penetrate the gas clouds that obscure NGC 1365′s center. NuSTAR detects high-energy X-ray radiation, while the XMM-Newton detects lower-energy X-rays. By simultaneously observing the X-rays emitted by iron in the black hole’s accretion disc, the telescopes were able to determine that the X-ray distortion was coming from the black hole instead of gas clouds. This means that astronomers can now use iron signature distortions to measure black hole spin rates.

“If I could have added one instrument to XMM-Newton, it would have been a telescope like NuSTAR,” said Norbert Schartel, XMM-Newton Project Scientist at the European Space Astronomy Center. “The high-energy X-rays provided an essential missing puzzle piece for solving this problem.”

(Image courtesy NASA/JPL-Caltech)

In a new paper published recently in the journal Nature, astronomers have proposed that the strobe effect is caused by interactions between two very young stars (protostars) that orbit each other (binary star). As material is dumped into the growing binary star, they believe that the flashes are caused by a blast of radiation unleashed when the stars closely approach each other in their orbits. Such an event, known as a pulsed accretion, has been observed before, but never with such regularity or in a system so young. The binary star is estimated to be no more than a few hundred thousand years old.

“This protostar has such large brightness variations with a precise period that it is very difficult to explain,” said James Muzerolle, co-author of the paper and a researcher at the Space Telescope Science Institute.

LRLL 54361 is located 950 light-years from Earth in a star-forming region named IC 348. The discovery of its strobe-like property was made using NASA’s Spitzer Space Telescope, and astronomers used NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope to confirm the observations and reveal the structure of the system.

Though the gas and dust surrounding the system prevents it from being observed directly, the Hubble was able to detect two “cavaties” in the material on opposite sides of a central dust disc. Astronomers believe the cavities were created by an outflow from near the binary star.

(Image courtesy NASA/ESA/JPL-Caltech/STScI/NOAO/University of Arizona/ Max Planck Institute for Astronomy/University of Massachusetts, Amherst)

The star, named TW Hydrae, is estimated to be 10 million years old – older than the age at which stars are thought to be able to produce planets. However, the star still has an accretion disc massive enough to possiblly produce planets. The new findings appear in a paper published recently in the journal Nature.

“We didn’t expect to see so much gas around this star,” said Edwin Bergin, lead on the new research and an astronomer at the University of Michigan. “Typically stars of this age have cleared out their surrounding material, but this star still has enough mass to make the equivalent of 50 Jupiters,”

The new TW Hydrae data comes out of a new technique for estimating the mass of planet-forming discs. Researchers used the Herschel telescope to analyze the light coming from the star and pick out hydrogen deuteride gas, which emits light at the longer infrared wavelengths that Herschel can detect. The measurements have provided the most precise measurement of the disc’s mass to date.

“Before, we had to use a proxy to guess the gas quantity in the planet-forming disks,” said Paul Goldsmith, project scientist for Herschel at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory(JPL). “This is another example of Herschel’s versatility and sensitivity yielding important new results about star and planet formation.”

The researchers stated that knowing the mass of a star’s gas disc is “crucial” to understanding how planets may form around it. Though they don’t know what TW Hydrae’s massive disc will mean for the system’s future, the astronomers stated that the new data has helped define “a range” of possible future planet configurations.

“The new results are another important step in understanding the diversity of planetary systems in our universe,” said Bergin. “We are now observing systems with massive Jupiters, super-Earths, and many Neptune-like worlds. By weighing systems at their birth, we gain insight into how our own solar system formed with just one of many possible planetary configurations.”

(Image courtesy NASA/JPL-Caltech)