Frozen feathers! Getting shorter! Asteroid redemption! NASA engineers! Weight brain! Giant telescopes! Desperate dolphins! Indian frogs! And hypothetical questions with real world consequences! It's your Tuesday Science Watch, where we watch science—like ka-blow!

  • Prehistoric feathers frozen in amber. These are a few of my fav-or-ite thingsssss. Haha, you know that song? No, because you lived in the Cretaceous era.
  • No, it's not your imagination: you really are getting shorter. Usually it happens because of aging, but in your case it's due to the huge iron weights that you carry around on each shoulder every day, as you walk about, sinking into the ground bit by bit. Why do you do that? It's strange.
  • For the last time, the Baptistina family of asteroids did not wipe out the dinosaurs by crashing into earth. Okay? Can we put that rumor to bed? The Baptistinas are a peaceful family but at this point, I swear to god Ted, I could just punch you.
  • You don't just expect laid off NASA shuttle engineers to sit at home moping do you? Hell no! Those guys are tearing up the streets and putting their rad skills to use building three-wheeled racing cars! That's almost unbearably pitiful.
  • Why can't you lose weight? Because of your brain. That's where your character resides. Yours is weak.
  • Not one but two different groups now want to build giant telescopes. Where does it end? Do we have to wait until everyone everywhere is raping the world's various metal mines in order to construct giant telescopes, and walking around with their pants hanging halfway off their asses, spouting curse words I won't even say? Go to your room.
  • How far will dolphins go to relate to humans? Will they go... all the way? Lucy sure will. Ooo-wee.
  • They went and found 12 new species of frog in India. When they got home they said, "What the fuck did I do that for?" You have to tell them: for future generations, guys. Never stop telling them that.
  • Psychologists tell us that hypothetical questions can influence behavior. For example, if we went out on a date and I kept telling you that you were eating spaghetti the wrong way because it's more efficient to twist it all up on the fork into as massive a ball as possible instead of trying to be all dainty about it (wasting your time and mine), and I was really passionate on this issue and ended up yelling at you pretty loud about it in the restaurant, to the point that it was a little bit of a "scene," but it was all out my genuine concern for you and your eating methods because I care about you, and then at the end of the night I leaned in for a kiss and you kind of blew me off with some excuse about not having chewing gum, and then when you got to work today and went to tell your friend about the "bad" date you had last night, before you could even say anything your friend was like "Jesus, have you seen that anonymous email about you that someone sent to the entire company staff list last night? It's really shocking and obscene stuff," that would eventually, maybe years down the road, turn into a great "meet cute" story we could tell at our wedding, right? So do you want to go out?