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Tropical Storm Arlene is predicted to make landfall in Mexico early Thursday morning (credit: NOAA, NWS National Hurricane Center)

It’s been a busy year for natural disasters: the earthquake and tsunami in Japan; tornadoes, flooding and wildfires here in the United States; a volcanic eruption in Chile. And now the first named storm of the 2011 hurricane season, Tropical Storm Arlene, is brewing in the Gulf of Mexico.

The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration has predicted an above-average season this year in the Atlantic: 12 to 18 named storms (winds of 39 mph or higher), of which 6 to 10 could become hurricanes (winds of 74 mph or higher), including 3 to 6 major hurricanes (Category 3, 4 or 5; winds of 111 mph or higher).

With that in mind, this seems like a good time to review the topic of disaster preparedness (well, September is National Preparedness Month, but that’s too late for this in my opinion). FEMA lists three steps to preparedness at Ready.gov: (1) Get a kit. (2) Make a plan. (3) Be informed. Dig down in the site for more details, tips and tools, along with special instructions for specific groups, including military families, the disabled and even pet owners. (There’s also a site geared for kids.)

For those people who live in hurricane territory—that is, along the East and Gulf coasts—NOAA has a great site with plenty of information and videos about hurricanes and how to prepare. And whether an active year is predicted or not, people who live in these regions should prepare every year, because as Bill Read, director of the National Hurricane Center, notes in one video, “it only takes one storm hitting your community to make it a bad year.”

And those of you who live outside the hurricane zone aren’t off the hook. Learn what potential dangers are in your area—earthquakes, tornadoes, volcanoes, floods and so on—and make your own preparations. Because not preparing only makes you more vulnerable when the inevitable occurs.

If you call someone a piranha, first make sure you've got the right fish (via wikimedia commons)

We’ve all used a fishy metaphor in the past, but use the wrong one and you can look pretty stupid (as in this question in a recent Washington Post online chat—though advice columnist Carolyn Hax was still able to figure out the correct species). So here’s a quick guide to finding the right fish for your metaphor:

Piranha: These small South American fish of the genus Serrasalmus are known for their voracious appetites, even resorting to cannibalism when times are tough. (But they’re not as violent as the movies might have you believe.) A human piranha is a competitive, ruthless predator.

Remora: The members of this family of fish are most often found attached to whales or big fish, feeding off their host’s leftovers. You may have one of these in your group of friends.

Shark: These fish have skeletons of cartilage and streamlined bodies and are among the scariest predators in the sea. Metaphorically, they’re often hustlers (think pool shark) or other kinds of greedy cheaters.

Pilot Fish: This species (Naucrates ductor) hangs out in warm ocean waters around sharks, rays and sea turtles feeding off their parasites and leftover bits. They’ve also been known to follow ships, which once led to the myth that they would play navigators for sailors who had lost their way. The phrase “pilot fish” has been used to refer to scavengers who accompany a larger threat, though Ernest Hemingway in A Moveable Feast used the term for people who scouted out artists for rich people.

Goldfish: You might use this term for someone with a short memory, thinking that our fishy friends can’t remember anything beyond a few seconds. You’d be wrong, however. Goldfish have much longer memories and scientists (and the Mythbusters) have trained them.

Eel: There are hundreds of species of this finless fish, and many of them burrow into the ocean bottom in shallow waters. They look somewhat snakelike, though sea snakes are entirely different. Call someone an eel, you mean that they’re slippery.

Barracuda: These large, elongated fish have fang-like teeth, similar to the piranha. Metaphorically, a barracuda is like a piranha, too, a predator in the office.

Clownfish: Clownfish are one half of a classic case of mutualism with sea anemones (the fish eat small invertebrates that could harm the anemones; the anemones protect the clownfish from bigger predators). There should be some kind of metaphor in this relationship, but the term clownfish can mean so many different things (someone who is a joke, someone who lacks self-respect, etc.), that’s its probably best avoided for something clearer.

Whale: They’re not fish, and so this metaphor is left for another day.

What fishy metaphors have I missed? Tell me in the comments.

Still from Cars 2. Courtesy of Disney.

“They’re not only racing across the world—they’re racing to save the world,” declares the trailer of the new movie Cars 2. The animated feature is the latest kids’ movie with an environmental twist: Alternative-fuel-advocating heroes will show down with big-oil villains as the movie hits theaters today. We rounded up the top ten kids’ movies aimed at spreading the word about saving the environment.

1) FernGully: The Last Rainforest — This 1992 animated film depicts a magical rainforest inhabited by fairies but threatened by destructive loggers. When the loggers cut down a tree and release the evil spirit Hexxus, Crysta, the fairy protagonist, and her friends (including lumberjack Zak, whom Crysta shrunk down to miniature size to save his life) must find a way to defeat the pollution-loving demon and save their home. The movie’s message is overtly conservationist, villainizing destructive humans and urging viewers to do what they can to preserve the wilderness areas still left on Earth.

2) WALL-E — This hit film from 2008 takes place 700 years in the future, when the Earth has been reduced to a deserted, trash-covered ghost town. Robot WALL-E seems to be the last sentient being on the planet, as all the humans have fled to gigantic space ships that hover in outer space. One day, one of those ships comes to Earth, bringing advanced robot EVE, with whom WALL-E falls in love. He follows her back to space, and his adventures there eventually convince the humans they must return to Earth. The state of the Earth in the movie urges viewers to take notice of how their actions are affecting the environment and warns of what might happen if they don’t.

3) Bambi — The classic animated film from 1942 tells the story of a young deer and his friends who live in a forest threatened by hunters. When Bambi is still a fawn, his mother is killed by one of those hunters, and he must grow up without her. Bambi and his friends get older and he falls in love with another deer, Faline. Everything is peachy until the next day, when the forest goes up in flames and Faline is attacked by hunting dogs. Bambi is able to save her, and the couple eventually escapes to an island in a lake, where they live (at least we expect) happily ever after. The scene where Bambi’s mom dies would make even the most hardened hunter think about setting down his gun.

4) Over the Hedge When the forest animals, the main characters in Over the Hedge (2006), wake up from hibernation, they realize that half of their forest has been destroyed and replaced by a suburban neighborhood hidden behind a giant hedge. The animals, especially raccoon RJ, who is paying off a debt to an angry black bear, try to survive by stealing food from the humans who live on the other side of the hedge. The plot revolves more around the interactions among the animals than an environmental message, but some pointed comments are unmistakably meaningful: “That is an SUV,” says RJ in the trailer. “It’s so big!” respond the animals. “How many humans fit in there?” RJ’s reply is priceless: “Usually…one.”

5) Hoot — Based on a Carl Hiaasen novel, this 2006 film portrays the adventure of three middle-school students who try to protect a rare breed of endangered owls. The main character, Roy, just moved to Florida from Montana, and quickly makes friends with Beatrice and her truant stepbrother, “Mullet Fingers.” The three set out to derail a greedy CEO in his construction of a pancake restaurant on the vacant lot where the rare owls live. Not exactly an award-wining movie, but definitely one that encourages kids to think about the relationship between humans, development and wildlife.

6) Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home — Whether this 1986 film can be considered a movie for kids is debatable, but its environmental undertones are clear. It’s the year 2286, and a strange probe is approaching Earth, sending out signals that Spock determines match the calls of the extinct humpback whale. The probe is wreaking havoc on Earth, so the crew of the USS Enterprise decides to go back in time to 1986, where they find two whales in a San Francisco aquarium. A curator there explains to the crew members why the whales are endangered. They take the whales back to the future with them and release them in the San Francisco Bay, where the giant mammals answer the probe’s signal and stop the destruction. Logical? Maybe not. But with an environmental message? Most definitely.

7) Free Willy — Another movie with whales and an environmental message, Free Willy was a hit in 1993. It features a young boy who befriends a recently captured orca whale in a local aquarium/amusement park. The boy, Jesse, and the whale, Willy, bond, but Willy is in danger because he doesn’t perform tricks well and therefore doesn’t earn much money for the park. The park owner and his cronies threaten to kill Willy, so Jesse decides to release the whale into the wild. There’s no mistaking the villains in this movie—the park owner, who exploits animals, and the whalers who capture Willy—or the message that wild animals are better off left alone.

8) Disneynature’s Oceans — Though a bit more subtle than some of the other films on this list, Oceans still makes an impact. A documentary released on Earth Day in 2010, the film explores the underwater world that covers three-quarters of our planet. While it spends much of its time depicting the weird, wonderful and beautiful life forms that the oceans have to offer, the documentary doesn’t miss its chance to show the negative effects human actions can have on wildlife and urge viewers to respect nature.

9) Avatar – Again, it’s debatable whether this is a kids’ movie, but it’s clearly a film with environmental themes. A paraplegic soldier travels to the planet of Pandora, where he, in the form of his avatar, integrates with the indigenous Na’vi people. He is supposed to help conquer the foreign land, but soon finds himself siding with the Na’vi. There are many themes in this 2009 film, but among them are a respect for the environment (demonstrated by the graceful Na’vi), our ultimate reliance on nature and the destructive nature of humans and how it affects the planet.

10) Happy Feet — The main message of this 2006 Disney movie is that it’s okay to be different, but environmental themes work their way in as well. The film focuses on a young penguin, Mumble, with a talent for tap dancing—something none of the other penguins can do. It follows his adventures and quest for acceptance throughout the plot, but the environmental aspect shows up when Mumble is blamed for the scarcity of fish in the ocean, a nod to overfishing. In addition, one of Mumble’s friends wears a set of plastic six-pack rings around his neck like jewelry, only to later be choked by the piece of trash. Happy Feet is an example of the environment showing up in movies that are not directly about the environment.

Giving films a green theme is clearly a trend in cinema lately. What other environment-focused kids’ movies did we miss?

One of Will Walker's demotivational posters for scientists

We’re big fans of science humor here at Surprising Science HQ. Some of the funniest, most innovative new comics have a science angle, whether it’s dinosaur spokescharacters, grad students toiling in a lab or stick figures with sophisticated math skills. We keep this poster in our time machine, earn our badges, celebrate the IgNobel Prize winners and encourage educators to teach the controversy. And, of course, although it’s a non-denominational blog, we’re Pastafarians at heart.

One of my favorite new (to me) examples of humor as a form of release from scientific tension comes from Will Walker, now a post-doc at the McLaughlin Research Institute for the Biomedical Sciences in Montana. He has a series of mock-motivational posters [update: you must log on to Facebook to see them, apologies!] that capture the absurdity of lab work. (They’re akin to the “Demotivators” from Despair, Inc. that you may be familiar with. My favorite is a photo of a sinking ship titled: “MISTAKES. It could be that the purpose of your life is only to serve as a warning to others.”) Here’s where Will’s poster inspiration came from:

I was in the throes of my dissertation research at Cornell University. As a baby scientist, I was super excited to test a great idea I thought I’d had, but I was learning for the first time about all the gremlins that stand between the researcher and The Answer. It’s just the nature of science, really: since you’re trying to extend the boundary of the known, there’s necessarily a lot of inefficient fumbling around with things you barely understand. Still, troubleshooting all the problems that pop up at the lab bench can feel like fighting a multi-headed hydra of experiment failure, so you have to find ways to manage your frustration during the rough patches. There’s no class in grad school to teach you this, but it’s a huge part of the mental equipment you end up acquiring. The posters were part of a conscious effort to maintain a little space for humor between me and my frustrations: I found it was easier to keep banging my head against the wall if I could do it with a modicum of ironic detachment. (An earlier part of my self-prescribed frustration therapy was to buy a sledgehammer and a pile of cinder blocks to smash, but that got expensive after a while. Making posters was cheaper!)

What are your own favorite science humor sites? Please share them in the comments.

Scientists are still trying to figure out why primates have excellent vision. (langur monkey photo courtesy of flickr user Troup Dresser)

We humans aren’t alone in our aversion to snakes. Our primate cousins also fear serpents. And for good reason—snakes eat primates. Snakes have been preying on primates for millions of years, and some researchers think they might be the reason we—and our fellow primates—have such good eyesight.

Good vision is a hallmark of the primate order. Compared with many other mammals, primates have more closely spaced, forward-facing eyes that allow for a lot of overlap between each eye’s visual field, which in turn gives primates 3-D, or stereoscopic, vision and a good sense of depth perception.

In the early 20th century, scientists attributed primates’ keen sense of sight to their arboreal lifestyle. The ancestors of primates needed to accurately judge the distances between tree branches before taking a leap, so the theory went. But that hypothesis lost favor in the 1970s after biological anthropologist Matt Cartmill, now at Boston University, pointed out that many other acrobatic, tree-dwelling animals like squirrels get by without such an advanced visual system.

Cartmill offered his own explanation, called the “visual predation hypothesis”: early primates needed superb visual skills to hunt and grab insects. Another hypothesis is that primates needed to see well to pluck fruits from the ends of tree branches.

More recently, snakes came into the picture. In 2006, anthropologist Lynne Isbell of the University of California at Davis argued that early primates were stalked by constricting snakes, and it was highly beneficial to see these camouflaged predators before it was too late. Later, some monkeys and apes in Africa and Asia started to live alongside venomous snakes, which led to even more visual advancements.

But the idea may not hold up, according to the authors of a recent study in the Journal of Human Evolution. Led by behavioral ecologist Brandon Wheeler of the Cognitive Ethology Laboratory at the German Primate Center, the team tested the snake hypothesis by looking at variations in modern primates’ visual skills (in terms of stereoscopic vision, as measured by the closeness of the eyes) to see if the primates with the best eyesight had the longest evolutionary history of coexisting with snakes and the greatest likelihood of encountering and being attacked by them.

The team didn’t find any correlations between snake exposure and primate vision, concluding that snake attacks did not drive the evolution of better eyesight. Still, the researchers say, detecting snakes was definitely a beneficial side effect regardless of why better vision evolved.