Earlier this year, a slightly horrifying factoid made its way around the internet: Penguins poop so much that piles of their poop can be seen from space. But take heart, people who don’t like thinking about mountains of bird guano: It turns out that today's penguin dung heap could be tomorrow's source of nutrition for beautiful, fuzzy moss.

A team of Australian researchers were looking into the source of nutrients for these Antarctic plants, the BBC explains, and had narrowed it down to "nitrogen that's gone through algae, krill and fish." That food chain leads to seabirds -- penguins -- but the researchers were puzzled:

Since no penguins live on the elevated lakeside site in East Antarctica, the researchers had to work out where the mysterious seabird poo came from.

They realized that their moss beds were growing on the site of an ancient penguin colony.

"Between 3,000 and 8,000 years ago, on the site where the moss is now growing, there used to be [Adelie] penguins," said Prof Robinson.

The Audubon Society, protector of all things avian, tackles this question in a blog post.

An illegal fireworks display in Beebe, Ark., a year and a half ago was blamed for the deaths of up to 5,000 red-winged blackbirds. The blasts disturbed and disoriented a winter roost of the birds, sending them flying every which way and crashing into houses, cars, trees, you name it.  “Necropsy report shows trauma primarily to the chest,” said Karen Rowe of CSI: Arkansas the Arkansas Game and Fish Commission. “Hemorrhaging in the body cavity, bruised skulls, blood clots in brain. It’s consistent with crashing into something rather than falling.” Yikes.

But before you chain yourself to your local Chamber of Commerce fireworks stash to prevent it from being detonated on the Fourth, it appears that the Arkansas carnage was unusual.

Here are so many things that we like, all in one place. Greenpeace. Jude Law. Polar bears. RADIOHEAD.

Together, these forces for good made a video about a sad, sad polar bear who can no longer live in the Arctic.

Here it is:

Okay, now we are going to cry. Or at least sit around for the rest of the day and contemplate the meaninglessness of existence.

Sometimes, when sitting with an iPad and raptly poking Uzu with your finger, you probably feel a little like an ape, admit it. That’s because a) you are basically just a smart ape and b) of course smart apes like touch screen tablets (heck, even lizards like them). And just like humans, the apes are using the technology to slowly peck out messages that express their thoughts and desires.

Here’s Teco, a 2-year-old bonobo:

Sitting with his Motorola Xoom tablet, he’s rapt, his dark eyes fixed on the images, fingers pecking away at the touch screen. He can’t speak, but with the aid of the tablet app I created for him, he’s building a vocabulary that will likely total several thousand words. What’s more, he’ll be able to string those words together into simple sentences and ask questions, tell jokes, and carry on conversations.

The bonobos communicate in short “sentences” made of lexigrams, a set of graphical symbols that the apes have been trained to understand and combine into phrases. Apps designed for the apes offer 600 or so lexigrams on a touch-screen keyboard, and allow researchers to easily design and implement new lexigrams as needed.

But I'm looking at one right now. (Photo by Mehgan Heaney-Grier.)

You might have thought the federal government wouldn't have to weigh in on an issue mainly popularized by Disney and 4-year-olds, but apparently you would be wrong. NOAA has made an update to its "Ocean Facts" site stating that mermaids do not exist, and "[n]o evidence of aquatic humanoids has ever been found." Well, that's a relief! Finally I can go swimming again without worrying that I'll stumble into an underwater calypso party.

The fact that this sea creature looks exactly like a rock with guts is not even the weirdest thing about it. It's also completely immobile like a rock -- it eats by sucking in water and filtering out microorganisms -- and its clear blood mysteriously secretes a rare mineral called vanadium. Also, it's born male, becomes hermaphroditic at puberty, and reproduces by tossing clouds of sperm and eggs into the surrounding water and hoping they knock together. Nature, you are CRAZY.

Guys. GUYS. Just look what happens when you yell "ice cream!" and/or sing Amy Winehouse at a stack of baby pigs.

He does have four legs, he's just scratching himself with one of them.

We tend to think of extinct species as creatures from the distant past, whose habits and physiology we can only guess at from fossil evidence. But that doesn't take into account how relentless humans are about wiping out entire categories of animal! We've definitely deep-sixed a few since the invention of video, meaning that we have animated visual reminders of what we lost. For instance, this 1933 video of the last thylacine, or Tasmanian tiger, in captivity.

Denmark wants permission for indigenous communities in Greenland (which it rules) to catch more whales for food, The Guardian reports. Problem is, an environmental group has found that the whale meat's not actually going to feed indigenous communities. It's going to tourists who I guess get a kick out of eating something endangered:

The [Whale and Dolphin Conservation Society] chief executive, Chris Butler-Stroud, said: "The Danish government's claims that Greenland needs to kill more whales for nutritional and cultural needs is laughable. Who is this meat really for? Our investigation report shows that this demand for more whale meat is clearly driven by the commercial consumer market, not by aboriginal needs."

In the past 25 years, the group says, Greenland's "need" for whale meat has gone up way faster than its population. Greenland has 10 percent more people now than it did 25 years ago, but requests for whale hunting permits have increased by 89 percent.

Cows eating something besides cyanide. (Photo courtesy of the University of Missouri Extension.)

Perhaps you heard the story going around today. A genetically modified grass started pumping out cyanide gas, killing a herd of cattle. CBS News had the scoop, as seen at WTVR.com in Richmond: "Genetically modified grass linked to cattle deaths." It's basically a story custom-built for rapid spread around the internet.

And it is basically completely wrong. The grass at issue, Tifton 85, was not genetically modified at all, but rather is a hybrid. Confusion between hybridized crops (which is a process that is basically as old as the idea of "crops") and GMOs is not uncommon.

Nor did the plants suddenly start pumping out cyanide. Examiner.com was one of the first sites with a refutation of the story from which we excerpt this explanation:

According to local station KEYE, Abel first knew something was wrong when the cows started bellowing. He thought he was about to witness a calving but instead saw his unfortunate animals staggering around, obviously dying. Others in the area have also since tested their grass and found the same results—the grass has started venting cyanide.

True: Cattle died after eating grass that suddenly started venting cyanide [Update: the animals died of prussic acid or hydrogen cyanide poisoning.]

False: The grass was genetically modified

Reports indicate that the culprit was indeed prussic acid poisoning, a well-documented, if uncommon, threat to cattle.