Snappy, an 8-foot-2-inch crocodile, turned orange. Not from eating a bunch of carrots and tomatoes like that one episode of Scrubs would have you believe, but because Snappy attacked a water filter at his enclosure at the Roaming Reptiles park in Australia. A few weeks after the attack, owner Tracey Sandstrom notice Snappy changed color. Sandstrom hasn’t noticed the color change affecting Snappy in any negative way, noting that Snappy still has a healthy appetite and is doing everything he always did prior to the filter attack.

Crocodile expert Graham Webb guessed that something in the water changed the croc’s color, iron, tannins from leaves, or red algae that oxidizes when it dries. Webb noted that the tongue was not colored, which lends credence to the theory that the color change came from oxidization when drying while Snappy basked in the sun, due to the tongue being unlikely to dry out from basking, whereas the skin would be. Though the bright orange look might be a sleek new style for the crocodile, he is expected to change back to his normal color at some point. Head on past the break to see another, somewhat terrifying picture of the orange crocodile.

You’ve probably realized that running your car on the ancient compressed remains of animals that lived thousands of years ago is starting to get a little expensive. Well, researchers from the University of Louisiana at Lafayette published a paper in the Industrial Engineering Chemistry Research that suggests we can turn Alligator lipids (fat) into biofuel for something that costs around $2.40 a gallon. Not bad right?

Now, before anyone gets all up in arms, no one is proposing that we start farming and butchering alligators for the sole purpose of turning their fat into fuel. Instead, they’re suggesting that we take the fat from the alligators we are already farming and butchering for other things and turn that into fuel instead of simply throwing it away like we are right now. The alligator skin and meat industry creates a byproduct of over 15 million pounds of alligator fat each year and, at the moment, it’s all going to waste.

Pretend for a minute that you are the consumer culture of an entire country in Asia. You really like key-chains that contain live fish or turtles, but those are starting to bore you. What do you do next? Thats right: you make neon frogs by coloring them with industrial dye! If the dye sounds a little dangerous and borderline horrific, don’t worry, you can also use lasers, somehow. These flagrantly florescent frogs have garnered a lot of popularity in China and are in high demand at aquariums, ponds and for personal ownership. The coloration is reported to last four to five years, which implies that the frogs last that long too, unless the coloration lives on as some kind of crazy, neon-color-ghost of its own, and you know what, I wouldn’t be entirely surprised.

Naturally, the ethics of dyeing frogs for fun and profit are questionable. It definitely sucks for the frogs who, so far, have failed to exhibit any accompanying superpowers. On top of that, there are concerns that the dyes could have dangerous effects on the people exposed to them, either by holding and playing with the frogs, or actually administering the dye (or lasers). For the moment however, none of those concerns seem to trump the “colored frogs are just plain awesome” effect and their popularity continues to boom. I am equal parts intrigued and horrified to see where this trend goes next. More photos after the jump.

Last year, 205 million gallons of oil were dumped into the Gulf of Mexico in the wake of the Deepwater Horizon disaster. In his info-tastic video Oil’d, Chris Harmon poses a provocative question: What would we have done with the oil if it had never been spilled? His answers are staggering, but also underline human dependency on oil. Sure, we could have done a lot with those 205 million gallons, but maybe we could have done even more — or less.

(via Reddit)