Hey coral jokes

Now get ready to laugh, cringe, or most likely do a little bit of both. Because they make you a lot cooler. Why do cowboys get a lot of laughs? What did the coal say when it saw a diamond? What did the tectonic plates say when they bumped into each other? Not my fault.

This story originally appeared in bioGraphic , an online magazine about nature and sustainability powered by the California Academy of Sciences. Now, she is dangling upside down, hovering above a pillow-sized brain coral. The waters that surround it are murky, and most of its corals are brown and lumpy, sparsely accessorized with bright-purple vase sponges and waving, rusty-red sea fans. Chamberland flicks away an agitated crowd of silvery butterfly fish, then descends slightly for a closer look at the mound of brain coral. She inspects the meandering grooves on its surface, looking for the tiny white bumps that appear immediately before its annual spawning. Over the past two decades, Chamberland and other scientists throughout the Caribbean—many of them now associated with a research and conservation group called SECORE, which stands for Sexual Coral Reproduction—have stubbornly advanced the art and science of raising coral babies.

Have you heard about the restaurant that caters exclusively to dolphins? What did one flat-fish parasite say to the other at the end of their date? Did you hear about the red ship that collided with the blue ship?

Another day, another boneheaded sexist misstep igniting a blamestorm in the tech world. It all started on Sunday at the PyCon event in Santa Clara, California, when Adria Richards, a female conference-goer and a technology consultant, overheard a conversation with a guy seated behind her at a panel. Richards claims their otherwise unremarkable techie chat turned sour when a neighboring guy joined in with a couple of jokes. Richards snapped a picture of the guys making the jokes, and posted it to Twitter. PlayHaven, a mobile-gaming site, confirmed to Mother Jones that both of the men photographed by Richards were PlayHaven employees at the time.