Bizarre creatures! Big galaxies! Color theory! Poison resistance! Mystery craters! Space experiments! Moon water! And a little "toke" of knowledge! It's your Thursday Science Watch, where we watch science—deja vu-ti-fully!

  • Half a billion years ago, the largest animal on earth was this bizarre arthropod that lived in the sea. Today, the largest animal on earth is a lion. We have no idea why.
  • Is it possible that our Milky Way galaxy is, in fact, 50% bigger than previously believed? Sure. But are you ever going to see it in person? Highly unlikely, so you're wasting your time right this very second. Joke's on you.
  • Researchers who study visual perception have an explanation for why everyone disagreed about what color that infamous dress was. If you're interested in reading about that, keep on walking, buddy.
  • If you lived in the Atacama Desert, you would be more resistant to arsenic. Can't afford to move to the Atacama Desert? Drink a little arsenic every day, slowly building up your tolerance. This approach has been fully vetted and endorsed by the American League of Scientists and is perfectly safe. As you go to drink your arsenic, a man taps you on the shoulder. "The door that leads to the City of Liars always speaks lies, while the door that leads to the City of Truth always speaks the truth," he says. "You want to go to the City of Truth. What question do you ask to determine which door leads to the City of Truth?" Does he work for the American League of Scientists? If YES, turn to Page 101.
  • Turns out that remote northern Siberia is full of mysterious craters. And what's inside these craters? Restaurants, or scorpions.
  • [My impression of a NASA scientist]: " The key to unraveling the mysterious cause of Alzheimer's disease may not lie in the recesses of the human brain, but rather in the weightless expanse of space." "Yes, that's right, I'm a NASA scientist. Send up 15 pizza pies—charge it to NASA, okay?" ;)
  • There's an ocean on Jupiter's moon. If you believe that I've got a Brooklyn Bridge to sell you next!!!!!!!!!!!!!
  • A new study finds that teens who are heavy weed smokers end up with impaired long-term memory even years later. Can you imagine the bad jokes this study will inspire? The Jay Leno-esque winks and nods? The trite, awful, "Gee, I don't remember..." punchlines which have been shared before ad nauseum by the most unoriginal comedians the world has ever seen? Might we not all be better off if scientists just stopped studying marijuana altogether, so as to spare us the torture of this inevitable humor death march? Scientists might plead, "Well, the inevitable grim procession of painful jokes is the fault of the bad comedians themselves, not us." But is that so? It seems more accurate to say that such awful jokes constitute the most excruciating manifestation of our desperate evolutionary desire to experience fawning admiration and inclusion from a group of our peers. The fact that such tedious stabs at witticism are so reliable upon the release of such a predictable sort of news just goes to show that human nature is itself the problem. We will be undone by ourselves. There is no way to save ourselves from ourselves, short of wiping humanity off the earth. Short of that, wiping scientists off the earth seems to be the next best solution. This should not be read as a vibrant call to hunt down and destroy all of the world's scientists; as a science journalist, I don't practice advocacy. I simply report things. The all-out war against scientists is one that must start on a grassroots level.

[Photo: AP]

Contact the author at Hamilton@Gawker.com.