So, here are the rules: To answer, follow us on Twitter and tweet at us with the hashtag #mysteryanimal. For example:

Hey @PopSci, is the #mysteryanimal a baboon?

And then I might say "if you think that's a baboon, perhaps you are the baboon!" But probably not, because this is a positive environment and all guesses are welcome and also this is not a very common animal so guess whatever you want!

The first person to get it right wins! We'll retweet the answer from @PopSci, and also update this post so your amazing animal knowledge will be permanently etched onto the internet. Show your kids! Your dumb kids who thought that was a baboon!

Update: Congratulations to @Sciwhat, who correctly guessed the identity of this amazing animal! It's a northern tamandua (Tamandua mexicana), a small variety of anteater which lives in forests from southern Mexico through Central America. Like other anteaters, it's extremely muscular, but also very curiously adapted to its specific ant/termite/other bug-based diet: no teeth, a long snout with a limited jaw, and a super long, sticky tongue which can dart in and out several times per second. It's also really cuddly and adorable. Hi tamandua!

Click to enter the gallery

Want to win this competitive Baarbarian illustration on a T-shirt? It's easy! The rules: Follow us on Twitter (we're @PopSci) and retweet our This Week in the Future tweet. One of those lucky retweeters will be chosen to receive a custom T-shirt with this week's Baarbarian illustration on it, thus making the winner the envy of friends, coworkers and everyone else with eyes. (Those who would rather not leave things to chance and just pony up some cash for the T-shirt can do that here.) The stories pictured herein:

• How Birds Learn To Sing
• This Robot Vomits So You Won't Have To
• Giant Panda Genome Holds Recipe For Powerful Antibiotic
• FYI: Why Do We Crave Greasy Food When We're Hung Over?

And don't forget to check out our other favorite stories of the week:

• 21 Emotions For Which There Are No English Words [Infographic]
• Skip Out On The Elks Lodge, Die In A Traffic Accident
• On DARPA's 2013 Wish List: Extreme Diving, Portable Brain Reading, And Gravity Vision
• Crazy Weight-Loss Schemes Through The Ages
• For The First Time, Astronomers See Giant Planets Helping Their Star Grow
• Why Everything You Read About Your Health Is Wrong
• The Goods: January 2013's Hottest Gadgets
• NASA Considers Tugging An Asteroid Into Orbit Around The Moon
• Gorillas, Watermelons and Sperm: The Greatest Genomes Sequenced In 2012
• 10 Of The Best Home-Improvement Innovations Of 2012
• The Most Mind-Blowing 3-D Printed Objects Of 2012
• Does Pot Use Cause Psychosis, Or Does Psychosis Cause Pot Use?

Science and technology have utterly transformed human life in the past few generations, and forecasts of the future used to be measured in decades. But big changes arrive faster and faster these days. So here we've shifted our forecast to the near-term, because we're right on the verge of some extraordinary stuff. These are the trends and events to watch out for in 2013. See them all here.

Earth's two most populous nations have major space launches slated for 2013: China will send a lander to the moon and India will propel an orbiter toward Mars. On the surface, their goals appear similar-cement a toehold in a frontier dominated by the U.S., Russia, and Europe-but the ways in which they will achieve them are very different.

China wants to do everything that other nations have done in space, and more, including building its own space station and mounting a lunar sample-return mission. And it has a methodical road map to reach those targets. The planned Chang'e 3 lunar probe will serve as a testbed for launch and landing techniques, as well as cameras, samplers, and other instruments. "China is beyond doing things in space for show," says Gregory Kulacki, head of the China project at the Union of Concerned Scientists' Global Security Program. Instead, it is building toward "a comprehensive set of space capabilities."

India runs a much smaller, more tightly focused program. Its budget is perhaps a third to a fifth of China's, estimates Dinshaw Mistry, an expert in Asian security and space issues at the University of Cincinnati. Over the past decade, it has launched about a fifth as many spacecraft, most of which have been satellites for furthering the country's development. Its highest profile mission so far, the Chandrayaan-1 moon probe in 2008, carried instruments from the European Space Agency and NASA. The Mangalyaan Mars orbiter, planned for a November launch, will be more independent. But its budget is low and the timetable tight.

Space exploration is anything but routine­-­either mission could fail. But it's more likely they'll both be successful, proving there are several paths to blaze in orbit. Whether by scrappy collaboration or in grand, go-it-alone style, more missions invariably mean more data-and a deeper understanding of space.

Few post-disaster myths have a stronger hold on our imaginations than the specter of a follow-on epidemic. Some imagine a killer virus will spread through the sudden glut of dead bodies. Others merely go by the notion that when it rains--or shakes, or erupts, or burns--it pours. But we can all take a deep, healthy breath: It's not true. There don't tend to be spontaneous epidemics in the wake of natural disasters. As a World Health Organization team explained in a 2007 study published in the journal Emerging Infectious Diseases: "The risk for outbreaks after natural disasters is low."

Forget corpses. Those lost in a disaster such as an earthquake or hurricane are killed by injury, not disease.The logic, reinforced by study after study, is simple: There is no relationship between terrestrial disasters and the breeding of viruses and bacteria. Forget corpses. Those lost in a disaster such as an earthquake or hurricane are killed by injury, not disease-and given the victims' inherent lack of circulation, so to speak, the colds a few might have had beforehand are even less likely to be spread than before. Yes, floods can give disease-carrying mosquitoes more room to breed. Tetanus can ride puncture wounds into the bodies of unimmunized victims. It is even possible that some of the displaced, if forced into close quarters, can spread an airborne ailment among themselves. But in order for such maladies to be a threat after a disaster strikes, they had to have been present before. That means the area in question was probably dealing with rampant malaria, tetanus, or tuberculosis already, and thus its people are probably somewhat prepared for, and even somewhat immune to, any potential uptick.

But myths have their price. And nowhere has the price of this particular myth been higher than in Haiti.

You know about the Haiti earthquake of 2010, which observes its third anniversary this week. Though a mere 7.0 on the magnitude-moment scale, the location of the quake and the country's underlying poverty made it the deadliest single natural disaster ever recorded in the Western Hemisphere.

Billions of dollars were pledged for relief and reconstruction, and thousands of organizations rushed in to save lives. One of the responders' primary stated goals was to prevent the outbreak of disease, especially amid the poor sanitary conditions of sprawling postquake homeless camps. No less a luminary than Bill Clinton, the UN Special Envoy for Haiti, warned in early 2010 that diarrheal disease sparked by squalid conditions could prove a "second round of death."

In fact, there was a second catastrophic round of death in Haiti that year: an epidemic, no less. But that epidemic--a virulent outbreak of El Tor cholera--had nothing to do with the earthquake at all.

Cholera was almost definitely introduced into Haiti by UN peacekeepers.Rather, cholera was almost definitely introduced into Haiti by UN peacekeepers in October 2010. The evidence is overwhelming: The soldiers were stationed well outside the quake zone, during a troop rotation at a riverside base established six years before amid political strife. Molecular analysis has shown that the deadly strain of Vibrio cholerae that appeared in Haiti was identical to that circulating in Nepal, where the soldiers in question came from. Those soldiers were not screened for cholera before leaving Kathmandu. They moved into a base in Haiti that had frightfully inadequate sanitation that allowed fecal matter to enter the waterway. The disease broke out shortly after their arrival, and was confirmed to be spreading first along the adjacent river system before infecting the rest of the country.

Most crucially of all, the strain spreading unchecked through Haiti's vulnerable population had never been seen in the country before. In fact, there had never been a confirmed case of cholera in Haiti before that outbreak, ever.

That's where the epidemic myth came in. Already expecting outbreak of disease after the earthquake, particularly in a place regarded as backwards and dirty, most journalists and responders shrugged off cholera as a natural product of the disaster. "It's what all of us worried about when we arrived in Haiti just hours after the quake," Brian Williams said as the outbreak was reported on NBC Nightly News. "Beyond the death toll, the inevitable spread of disease." That the supposedly "causal" earthquake had taken place a full 10 months before, this notion went largely unquestioned for months. The attitude made epidemiologists and aid workers less likely to seek out the source of what was in fact a particular infection not only new to Haiti, but the entire hemisphere. And it has since continued to provide cover for the United Nations as advocates press for reparations, and public health experts try to reform the peacekeeping system to prevent such a catastrophic error from happening again.

Conditioned to look for a problem that wasn't there, responders ignored the greatest public health threat of all.There are many reasons to keep myths away from disaster response. As Pan American Health Organization consultant Claude de Ville de Goyet has written, "Using scaremonger tactics to promote public health ... damages the credibility of relief agencies and diverts resources away from real priorities." In Haiti, where cholera has claimed 7,800 lives and counting, becoming a permanent feature of the landscape, the diversion has proven particularly ironic. Conditioned to look for a problem that wasn't there, responders ignored the greatest public health threat of all: themselves.

Jonathan M. Katz is the author of The Big Truck That Went By: How the World Came to Save Haiti and Left Behind a Disaster (Palgrave Macmillan, January 2013). Follow him on Twitter.

ANALOG BIKE CLOCK

Artist and cycling enthusiast Gregory de Gouveia, based in Chico, California, has built bike sculptures before. But his 12-foot-tall clock called Time to Change-a fusion of more than a dozen two-wheeled machines-is his largest and most functional aesthetic contribution to the sport.

The project began when another local artist asked de Gouveia if he wanted to create a sculpture for the 2011 Chico Wildflower Century Ride. De Gouveia decided to build an unofficial clock for the bike event. He called on nearby cycling communities to donate used bikes, and once enough junkers rolled into his shop, he held a "disassembly party" to remove their gears, frames, chains, and other components. De Gouveia pieced together the gigantic clock's skeleton from the scrap metal in roughly three weeks, and then spent another three weeks adding parts and tuning the gears.

The finished clock's heart is a 600-rpm variable-speed drill motor. Solar panels charge a 12-volt battery that powers the motor, which spins a geared bike wheel near the twelve o'clock position. The coordinated movement of 12 bicycle wheels, 13 cranks, and 26 chains keeps time like the gears of an analog wristwatch.

The clock debuted at the Wildflower ride and made a second public appearance in 2012 at San Francisco's Maker Faire Bay Area. De Gouveia says it runs about 30 seconds slow, but adjusting the battery's voltage should help the clock's second hand hit precisely one revolution per minute. Look for his symbolic masterpiece at future West Coast bike races.

TIME: 6 weeks
COST: $0

HONEYBEE COUNTER

Thomas Hudson, an engineer and bee­keeper in Portland, Oregon, wanted to log his insects' comings and goings, so he built a row of 22 tunnels at the mouth of their hive. Infrared sensors that detect bee movement flank the ends of each tunnel and count entries and exits. Hudson maps hive patterns with the data. Researchers might use the device to study honeybee ecology.

TIME: 3 months
COST: $110

THERMAL FLASHLIGHT

Mapping energy leaks in poorly insulated homes no longer requires hiring a technician. The thermal flashlight, designed by the Public Laboratory for Open Technology and Science, changes the color of an LED light beam in step with an infrared thermometer's readings. By sweeping the handheld device across walls and floors during long-exposure photos, anyone can "paint" a room's inefficiencies.

TIME: 1 day
COST: $50

Click to launch the photo gallery

The space shuttles are all nestled in their retirement homes, but NASA still has plenty of equipment, buildings and other infrastructure left over from their 30-year run. The space agency is quietly trying to sell it or lease it, and in some cases by the end of this year.

The last shuttle mission ended a year and a half ago now, and the final pieces of cleanup and mothballing are just about done down at Kennedy Space Center in Florida. There is enough federal money to finish those tasks and perform maintenance this year, but the money runs out at the end of 2013, according to the Orlando Sentinel, which has been tracking NASA's garage sale efforts. After the funds dry up, the steel and concrete buildings will almost certainly start to rust in the humid, salty climate of Florida's Space Coast.

Some commercial partners already have deals with the space agency to use its facilities. Boeing is refurbishing one of the Orbiter Processing Facilities for its CST-100 space transport capsule, which could eventually ferry up to seven astronauts to the space station. And SpaceX has already used the launch facilities at KSC.

But there's plenty left, from the huge shuttle landing strips and rollout paths to the parachute-packing plants. Some of these may be more attractive than others--as the advocacy group Space Florida told the Sentinel, companies might want to build their own launch facilities. Still, there's plenty of infrastructure just waiting for someone to want it.

Check out our gallery to see some of the assets NASA is hoping to offer to the next generation of space explorers.

Nvidia isn't a company everyone necessarily knows; they've long been known for graphics hardware, but have recently branched out into mobile silicon with the Tegra line of combination CPU/GPU processors, which are used in some Android tablets and smartphones. Last night they combined those two specialties and added a hefty dose of wild, optimistic insanity, announcing a portable gaming system currently code-named "Project Shield."

It's kind of a gamer's wet dream of what a portable Android gaming device could be; it looks more than anything else like an Xbox controller with a folding screen on top of it. That screen is a 5-inch, 720p touchscreen with a 294ppi density--that's a "retina" display, I suppose--but what's weirder is what's inside. Nvidia says the device can stream 4K movies to a TV via HDMI, that it can stream games from your gaming PC if you're using a high-end Nvidia card, that it can multitask with the entire library of Android games and apps, that eventually you'll be able to stream games to your TV when you're at home, and that it has a 10-hour battery life and that its speakers are vastly superior to any other portable gaming system on the market.

It was demoed on-stage, but, in case it wasn't clear, I am pretty dubious that this will ever make it to market. Nvidia has a history of announcing crazy things that would be technologically amazing if they existed, and then not releasing them, and Project Shield does not have a price or release date set, so. But it's an interesting device--would you guys be interested in an Android gaming device with essentially no power limits?

Astronomers have long been baffled by lasers that occur naturally out there in the universe, sending bursts of intense optical and microwave light streaming across the cosmos at specific frequencies. Scientists quickly realized that the atmospheres of stars and planets were generating laser light since they first began detecting them fifty years ago, but the mechanisms by which they do so have remained a mystery. Until now, that is. Physicists here on the home planet have created the first Earth-based laser made from a cloud of gas, reproducing for the first time these naturally-occurring space lasers.

Lasers are nothing more than a contained group of atoms (that emit light at a certain frequency) that are excited by inserting energy into the system. This light emission is triggered by bouncing light back and forth past the atoms, generally by placing mirrors at either end of the group of atoms. Sometimes the atoms are contained in a crystal, other times in an optical cavity that contains gaseous atoms, but the setup is generally the same: confined atoms plus light bouncing between mirrors through said atoms equals an emission of specifically tuned light.

But out there in space there are no mirrors, nor are the atoms in stellar or planetary atmospheres contained within a crystal or cavity--and this is what puzzled astronomers. But researchers have found another route to lasing that provides a clue. So-called random lasers have been developed in recent years that employ some kind of unconfined, disordered medium like a semiconductor powder to create laser emissions. In random lasers the light bounces around inside the medium based purely on the medium's disorder without having to be confined or book-ended with mirrors.

It turns out naturally-occurring space lasers work the same way, but there's still a catch: The powdered mediums used in random lasers are very different than gas clouds in space. And that's the facet that researchers at the Institut Non Linéaire de Nice in Southern France have finally figured out. Using a cloud of rubidium atoms contained within a magneto-optical trap, the team has created an Earth-based laser from a gas cloud for the first time. When the team introduces light tuned close to rubidium's expected emission frequency it goes bouncing around inside the gas cloud at random--just as it does in natural space lasers.

The ability to recreate this phenomenon in the lab will allow astronomers and physicists to examine this mechanism up close for the first time, but it could also have broader implications. Such a natural laser could lead to new kinds of artificial light made with gaseous atoms that currently haven't been explored as potential laser light sources. That could spell new kinds of artificial light--the same kinds manufactured by the cosmos but on a much smaller scale.

Much more on this over at Technology Review.

[Technology Review]

Mars Rover Curiosity is back on the move. After a brief holiday break during which the immobile rover simply imaged its surroundings it resumed rolling on January 3 and is now within a robotic-arm-length of a strange rock feature now dubbed "Snake River" within a small depression known as "Yellowknife Bay." And now on it's 147th Martian day, the geologist in Curiosity is getting restless--according to NASA scientists the rover is scouting potential targets for the first use of its hammering drill.

That target likely won't be Snake River, but the rock feature is interesting to NASA researchers for a few reasons, chiefly because it "has a crosscutting relationship to the surrounding rock," says project scientist John Grotzinger, and that suggests it was most likely deposited there after the layer of rock that it cuts across. No is sure exactly what that means, but Curiosity is pausing there briefly to take a hard look at the formation.

Meanwhile, the universe's most popular robotic rover (that we know of) is taking in all of Yellowknife Bay as it considers areas in which it might be worthwhile to deploy the aforementioned hammering drill. This instrument will come out of Curiosity's toolbox in the coming weeks to collect powdered samples from the interior of rocks for analysis by the rover's onboard instruments. Stay tuned for rock smashing.

[PhysOrg]

Comfortably a few years into their mission, scientists working with the Kepler Space Telescope are now getting deep into statistics. Like pollsters drawing conclusions from a small sample of voters, they're confident the few thousand planets and planet candidates they've found are good analogs for the rest of the Milky Way.

And they say the Milky Way has a lot of worlds: At least one for every star, and at least one Earth-like one for every six stars.

There's a ton of exo-news coming from the American Astronomical Society's winter meeting in Long Beach, Calif., today. Tops on the list is the announcement that Kepler has found 461 new planet candidates. This brings the Kepler catalog to 2,740 potential planets orbiting 2,036 stars, according to NASA, which operates the telescope. The most dramatic increases were seen in the number of Earth-size and super Earth-size candidates, which grew by 43 and 21 percent, respectively.

Also interesting: 43 percent of Kepler's planet candidates have at least one neighbor. That means a substantial number of planets reside in planetary systems, and are not solo orbiters. And one more bit of statistics: Astronomers have also found whatever type of star you're talking about, it can have an Earth-size planet around it. Based on estimates of Earth-size planet candidates found so far, there could be 17 billion of them.

Billions and billions of Earth-like planets, that means. Carl Sagan would no doubt be thrilled.

Kepler finds planets by staring at about 156,000 stars and noticing blips in their brightnesses, which could be the result of planets passing in front of them as viewed from our vantage point. These blips have to be further studied to ensure they are really planets, which is why astronomers refer to candidates versus confirmed planets. So far there are 105 definite, confirmed planets among that exoplanetary census.

Caltech astronomers John Johnson and Jonathan Swift confirmed a few of those recently for a study measuring planetary abundance in our galaxy. They looked at Kepler-32, a five-planet system hosted by an M-dwarf star. These stars are incredibly common in our galaxy; about 76 percent of all stars are M-dwarves. These are orange-ish stars compared to our yellow sun, and they're about half the sun's size. Other astronomers have already guessed there's about one planet per star in our parts, but this is the first time anyone has figured that estimate using the most common stars.

Two planets in Kepler-32 had already been confirmed using Earth-based double-check methods, and the Caltech team confirmed the other three. The planets are similar in size to Earth and orbit pretty close to their star. These planets are also a lot like the other ones orbiting M-class stars that Kepler has seen so far, according to Johnson and his coauthors. That means the majority of planets orbiting common stars probably are comparable with these planets. Therefore, the one-planet-per-star calculation is probably conservative, Johnson and Swift say. Further analysis could turn up numbers that support at least two planets per star.

The planets in Kepler-32 are also helping refine theories of how planets form. The planets probably formed farther away from their star than they are now, and moved inward. And they formed from a disk of gas and dust that surrounded their star when it was younger.

This is further confirmed by another exo-study--this one involving exo-comets. After planets like the ones in Kepler-32 system (and in our solar system) are done forming, there are still some leftovers, planetisimals and comets. Barry Welsh, a research astronomer at the University of California, Berkeley's Space Sciences Laboratory, set out to find these remnants, and located six new exocomet systems. These comets orbit A-type stars, which are very young (around 5 million years old). But again, statistical evidence suggests the older stars should have comets, too. Exocomets may be as common as exoplanets.

What are the implications of all these findings? For astronomers, they show Kepler and ground-based observatories are capable of finding a huge range of planets and planetisimals around a huge range of stars, which means many more findings like this are still to come. But in the broadest terms, they confirm something every human should know: We are not unique. Other rocky worlds orbit other middle-aged, medium-bright stars, everywhere in our corner of the cosmos.

Swift, a postdoc at Caltech who was lead author of the Kepler-32 paper, summed it up perfectly: "Kepler has enabled us to look up at the sky and know that there are more planets out there than stars we can see."

At CES today, Lexus showcased an "Advanced Active Safety Research Vehicle," a souped-up LS being used as a testbed for autonomous car technology.

"Our goal is to eliminate future traffic fatalities and injuries," Lexus's Mark Templin said, standing in a press conference room lit like a Virgin cabin. And he believes autonomous--if not fully self-driving--cars are an important step forward.

The prototype's technology is designed to help drivers avoid, or better react to, collisions. That incudes stereo cameras that can sense objects 150 meters away (including the color of a traffic light); GPS antennas that measure the car's angle and orientation; and 360-degree rooftop laser tracking tech that detects things around the car, up to 70 meters away. "Our goal is a system that constantly perceives, processes and responds to its surroundings," Templin said.

Templin emphasized that the prototype will not necessarily lead to a self-driving car. Autonomous tech should be carefully deployed to make drivers safer and more aware, he said--it doesn't have to get rid of them altogether.

The prototype is still being tested and will not be commercially available "in the immediate future," he said.

MATERIALS
USB cable for your device
Any 5-volt car cigarette lighter adapter
Knife
Tape

STEP 1
Cut the USB end off the cable for your device and strip the insulation. You'll use the black and red wires to connect to the adapter. Twist together the other two wires.

STEP 2
Cut off the end of the cigarette lighter adapter that does not plug into the cigarette lighter. Use the knife to strip the insulation to reveal the black and red wires.

STEP 3
Twist the two red wires together and the two black wires together. Wrap tape around the joints to insulate them.

STEP 4
Plug it in and charge up your phone in the car.

This project was excerpted from The Big Book Of Hacks: 264 Amazing DIY Tech Projects, a compendium of ingenious and hilarious projects for aspiring makers. Buy it here. And for more amazing hacks, go here.

We haven't been too thrilled with Fitbit's offerings in the past--not that they're not good at what they are, just that the fitness tracker in general is not what we'd like it to be right now. One of the bigger problems with the Fitbit is that you have to remember to take it with you, so we're glad to see that problem remedied with the new Fitbit Flex, announced today here at CES.

The Flex is a wristband-style tracker, like the Nike Fuelband, so you wear it all the time, even while sleeping--and Fitbit has a hefty sleep-tracker system, complete with a nice little wrist-vibration to wake you up. We'll learn more about the Fitbit Flex tomorrow from the Convention Center floor, but for now we can tell you that the Flex will cost $100 and ship sometime in the spring.

The world saw its first modern zoetrope in 1833, and since its invention the device has paved the way to cinema as we know it. This playful update uses a strobe light to interrupt your view of a series of still objects as they go around and around on a record player-causing your eye to perceive them as if they were in motion. It's not 1833 anymore, but the effect is still pretty mind-boggling.

MATERIALS
Protractor
A record to sacrifice
18 LEGO miniature figures
Superglue
Record player
Strobe light

Cost: $$
Difficulty: 2 out of 5

STEP 1
Using the protractor, measure and draw lines every 20 degrees on the sacrificial record. Space out the Lego figures around the edge of the record according to these marks, and glue them down.

STEP 2
Put the LEGO figures in positions of your choosing-think about creating the look of continuous motion by carefully changing each one's position incrementally from that of the one before it.

STEP 3
Set the record player to 33⅓ RPM.

STEP 4
Adjust your strobe light to flash ten times per second and position it so that it's pointed at the zoetrope at close range.

STEP 5
Turn out the lights, turn on the record player and the strobe, and watch those LEGO figurines start dancing, running, battling, or doing whatever you want them to do.

This project was excerpted from The Big Book Of Hacks: 264 Amazing DIY Tech Projects, a compendium of ingenious and hilarious projects for aspiring makers. Buy it here. And for more amazing hacks, go here.

It's going to be a rough week in Australia, where the weather service had to add new colors to their climate map in preparation for an extreme heat forecast. The Bureau of Meteorology recently added pink and purple areas to its maps to make room for higher temperatures.

On the map issued for next Monday, Central Australia gets the dubious distinction of being the first region shown in purple, meaning temperatures are likely to rise above 50 degrees Celsius (122 Fahrenheit). This last Monday was the country's hottest day on record nationwide, with average maximum temperatures around the country of 40.33 degrees, and officials expect more to come. The new pink code is reserved for temperatures from 52 to 54 degrees Celsius, more than 125 degrees Fahreinheit.

Australia's all-time record for highest temperature, set in 1960 in Oodnadatta, still hasn't been broken, but this year's heat has been uniquely widespread and intense. Between the heat and the dry vegetation conditions, conditions are ripe for wildfires, which have broken out in multiple states, and Prime Minister Julia Gillard warned yesterday that global warming will mean even more extreme weather events.

[AFP]

If you've read Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas by Hunter S. Thompson, or quaffed a bottle of Flying Dog Brewing's beers, you will be familiar with the work of illustrator Ralph Steadman. The evocative ink splashes, seemingly haphazard lines, and splashes of color have always fascinated and horrified. Recently, he turned his talent to drawing birds. The work was part of a larger collaborative project with filmmaker Ceri Levy, called The Ghosts of Gone Birds, in which well-known artists depicted now-extinct bird species such as the dodo and great auk. Levy asked Steadman to draw a single bird, but Steadman ended up illustrating more than 100. Those illustrations have been collected in a book just published by Bloomsbury called Extinct Boids.

And "boids" they are: The illustrations themselves are not scientifically accurate, and a couple of them never even existed (the "nasty tern" or the "jail bird," for example). But that hardly matters: this isn't supposed to be a guidebook to extinct species. It's one artist's view of birds, their spirits and personalities and their place in our collective imaginations.