Phoenix Blog

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A breakfast that makes you go "mmm?" Not in Chandler, reportedly, where a teacher said his McDonald's bag contained a special ingredient: A live scorpion.

Jeff Tallman, according to Channel 15 (KNXV-TV), found the critter along with his meal last Friday morning after stopping at the Mickey D's on Arizona Avenue and Ray Road. Channel 15 says Tallman is "the science teacher at Chandler High School." (What, there's only one?)

Normally, we'd say this sounds fishy to us and dismiss the whole thing as an attempt to turn out the pockets of Ronald the Clown. But everyone trusts a science teacher about things like scorpions and the odds of finding an arachnid lurking in our Egg McMuffins, so we'll suspend disbelief for a moment.

Except on one thing. 

Image: Wikimedia Commons

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Creationists will have a field day with this one.

Turns out that Charles Darwin was wrong about the appendix. Darwin believed the organ didn't do anything useful, so it might have been vestigial -- an evolutionary leftover from an early antecedent of humans.

However, a team of researchers from Arizona State University, the University of Arizona and Duke University recently published an scholarly article that describes how the appendix actually servers a critical -- though somewhat disgusting -- function.  

​It's a miracle!

Or not.

According to one scientist, the image of the Virgin of Guadalupe that supposedly appeared on a peasant's cloak more than 200 years ago defies rational explanation.

This load of hokum was foisted on a crowd of believers at the First International Marian Congress held over the weekend in Phoenix. Adolfo Orozco told folks that two miracles are associated with the cloth, both having to do with its supposed resistance to decay.

Image: Arizona State University

In 2004, Arizona State University geologist Phil Christensen put out a request via Internet: Send rocks.

In five years, children and adults worldwide have answered the call -- big-time. Last week, ASU reported the Rock Around the World program was sent its 10,000th rock, the piece of quartz from Nepal in the picture at right.

The milestone -- get it?? -- caught the attention of ABC News, which contains an amusing anecdote about how Christensen (below) started the program, then skipped town for a few days on business.

Image: Wikimedia Commons

More than half a billion years ago, life on Earth wasn't very interesting. No cats, dog, people, dinosaurs -- not even plants.

What did the landscape look like back then? Endless miles of green "pioneer vegetation," say according to researchers at Arizona State University and the University of California, Riverside.

The scientists think they've found the answer to what triggered an explosion of more complex, multi-cellular life that led to the plants and animals we know today. Before that explosion could occur, the researchers wrote in the science journal, Nature, these primitive, photosynthesizing life-forms covered the planet, dumping vast amounts of oxygen into the atmosphere.

ASU geologist L. Paul Knauth led the research, says Science Daily:

How's this for romantic:

A University of Arizona professor found a new species of moth -- one with beautiful pink wings -- and named it after his wife, who likes the color pink. Tests proved the critter was a previously unknown species.