Planet Of Strange Things

2011-12-06T02:58:00.002+11:00

The Monsters In The Mona Lisa

An artist claims he has found 'animal faces' unnoticed for over 500 years in the most famous painting in the world. Here's one of them :

From the UK Sun :

Ron found another hidden image — the crocodile or snake — by following instructions in another part of da Vinci's writings suggesting to tip the painting at a 45 degree angle. This was supposedly where the angle of the light was best and led to the least amount of reflection.

The instructions also called for the viewer to put their eyes on the same level as the horizon in the painting.

From this he was able to make sense of the line in the passage about how to paint envy which reads: "Make her heart gnawed by a swelling serpent", as there is such a creature emerging from her right breast.

You might need a handful of magic mushrooms to find them without da Vinci's instructions.

2011-10-17T02:06:00.002+11:00

Pug Life

Tiny high-definition cameras are giving us amazing point-of-views from the daily lives of not only animals in the wild, but our urban animal friends as well :

2011-09-28T02:50:00.004+10:00

Don't They Mean Humans Exhibit Ape-Like Behaviour?

How strange it is that apes can show "human-like behaviour" when they were running around this planet for millions of years before humans came along. Maybe they taught us to use tools...

Do apes have access to genetic memories of previous generations? Did these torture lab apes know the sun existed for the 3 decades they were held against their will? They can scarcely believe what they are seeing, but they're not afraid. They're delighted, and laughing. It's like they're hugging each other saying, "We made it! We're finally free!"

We were told for most of the 20th century that apes were not like humans, they had no sense of self. The arrogance in believing that we were alone of all the animals in knowing what we are is beyond belief and seems an incredibly primitive way for such a supposedly advanced species to think :

2011-09-13T14:17:00.003+10:00

A bridge climb that will make your toes tingle and your stomach lurch. Even on YouTube, it kicks in the adrenalin :

2011-09-04T00:30:00.004+10:00

The World's Fastest, Tallest, Steepest, Wildest, Most Airtime Rollercoasters

Kingda Ka in New Jersey, USA, claims to have the world's highest drop of 456 feet, and is also one of the fastest :

Superman Ride Of Steel, Six Flags, New England, USA, with up to 10 periods of weightlessness, or "airtime" :

Takabisha, Japan is, for the moment, the world's steepest rollercoaster, with 121 degree incline :

Formula Rossa, in Abu Dhabi, claims to be the world's fastest, accelerating to more than 250kmh in four seconds :

Expedition GeForce, Germany, provides seven, brief periods of airtime :

Eejanaika in Fuji highlands, Japan, is simply the world's wildest rollercoaster :

2011-09-04T00:07:00.001+10:00

You will believe that a man can fly :

2011-08-20T18:46:00.003+10:00

There are not many physical things that humans can do that no other creatures of the animal world are incapable of replicating, but these incredible feats surely must be some of them. In particular, watch from 4:35 and 5:13. Great music, too :

2011-08-17T01:42:00.001+10:00

Volcanoes blowing 'smoke rings' of steam and gas are not unusual, but it sure is a beautiful event.

2011-08-09T02:45:00.004+10:00

An unexplained piece of roadkill found in Minnesota. A mutant badger, maybe....

Full Story Is Here

2011-08-06T00:33:00.001+10:00

Maybe we learned to keep dogs as pets, hundreds of thousands of years ago, by watching our hairier relatives :

2011-08-06T00:25:00.002+10:00

That's one damn impressive cloud face :

You can see the face forming in the storm front at about 1.15m :

2011-08-04T09:43:00.000+10:00

Nobody is born a racist :

2011-08-03T01:37:00.001+10:00

Whatever it is, it's quite pretty, and no doubt it utterly entranced and brought magnificent excitement to those who witnessed it, and caught these clips :

2011-07-26T22:15:00.000+10:00

You can jump out of a plane without a parachute, and survive :

2011-07-14T13:47:00.000+10:00

A huge, fast-spreading sinkhole opens up in Texas :

2011-07-04T00:22:00.000+10:00

Everything looks spectacular at 1000 frames a second :

2011-06-27T13:06:00.002+10:00

Do You Get The Feeling Humans Are Not Supposed To Know Cats Can Do This?

2011-06-20T01:51:00.002+10:00

'Shelf' clouds, occasioally seen but not often caught on video in such detail, are beautiful, remarkable and just a little bit freaky :

2011-06-14T02:29:00.003+10:00

How Japanese Zookeepers Deal With Attacks From Escaped Animals : Poke It With A Stick, Fall Over

Two videos that show how Japanese zookeepers rehearse emergency response scenarios for keeping visitors safe in the event of, say a rhino rampage....

...or a clearly angry and agitated polar bear :

This overacted transquilised 'ape' collapse is some beautiful work.

2011-06-05T12:11:00.001+10:00

There Really Was A "House Of Horrors"

A house with false walls, corridors that lead nowhere, windows that open only onto brick walls, has become a staple of both horror movies and crime fiction, but such a house really did exist, in Chicago, in the last years of the 19th century :

....a maze of windowless rooms with doorways opening to brick walls, oddly angled hallways, stairways to nowhere, doors openable only from the outside, and a host of other strange and labyrinthine constructions.

Holmes repeatedly changed builders during the construction of the Castle, so only he fully understood the design of the house, thus decreasing the chance of being reported to the police.

After the completion of the hotel, Holmes selected mostly female victims from among his employees (many of whom were required as a condition of employment to take out life insurance policies for which Holmes would pay the premiums but also be the beneficiary), as well as his lovers and hotel guests. He tortured and killed them. Some were locked in soundproof bedrooms fitted with gas lines that let him asphyxiate them at any time. Some victims were locked in a huge soundproof bank vault near his office where they were left to suffocate.

The victims' bodies were dropped by secret chute to the basement, where some were meticulously dissected, stripped of flesh, crafted into skeleton models, and then sold to medical schools. Holmes also cremated some of the bodies or placed them in lime pits for destruction. Holmes had two giant furnaces as well as pits of acid, bottles of various poisons, and even a stretching rack.

The builder of the house, Dr Henry Howard Holmes, is known as the United States' first documented serial killer. He admitted to the murders of more than two dozen people, but he may have killed as many as 250.

A Harpers Magazine examination from 1943 goes into more detail of this horrific house :

...in 1892 he built on the opposite corner the enormous, improbable structure later to be known as his murder castle. It was more than a hundred and fifty feet long and fifty feet wide, huge and ugly, with three storeys and a basement.
There were “staircases that led nowhere in particular,” blind passageways, hinged walls, false partitions, rooms with no doors and rooms with many doors. All these centered on the second floor of the gloomy, forbidding structure. Holmes’s own apartments were at the front of this floor. A trap door was cut in his bathroom and from it a short hidden stairway led to a windowless cubicle between-floors in the heart of the house; from this a chute dropped straight to the cellar.

Behind Holmes’s apartments were various rooms labeled in contemporary newspaper sketches as “five-door room,” “secret room,” “mysterious closed room” (behind this last was a “dummy elevator for lowering bodies” to the basement), “the black closet,” “room of the three corpses,” “sealed room all bricked in,” “blind room,” “another secret chamber,” “the hanging secret chamber,” and so on–nearly forty rooms in all. Near the rear of the house was an “asphyxiation chamber–no light–with gas connections.” Here the large purchases of gas fixtures becomes meaningful; it apparently was Holmes’s practice to lock victims in this sealed, asbestos-lined room and to turn on the gas. Immediately behind the asphyxiation chamber was another chute down which the bodies could be dispatched to the basement. Some of the rooms on this second storey were lined with iron plates, some had false floors that concealed tiny airless chambers, nearly all had gas connections.

The cellar was perhaps the most remarkable section of the building. It was fitted with operating tables, a crematory, pits containing quicklime and acids, surgical instruments, and various pieces of apparatus which, resembling mediaeval torture racks, never were satisfactorily explained.

The minds of some humans.

2011-06-03T02:56:00.004+10:00

I know tornadoes don't really qualify as a "strange thing". They are, of course, very normal. But the citizen reporter footage of the brutal, deadly wave of tornadoes in the United States are too spectacular not to post here. This from Springfield, Massachusetts

The Aftermath :

2011-05-31T12:03:00.002+10:00

If the activities of humans on Planet Earth are being watched by an alien civilisation, what would they make of Brits chasing discs of cheese down slippery, sodden hillsides in the cold and fog?

2011-05-30T16:17:00.001+10:00

This is what you get when you enter 'Cherokee', the name of an American Indian tribe and culture that thrived for longer than the United States has existed, in Google Image search :

Via Reddit

2011-05-30T15:37:00.002+10:00

Humans, we do some very, very stupid, and very strange, things :

2011-05-26T23:54:00.007+10:00

I Never Wanted To See Darth Vader Do That

By Darryl Mason

Before you watch this, remember you cannot unwatch it, for now at least there is no way to burn the memory of seeing this from your brain. You can still look away. It's not too late :

Surely George Lucas only allowed this so there is something much worse out there than the Star Wars Holiday Special (see below)?

I don't know what's sadder, the fact that this authorised Star Wars Disney show of so little imagination actually exists, or the riot of absolute disgust Dance Off With The Star Wars Stars has provoked amongst 40-something males who truly believe the original Star Wars movie was the most important event of their childhoods and George Lucas doing anything to stain its memory is like the Pope vomiting on the Bible, over and over again. An attitude best summed up by this YouTube comment :

George Lucas killed my dreams with the prequels, this digs them up out of their graves to defecate on them with a continual stream of piping hot effluent.

I think George Lucas may actually now be trolling the most hardcore of Star Wars fans. If so, Dance Off With The Star Wars Stars is most definitely working.

Anyway, I don't know what Star Wars geeks are complaining about. It's not like George Lucas has only been taking Stars Wars and turning it into spin-off crap for the past decade. He was doing it within a year of the original film's release :

The Star Wars and Disney association that led to that stage show did, however, produce a great piece of poster art :

2011-05-26T23:14:00.004+10:00

Grabs from a series of aerial photos of the wreckage left behind by the deadly tornado that swept through the American city of Joplin :

It seems like there is a city-smashing natural disaster in the US every couple of weeks now.

The Full Set Of Aerial Photos Are Here

2011-05-26T13:48:00.003+10:00

More incredible tornado footage from the storms currently shredding the American mid-west :

And this from Denton, Texas :

2011-05-25T01:38:00.001+10:00

The Florida Soft Shell Turtle specialises in busting the most common turtle-related cliches :

2011-05-24T02:50:00.004+10:00

NASA UFO Photos Released
These are all screengrabs from a series of photos of unidentified objects shot by an astronaut in Earth's orbit, and were published on a NASA website :

More On This And Source Links Here

2011-05-17T02:38:00.004+10:00

This Is What It's Like To Be Standing Inside A Massive Tornado

Easily, the clearest, most vivid footage anywhere online of a hurricane passing directly overhead. From the Tuscaloosa, Alabama tornado swarm on April 27, 2011 :

You can't blame the cameraman for backing away from the windows when he did. More than 230 people died in those tornadoes.

2011-05-12T23:21:00.000+10:00

Bizarre Bird Carcass Found In Iran

Locals in northwestern Iran claim the above bird lived in a local cave. A skull like that of a reptile, canine teeth, small wings usually found only on flightless birds. What is it? Nobody knows yet :

The locals found the feathered bipedal creature, which seemed to have died a few days ago, near a remote village of Meshginshahr, IRNA reported on Sunday.

The avifauna of Iran includes a total of 527 species, none of which are similar to the found creature; however, the discovery needs ornithologists to verify the claims.

Scientists believe that fossil evidence demonstrates birds and dinosaurs shared many features such as hollow bones, gastrolith in the digestive system, nest-building and brooding behaviors.

Did a time portal from the age of the dinosaurs open up there recently? Or is it another long thought extinct bird?

Locals are claimed to be hiding the carcass, but hopefully this won't be the last we hear about this creature.

Presumably there'll be enough undamaged genetic material to work out exactly what it is. Then it can be cloned, and sold to zoos around the world.

Imagine one of those harrassing you on a beach for a hot chip? Here! Take them! Take them all!

2011-05-12T23:16:00.000+10:00

Baby aardvark. That's all. Just a hairless, baby aardvark :

2011-05-12T18:05:00.001+10:00

Galaxy's Most Wanted Terrorist Ben Kenobi Killed

It really suits him, doesn't it? He looks right at home :

From the Galactic Empire Times :

Obi-Wan Kenobi, the mastermind of some of the most devastating attacks on the Galactic Empire and the most hunted man in the galaxy, was killed in a firefight with Imperial forces near Alderaan, Darth Vader announced on Sunday.

In a late-night appearance in the East Room of the Imperial Palace, Lord Vader declared that “justice has been done” as he disclosed that agents of the Imperial Army and stormtroopers of the 501st Legion had finally cornered Kenobi, one of the leaders of the Jedi rebellion, who had eluded the Empire for nearly two decades. Imperial officials said Kenobi resisted and was cut down by Lord Vader's own lightsaber.

The whole story is excellent, and many of the comments are hilarious.

2011-04-07T15:47:00.003+10:00

More Quality Journalism From Rupert Murdoch

This apology printed in the UK Sun newspaper is mind-boggling :

In an article published on The Sun website on January 27 under the headline 'Gollum joker killed in live rail horror’ we incorrectly stated that Julian Brooker, 23, of Brighton, was blown 15ft into the air after accidentally touching a live railway line.

His parents have asked us to make clear he was not turned into a fireball, was not obsessed with the number 23 and didn’t go drinking on that date every month. Julian’s mother did not say, during or after the inquest, her son often got on all fours creeping around their house pretending to be Gollum.

To think they made all these things up about someone who had just died. Appalling.

2011-04-05T10:36:00.006+10:00

Tsunami Dog Comes Home

I was going to write a long, detailed piece about how March 2011 was one of the most event-packed, news stuffed, tumultuous, strange, heart-breaking months to have unfolded in my lifetime, but I was only a few paragraphs in when I came across the below cartoon by acclaimed Australian artist @FirstDogOnMoon, which wraps up March better than I could ever dream of doing.

(Click image to enlarge)

You can also see the Tsunami Dog At Sea cartoon, with comments, here at Crikey.

If you're wondering what happened to Tsunami Dog, here's the owner & dog reunion. Tear factor 9 :

The human death toll of the March 11 Japan earthquake and tsunami is beyond 20,000. Unlike Tsunami Dog, most of those swept out to sea were not rescued & did not survive, including hundreds of school children.

2011-03-31T03:17:00.001+11:00

An extraordinary sandstorm in Kuwait :

2011-03-30T01:54:00.005+11:00

Gloating Over Mass Deaths

I'd heard that Americans on Facebook were claiming within hours of the event that the March 11 Japan earthquake and tsunami were, somehow, "revenge for Pearl Harbour", but it took the compilation below to ram home just how truly strange and downright insane this mass FU-ing of the tens of thousands who died, the millions who've had their lives ruined, actually was :

(click image to enlarge or go here)

2011-03-29T12:46:00.003+11:00

I might have to file this under Planet Of Shit-Scary, Horrific Things.

Two views of the March 11 tsunami destroying the Japanese port city of Kesennuma.

2011-03-26T03:29:00.002+11:00

Crows, They're Up To Something But We're Not Clever Enough To Work Out What

A fascinating but slightly unnerving piece on '6 Ways Crows Are Smarter Than You Think' uncovers these facts :

* Not only can crows recognise human faces, they can hold grudges against the person who owns that face

* Not only can crows communicate detailed information to each other in all that cawing, they can do so to conspire, to plot and plan.

* Crows have regional accents, and recognise where another crow is from by the sounds of their caws.

* Half a million crows descended on a small, farming town. There was a plan to kill and bag a few hundred thousand of them. One crow was shot, and the rest communicated with each other, within minutes, to sound a warning to fly high enough to avoid the guns.

* Crows pass down memories and information to next generations about places to avoid because one crow had been shot there. And it's not a general area, they avoid specific houses where grandpa crow was shot dead all those years ago.

* Crows understand the natural laws of water displacement.

* They can look at a piece of wire and work out if they bend the end into a hook they can use it to pull something tasty that was out of reach into beak range.

* Not only do crows know how to make tools, they know how to make tools which can be used to make more tools.

* Crows can remember the days garbage trucks visit a neighbourhood, and the route they take.

* The smart little fuckers can also learn the pattern and timing of traffic lights.

Amazing.

Lots More Crow Brilliance Here

2011-03-24T02:13:00.004+11:00

Black And White And Totally WTF

BuzzFeed has '50 Unexplainable B&W Photos'. Here's five of the downright most strange :

I wonder if these photos would be more interesting, or much less, if we knew the story behind them?

The Other 45 Are Here

2011-03-16T16:23:00.003+11:00

Too Much Of An Ocean View

The US Navy photographed this incredible sight in the Pacific Ocean, off Japan :

2011-03-16T03:54:00.002+11:00

The Tokyo Sway

How far we've come in only a few thousand years. Where once we built cities that could be leveled by a common large earthquake, now we can build cities of gleaming towers that reach to the sky and only sway, instead of collapsing, under the rocking and heaving of one of the largest earthquakes in recorded history :

2011-03-16T03:49:00.003+11:00

It's like tempting the ocean to take your life. But it's also a joyous celebration of fearlessness and an astounding confidence that the judgments made are not the wrong ones :

But if you were a youth, if you saw this scene unfolding in front of you, if you were wearing a wetsuit, wouldn't you want to give it a try, too?

2011-03-12T03:24:00.003+11:00

Scientists Don't Know Why Earthquakes Come In Clusters

They don't know how yet, but imagine if scientists could look at a pattern of earthquakes and predict an expected size and location for a devastating quake, allowing for necessary evacuations a day or two in advance, then we will have cracked one of the greatest, most devastating, mysteries of Mother Nature.

From the Sydney Morning Herald :

The director of the Australian Seismological Centre in Canberra, Kevin McCue, said yesterday's quake in Japan, the largest recorded there, would not have been linked to the one that struck Christchurch last month.
''This earthquake is a rupture of the plate boundary,'' Professor McCue said. ''The Christchurch earthquake was not. It was an earthquake on the conjugate fault, a fault that's at an angle to the main fault and 100 kilometres away from the plate boundary.
...Professor McCue said earthquakes on plate boundaries often came in quick succession. ''We had a sequence of earthquakes in 1906 where there were at least six 'grade earthquakes' around the Pacific. And now we've had Chile last year and this one,'' he said.
''It's something we observe in all extreme events - they are clustered in time. That's what we observe they do but we don't have an answer for it.''

The Full Story Is Here

2011-03-11T04:09:00.001+11:00

Earthquakes as the soundtrack of Planet Earth :

Tectonic: Earthquakes Generate Music in Realtime from Micah Frank on Vimeo.

2011-03-11T03:23:00.001+11:00

Wait for the end, it's worth it :

2011-03-10T00:16:00.001+11:00

If you were an alien and came to Earth and saw someone doing this with a piece of wood and some little wheels, you'd have to be impressed, surely. More impressed at least than the many wandering past in the background, completely oblivious to the rare skill & creativity on display :

2011-03-08T17:04:00.002+11:00

This doesn't qualify as a "strange thing", but is sure is an awesome sight to behold :

2011-03-08T03:30:00.003+11:00

Your Funeral, Terminator Style

Methods of cheaply disposing of the recently departed without polluting the environment & using up wood for coffins, or filling the air with smoke from cremations, get steadily more bizarre :

Promessa, in Sweden, has come up with a method of burial that negates the worst aspects of the disposal of remains. They want to freeze human bodies, then shatter them into a million pieces. The body is chilled to around negative 18 degrees Celsius. Once it's cold enough, it's submerged in liquid nitrogen. As the body becomes colder, it gets more brittle. Once it's brittle enough, it's shocked with soundwaves that crumble it into powder.And that's just the start.
And that's just the start.

2011-03-07T23:30:00.004+11:00

Okay, Elephants might not be completely terrified of mice, but they certainly do seem to be afraid of them :

But are the Mythbusters wrong? Are elephants really afraid of mice, in the way some humans freak out when they see a spider scurrying towards them?

Or are these elephants in fact purposely trying to avoid stepping on them? Maybe they've had enough experience stepping on small animals as youngsters to not want to get squished rodent between their toes.

Also, it must not be forgotten, that elephants use their trunks like we use our hands. When they're looking around for fruit on a forest floor, their trunks are snuffling around through undergrowth and grass.

It might simply be they know enough to avoid small darting things because snakes, and some rodents, would bite at a trunk that accidentally finds them amongst the fruit and leaf litter around the base of tree..

Or maybe there's simply a kind of heeby-jeebies terror of small animals running up the inside of their trunks and getting caught.

Whatever the reason, the idea proposed by MythBusters that elephants are irrationally scared of mice is ridiculous.

Considering the (however small in scale) level of threat posed by rodents, spiders, snakes to a snuffling trunk, it makes sense that elephants would learn over the years to rear back and step cautiously around a quick moving something they've only just seen or become aware of.

Elephants can hardly be compared to a man or woman standing on a chair shrieking insanely because there's a mouse, spider or monster cockroach darting around the floor.

Elephants have far more dignity than that.

2011-03-04T01:25:00.004+11:00

A Christchurch man survived the recent tragic earthquake and found this visitor in his hall :

The intruder, nicknamed 'Rocky', is being auctioned to raise funds for survivors of the February 22 Christchurch earthquake.

More Here

2011-03-03T04:01:00.003+11:00

Dolphins Save Doberman

A beloved Doberman went missing in Florida and wound up in a canal, unable to escape. It took refuge on an almost submerged sandbar, and there it might have died when the tides rose.

But two dolphins decided they could help by alerting humans to the dog's precarious location.

At least, that's how this story read to me, you tell me I'm wrong :

It all started when D'Alessandro and her husband, Sam, walked out of their home....to go fishing. Behind the home is a canal where "we saw these two dolphins and they were splashing and making this big commotion.

Dolphins usually swim through the canal behind the home, as it leads into the Gulf of Mexico, but this time the dolphins weren't just passing through.
"They were just there, in one place, splashing water against the canal wall," she said.

Why would dolphins help a dog in distress? Compassion? Empathy? Maybe one just wanted to prove to the other that he knew how to get humans' attention.

Or maybe it's a mammal code of behaviour not as preciously human as we once imagined.

2011-03-03T03:23:00.004+11:00

Dawn Of The Zombie Puppies

He was just one of five puppies euthanised by a vet. His little body was checked for signs of life, nothing, he was tossed into a bin with the bodies of other dead animals.

But the next day :

an animal control officer looked into the bin and discovered that the one pup somehow survived.
"He was just as healthy as could be," Scott Prall told News 9.

The puppy has found a new home.

2011-02-15T16:47:00.007+11:00

The Bizarre Origins Of Valentine's Day

How did Valentine's Day begin? With the whipping of women with the hides of recently slain dogs and goats in Ancient Rome :

From NPR :

From Feb. 13 to 15, the Romans celebrated the feast of Lupercalia. The men sacrificed a goat and a dog, then whipped women with the hides of the animals they had just slain.

The Roman romantics "were drunk. They were naked," says Noel Lenski, a historian at the University of Colorado at Boulder. Young women would actually line up for the men to hit them, Lenski says. They believed this would make them fertile.

The brutal fete included a matchmaking lottery, in which young men drew the names of women from a jar. The couple would then be, um, coupled up for the duration of the festival – or longer, if the match was right.

The Full Story Is Here

2011-02-15T16:38:00.002+11:00

Fuck A Duck!

"One of them is raping me, I don't care."

Isabella Rosellini's educational videos on the secret sex lives of animals are some of the strangest things you will find on the internet, and man, that is saying something.

Rosellini wrote, produced, directed and stars in all these videos at the Sundance Channel. Educational and entertaining.

And one more, just to prove that dolphins are nature's kinkiest creatures. "Blowhole sex, anything goes".

2011-02-15T16:29:00.004+11:00

Back Again

Right, been a bit slack posting to this blog over the past eight months, but many e-mails and comments have convinced me it's time to dive back into the strange, scary and wonderful things this planet has to offer.

I haven't lost my fascination for such things, I just wrote and linked to those kinds of stories on my Twitter stream here :

www.twitter.com/DarrylMason

Thanks for your kind words, and click my profile to get my e-mail address if you think there's something bizarre and fucked up I need to know about, or just message me on Twitter.

Darryl Mason.

2010-07-19T15:52:00.004+10:00

In New Zealand, you can now buy robotic legs that will help paraplegics to walk again. Cost? About $150,000 :

From Discovery News :

Two New Zealand inventors have produced what they claim are the world's first robotic legs to help paraplegics walk again.

The bionic legs were road-tested publicly for the first time Thursday by 23-year-old Hayden Allen who was told five years ago he would never walk again after being paralyzed from the chest down in a motorcycle accident.

Allen said the experience of being able to stand up and walk when strapped into his robotic legs was fantastic and he felt like a normal human being again.

The Full Story Is Here

2010-07-19T15:35:00.003+10:00

Did you know the Nazis made a Titanic movie in 1943? Me neither :

From Cracked :

The whole production was a disaster from start to finish. The director, Herbert Selpin, was imprisoned and killed for not being nearly Nazi enough and saying mean things about the German Navy. And only once the most expensive German film up to that point was finally finished did everyone realize that the general public wouldn't really care for a disaster film when Germany itself was being bombed to hell.

The film was pulled from cinemas after its debut and only shown in Paris, before being banned altogether. And then in 1945 the ship the movie was filmed on was sunk, killing way more people than the actual Titanic disaster.
The whole project came to symbolize the complete and utter failure of the Third Reich, which isn't bad for a film where the complete opposite was meant to happen. And to add insult to injury, Germany's enemies the Soviets loved the film for its anti-capitalism message, the Brits stole some of the scenes for their own superior version a decade later, and James Cameron would eventually rip off some of the plot in his own sappy Hollywoodized version.

2010-07-19T15:28:00.003+10:00

Al Qaeda is now recruiting.....monkey terrorists :

2008-08-28T23:34:00.003+10:00

The baby boy lived for only a day, and 150,000 people came to see him.

2008-07-31T02:36:00.003+10:00

Monkey-Faced Piglet Born

Sure it's a mutant, but this kid doesn't care :

“Our son likes to play with it, and he stopped us from getting rid of it. He even feeds it milk,” said Mr Feng’s wife.

2008-07-31T00:44:00.006+10:00

Beastly And Beaky

BoingBoing has a good discussion on what the hell this creature washed up on a beach actually is. Equal votes for escaped experimental mutant and excellent Photoshopping exercise.

Did whatever-this-is really die giving the finger?

2008-06-22T01:11:00.002+10:00

UK Ministry Of Defence : "Don't Chase UFOs"

An unidentified flying object is reported to have "attacked" a police helicopter over Cardiff, Wales, earlier this month.

The helicopter pilots reported seeing a flying disc edged by lights. The official report on cited an incident with an "unusual aircraft" :

"The pilot banked sharply to avoid being hit, then launched into a high-speed pursuit," the tabloid reported.

"But he was forced to give up the chase as the helicopter's fuel ran low - and the UFO escaped."

The helicopter crew had described the object as "flying saucer-shaped and circled by flashing lights," it added.

That description was rather more dramatic than the official police version, which said: "South Wales Police can confirm its air support unit sighted an unusual aircraft."

A Ministry of Defence spokesman said...."it is certainly not advisable for police helicopters to go chasing what they think are UFOs."

2008-06-12T00:20:00.003+10:00

Pig Wears Wellington Boots...Because It's Afraid Of Dirt

The story is in the headline, but here's some more details from the UK Guardian :

Few pigs turn their snouts up at the chance to roll around in mud. But Cinderella the six-week-old saddleback has adopted a different motto - four wellies good, four trotters bad - after being diagnosed with mysophobia, a fear of dirt.
The piglet's owners, Debbie and Andrew Keeble, who run a farm near Bedale, North Yorkshire, were baffled by her reluctance to hit the mud when she and her siblings were let out into the fields. "When the batch ventured away from their mother, Cinders just stood at the edge of her sty shaking while the others explored," said Debbie.
Andrew, 42, said: "We scratched our heads a bit but then we thought, we wouldn't go in the mud bare-footed, so why not try some wellies?" The couple asked a designer friend come up with a bespoke pair of piggy boots. Cinderella's green wellies are made of rubber and have been created with no footwell so that her trotters slip straight in.

2008-06-07T21:40:00.002+10:00

Can Sharks Get A Taste For Human Flesh?

The majority of shark attacks on humans are written off as mistaken identity. The shark thinks the swimming human is a seal, or something else it usually eats. But a recent spate of attacks have some scientists thinking that "packs of bull sharks are now actively hunting humans for the first time after a series of horriifying attacks in the waters off a popular resort."

The theory emerged after two surfers were killed and one badly injured in a month. A fourth swimmer is missing at the Mexican seaside town...
Locals fear one rogue shark is responsible but experts believe a pack of deadly bull sharks are actively targeting humans for the first time.

They think the 3m fish could have developed a taste for human flesh after devouring hundreds of corpses dumped into the sea by mobsters.

The beach at Zihuantanejo – near Acapulco and popular with international tourists – had not previously recorded a shark incident in more than 30 years.

And, with an annual average of only four fatal shark attacks globally, the fact that two people have died along the same stretch of coast within weeks has astonished international experts.

The Zihuantanejo deaths come halfway through what is already turning into a bumper year for shark attacks.

Zihuantanejo is now gripped by fear. Police have been guarding beaches and signs warn against going into the water.

Local businessmen, worried the deaths will devastate the tourist industry, hired fishermen to kill the sharks.

Mexican navy vessels were brought in last week to scour the waters for sharks.

Jose Leonardo Castillo, chief shark investigator for Mexico’s National Fishing Institute, said yesterday: “One theory we’re investigating is that a group of sharks have developed a taste for humans.”

2008-05-31T12:32:00.002+10:00

Bees Can SMILE?

Uh, well no, actually :

"They have a rigid exoskeleton around the mouth.
"They can open their mandibles (jaws) but that's about it.
"A fortuitous light has reflected off the compound eyes, which makes them look that they have pupils.
"The light is also shining on the clypeus (a shield-like plate on the face) making it look like a nose and reflecting on the mandibles, which makes them look like a pinkish mouth."

Great photo though.

2008-05-15T03:44:00.000+10:00

Save The Planet : Eat Squirrels And Bugs

In the UK, Brits are supposedly "going mad" for a squirrel dinner. Not because squirrel is particularly nutritious, but for ethical and green reasons :

It's low in fat, low in food miles and completely free range. In fact, some claim that Sciurus carolinensis - the grey squirrel - is about as ethical a dish as it is possible to serve on a dinner plate.

The grey squirrel, the American cousin of Britain's endangered red variety, is flying off the shelves faster than hunters can shoot them, with game butchers struggling to keep up with demand.

...its new-found popularity is partly due to its green credentials.

'People like the fact it is wild meat, low in fat and local - so no food miles,' says Simpson.

Ridley reckons that patriotism also plays a part: 'Eat a grey and save a red. That's the message.'

Don't worry if you're repulsed by the idea of nibbling on all those tiny squirrel bones. Perhaps insect flesh is more to your fancy :

David Gracer lifts a giant water bug, places his thumbs in a pre-sliced slit in its underside, and flips off its head. “Smell the meat,” he says, sniffing the decapitated creature, and the people gathered around the table willingly oblige. Members of the New York Gastronauts, a club for adventurous eaters, they murmur appreciatively as they scoop out and swallow the grayish, slightly greasy insect flesh.
“Perfumey, tastes like salty apples,” one says. “Like a scented candle blended with an artichoke,” another adds.

The giant water bug, or Lethocerus indicus, a three-inch-long South Asian insect that looks uncannily like a local cockroach, is just one of the items on the menu of this bug-eating bacchanal.
Gracer, a self-described “geeky poet/nature boy” who teaches composition at a community college in Providence, Rhode Island, has made it his duty to persuade ordinary Americans to eat insects.

Gracer wants people to move away from getting their protein from traditional livestock such as cows, pigs, and chickens because raising livestock has a huge negative impact on the environment...,

“Americans have no idea how wasteful these large mammals are,” Gracer says. “If you want to feed a lot of people, insects are the best choice in terms of getting the biggest bang for your buck.”
It takes 869 gallons of water to produce a third of a pound of beef, about enough for a large hamburger. By contrast, to supply water to a quarter pound of crickets, Gracer simply places a moist paper towel at the bottom of their tank and refreshes it weekly.
Insects, he says, also need less food and space than vertebrate sources of protein and therefore could replace or supplement food resources that may become scarce in the future, such as fish stocks, which a recent study indicates may collapse by 2048.

Double-fist sized hamburgers dripping with cheese and lashed with bacon versus ground beetle dip. Dave Gracer has one hell of a sales mission on his hands.

2008-05-14T03:48:00.003+10:00

Series Of Bizarre Natural Events Preceded Massive Earthquakes In China

This story from the Times Online pings the word 'conspiracy' to these stories of weirdness before the 7.9 magnitude earthquake hit China a few days ago, but such stories are not rare. In fact, animals acting strangely before earthquakes hit is fairly common.

From the London Times :

One blogger from Shandong province, in eastern China, wrote that more than a month ago, he went to his local earthquake resesarch centre several times to report that his animals had been disturbed and restless.
But, he wrote: "They not only ridiculed me, they accused me of making up stories."

The Chutian Metropolis Daily reported that on April 26, 80,000 tonnes of water suddenly drained from a large pond in Enshi, Hubei province. The province shares a border with Chongqing Municipality, which was devastated by the earthquake on Monday.
On May 10, a Sichuan-based newspaper, the West China Metropolis Daily, reported that hundreds of migrating toads descended upon the streets of Mianyang, the second largest city in the province which neighbours Wenchuan County, the epicentre of the earthquake.
In the city of Mianzhu, 60 miles from the epicentre, bloggers pointed to reports just weeks before the earthquake of a mass migration of more than one million butterflies.

The quakes are expected to have killed more than 15,000 people, more than 20,000 remain trapped under collapsed buildings, schools and apartment blocks as this is written, and more than 40,000 people are missing.

2008-05-14T00:16:00.002+10:00

One Big Cow

The name is Chilli, and that isn't an optical illusion. He's the world's tallest, or almost tallest, bovine, peaking at 6ft 6inches.

More photos of Chilli here.

2008-05-11T02:09:00.003+10:00

Too Much Clean Air Bad For 'The World's Lungs'

Climate science, particularly the science backing the theory of man-made climate change, is fairly new and extremely complicated. As this story makes clear, what you think would be good for a region like the Amazon, may actually turn out to be bad news :

...the Amazon could be wiped out within half a century as a result of too much clean air...

The vast rainforest, so crucial to the Earth's climate, is coming under threat from attempts to curb the pollution that causes acid rain, warn UK and Brazilian climate scientists.
The drying of the Amazon is caused by a combination of increasing greenhouse gases and efforts to remove sulphate aerosol particles arising from the burning of coal in power stations.
Emissions of the particles in the 1970s and 1980s partially reduced global warming by reflecting sunlight and making clouds brighter. This pall of pollution has dominated in the northern hemisphere and has acted to limit warming in the tropical north Atlantic, keeping the Amazon wetter than it would otherwise be.
they found that the trend to cut sulphur emissions in North America and Europe to curb acid rain, which has harmful effects on plants, aquatic life and buildings, will see tropical rain-bands move northwards as the north Atlantic warms, resulting in a sharp increase in the risk of Amazonian drought, like that experienced in 2005.
"These findings are another reminder of the complex nature of environmental change," says Prof Cox.

Is this story actually claiming that significant pollution in the 1970s and 1980s reduced the effects of global warming by reflecting back sunlight that would have otherwise reached this planet's surface? And that the effect of this increased rainfall in the Amazon, making it healthier and lusher than it otherwise would have been?

Yes.

2008-05-11T02:03:00.002+10:00

Hail Spud

There's ordinary potatoes, and then there's the really extra special potatoes :

The home of a Berlin woman has become a destination for pilgrims after the likeness of a cross was found in one of the potatoes she was cutting to make french fries, Germany’s The Local reported.

Birgul Balta, 49, said she invited family and neighbors to see the spud and soon a steady stream of the curious had lined up at her door, the paper reported.

"Everyone was deeply stirred," said Balta, a Muslim. "Some of them even began to weep and to pray."

Over a potato...

2008-05-08T23:40:00.003+10:00

Fire, Lava, Lightning

io9 has the explanation for this spectacular, but thoroughly, destructive display of nature :

Several days ago, a volcano that had been dormant for 9,000 years near the coast of Chile erupted spectacularly, hurling liquified metals and lightning many miles into the sky. The results, which you see here, are called a "dirty thunderstorm," and are quite rare. Nobody is certain what causes them, but according to National Geographic it's believed to be "the result of rock fragments, ash, and ice particles in the plume collid[ing] to produce static charges—just as ice particles collide to create charge in regular thunderstorms."

2008-05-08T04:12:00.004+10:00

Big Bugs

Divine Caroline takes a fascinating look at some of the biggest insects on the planet.

Here's some background on the Atlas Moth (above) :

Found only in Southeast Asia, the Atlas Moth is the largest of the moth species with the largest wing surface area—close to sixty-five square inches—and a wingspan of up to a foot long. Named after wing patterns that resemble maps, the moth’s wing tips resemble a snake’s head in order to ward off predators. With no mouth, it feeds off fat reserves built up during their caterpillar stage. Females secrete a pheromone through a gland at the end of the abdomen that males can detect several miles downwind. Adults mate quickly, since a total lifespan of a female is only one to two weeks. Females lay their eggs, use up their fat reserves to feed themselves, and then quickly die.

Go Here For More

2008-05-08T02:21:00.002+10:00

Mobile Phones Killing Off Bees?

Without bees, we lose much of our food production. More than a million bee colonies are believed to have died out in the United States in the past year alone. While the bizarre phenomenon of dying bees is mostly contained to the US and Europe, not knowing what is responsible means it will be to stop it from spreading.

The UK Independent asks if mobile phones are somehow responsible :

It seems like the plot of a particularly far-fetched horror film. But some scientists suggest that our love of the mobile phone could cause massive food shortages, as the world's harvests fail.

They are putting forward the theory that radiation given off by mobile phones and other hi-tech gadgets is a possible answer to one of the more bizarre mysteries ever to happen in the natural world - the abrupt disappearance of the bees that pollinate crops. Late last week, some bee-keepers claimed that the phenomenon - which started in the US, then spread to continental Europe - was beginning to hit Britain as well.
The theory is that radiation from mobile phones interferes with bees' navigation systems, preventing the famously homeloving species from finding their way back to their hives. Improbable as it may seem, there is now evidence to back this up.
Colony Collapse Disorder (CCD) occurs when a hive's inhabitants suddenly disappear, leaving only queens, eggs and a few immature workers...,The vanished bees are never found, but thought to die singly far from home. The parasites, wildlife and other bees that normally raid the honey and pollen left behind when a colony dies, refuse to go anywhere near the abandoned hives.
The alarm was first sounded last autumn, but has now hit half of all American states. The West Coast is thought to have lost 60 per cent of its commercial bee population, with 70 per cent missing on the East Coast.
CCD has since spread to Germany, Switzerland, Spain, Portugal, Italy and Greece. And last week John Chapple, one of London's biggest bee-keepers, announced that 23 of his 40 hives have been abruptly abandoned.
The implications of the spread are alarming. Most of the world's crops depend on pollination by bees. Albert Einstein once said that if the bees disappeared, "man would have only four years of life left".
German research has long shown that bees' behaviour changes near power lines.
Now a limited study at Landau University has found that bees refuse to return to their hives when mobile phones are placed nearby. Dr Jochen Kuhn, who carried it out, said this could provide a "hint" to a possible cause.

2008-05-05T02:33:00.003+10:00

Desert Vs Highway

Some remarkable images from Fogonazos of a desert highway in China and the battle to keep the sands from swallowing up the road :

The Tarim Desert Highway crosses the Taklamakan desert from north to south. The total length of the highway is 552km; approximately 446km of the highway cross uninhabited areas covered by shifting sand dunes, making it the longest such highway in the world. To prevent the road from being buried by sand, China authorities have built a 60-meter-wide tree belt along the route provided with a massive irrigation system which pump water for the vegetation.

The highway was built in 1995 to move oil from the Tarim Basin, China's largest inland basin. Though the highway was built using sand-control meshing, the most effective method a decade ago, many sections of the highway were buried by floating sand, which moves at an annual rate of five meters.

Go Here For More

2008-05-02T00:57:00.002+10:00

Birds Can See A World Invisible To Us

It's not a new theory by any stretch, but scientists now believe they have proof that birds can find their way across vast distances of our planet's skies because they can see Earth's magnetic field :

Klaus Schulten of the University of Illinois, proposed forty years ago that some animals – including migratory birds – must have molecules in their eyes or brains which respond to magnetism.

The problem has been that no one has been able to find a chemical sensitive enough to be influenced by Earth's weak geomagnetic field. Now Peter Hore and colleagues at the University of Oxford have found one.

Cryptochromes are a class of light-sensitive proteins found in plants and animals, and are thought to play a role in the circadian clock, in regulating plant growth, and timing coral sex.

A few years ago, Henrik Mouritsen of the University of Oldenburg in Germany showed that they were present in the retinal neurons of migratory garden warblers, and that these cells were active at dusk, when the warblers were performing magnetic orientation.
Birds appear to orientate at dusk, and cryptochromes form their pair of free radicals when "activated" by the blue light typical of dusk.

Hore suggests that dusk might activate the birds' magnetic sense, producing the radical pair. The concentrations of each free radical would be controlled by the Earth's magnetic field, which is known to vary with latitude. As a result, he speculates, the radicals would bind in varying degrees with other signalling molecules, depending on how far north or south the animal is.
How birds decode their "magnetic sense" is another topic of debate. Mouritsen believes they have an additional layer to their vision, which when switched on allows them to visually "see" the Earth's magnetic field. The situation would be similar to "head-up displays" in fighter jets and some cars, where transparent screens displaying information are built into windscreens.

"Having that on all the time would be distracting, so you can see why it would be desirable for the system to switch on and off," says Hore.

2008-04-29T04:29:00.003+10:00

Magnetic Suicides

It's one of the more unusual questions you will come across today :

Does The Earth's Magnetic Field Cause Suicides?

Bizarrely, the answer might actually be yes, according to this story in New Scientist :

Many animals can sense the Earth's magnetic field, so why not people, asks Oleg Shumilov of the Institute of North Industrial Ecology Problems in Russia.

Shumilov looked at activity in the Earth's geomagnetic field from 1948 to 1997 and found that it grouped into three seasonal peaks every year: one from March to May, another in July and the last in October.

Surprisingly, he also found that the geomagnetism peaks matched up with peaks in the number of suicides in the northern Russian city of Kirovsk over the same period.

Shumilov acknowledges that a correlation like this does not necessarily mean there is a causal link, but he points out that there have been several other studies suggesting a link between human health and geomagnetism.
The review's author, Michael Rycroft, formerly head of the European Geosciences Society, says that geomagnetic health problems affect 10 to 15% of the population.
Psychiatrists too have noticed a correlation between geomagnetic activity and suicide rates.
Geomagnetic storms – periods of high geomagnetic activity caused by large solar flares – have also been linked to clinical depression.
"The most plausible explanation for the association between geomagnetic activity and depression and suicide is that geomagnetic storms can desynchronise circadian rhythms and melatonin production," says Kelly Posner, a psychiatrist at Columbia University in the US.

The pineal gland, which regulates circadian rhythm and melatonin production, is sensitive to magnetic fields. "The circadian regulatory system depends upon repeated environmental cues to [synchronise] internal clocks," says Posner. "Magnetic fields may be one of these environmental cues."

Geomagnetic storms could disrupt body clocks, precipitating seasonal affective disorder and therefore increase suicide risk, Posner told New Scientist.

Go Here To Read The Full Story

2008-04-29T00:53:00.005+10:00

Orang-utans 'Discover' Spear Fishing

Saying that orang-utans in Borneo are now learning to spear fish is probably not accurate. More accurate would be to state that this is the first time observers keeping records have seen orang-utans making use of sticks to catch fish :

Orang-utans have confounded naturalists by learning to swim across rivers and to fish with sticks.

Naturalists were shocked to see the apes swim across a river to gain access to some of their favourite fruits at a conservation refuge on Kaja island in Borneo. Orang-utans were previously thought to be non-swimmers. The wildlife experts were equally surprised to see an orang-utan pick up a tree branch and stun a fish before eating it. Other apes introduced to the island were seen trying to spear fish with sticks after watching fishermen using rods.

But the orang-utans then found a much easier way to get their fish :

The naturalists also noted that the apes quickly worked out that it was even easier to steal fish from unattended lines used by the humans on the island.

Smart, and resourceful.

Go Here For More

2008-04-18T12:54:00.003+10:00

When The Sky Is Your Home

Photograph George Steinmetz has a beautiful, sometimes stunning, portfolio of images from his time with the so-called 'Tree People' of West Papua online here.

Some background on the tree-dwelling tribes can be read here.

2008-04-18T01:45:00.006+10:00

Skeksis Washes Up On Russian Beach?

It's probably a whale of some kind, but first thoughts were : Wow, that looks so much like a Skeksis from The Dark Crystal.

Don't you think?

Here's the 'mysterious' creature washed up in Russia :

Here's a Skeksis :

Skeksis in action from The Dark Crystal :

2008-04-08T08:35:00.002+10:00

Are Animals Aware Of Time Passing?

Some busy humans are constantly aware of time passing, while animals may not even be conscious that time even exists :

Dog owners, who have noticed that their four-legged friend seem equally delighted to see them after five minutes away as five hours, may wonder if animals can tell when time passes. Newly published research from The University of Western Ontario may bring us closer to answering that very question.

William Roberts and his colleagues in Western's Psychology Department found that rats are able to keep track of how much time has passed since they discovered a piece of cheese, be it a little or a lot, but they don't actually form memories of when the discovery occurred. That is, the rats can't place the memories in time.

These results, the researchers say, suggest that episodic-like memory in rats is qualitatively different from human episodic memory, which involves retention of the point in past time when an event occurred.

"This research," said Roberts, "supports the theory I introduced that animals are stuck in time, with no sense of time extending into the past or future."

Full Story Is Here

Maybe we only know what time is, and are aware of its passage, because we gave the concept of time a name, and invented clocks and watches.

2008-04-08T08:19:00.003+10:00

Man With Donor Heart Of Suicide Victim, Takes His Own Life

A remarkable story, with a sad ending :

A man who received a heart transplant 12 years ago and later married the donor's widow died the same way the donor did, authorities said: of a self-inflicted gunshot wound.
Grateful for his new heart, Graham began writing letters to the donor's family to thank them. In January 1997, Graham met his donor's widow, Cheryl Cottle, then 28, in Charleston.
"I felt like I had known her for years," he said.

Full Story Is Here

2007-11-08T04:21:00.000+11:00

Whale Songs May Actually Be Sounds Of 'Conversation'

A simply fascinating story :

Thousands of hours of humpback whale sounds have been recorded off the coast of Queensland and analysed to reveal a secret and ancient language of the deep sea.

Over three years, researchers identified at least 34 recurring sounds - some lasting less than one second and others stretching for more than 10 - that can be linked to specific, different social settings.

"I've found that they have this massive repertoire," University of Queensland researcher Dr Rebecca Dunlop said.

"I think their communication system is a lot more complicated than we gave them credit for," she said.
From high-pitched squeaks, shrieks and cries to purrs, groans and low yaps, Dr Dunlop mapped the repeated sounds for a paper published this month in the Journal of the Acoustical Society of America.

Some noises represent aggression and competition, others affection and concern.
....higher-frequency signals are used when males are competing for the affections of a female.

"These high-frequency cries and screams (are also heard) when they're having a bit of a row," she said.

Dr Dunlop describes the male "purring" sound as a "C'mon baby" call to females, used as a mating signal.

You can hear the sounds of whales 'having a chat' by clicking here

2007-11-04T00:03:00.000+11:00

Elephants On Acid - This Is Science?

More examples of the incredibly cruelty that some inflict on animals, and their fellow man, in the name of research. Or should that be using up their research grants before asking for another?

One Friday in August 1962 Warren Thomas, director of Lincoln Park Zoo in Oklahoma City, raised his rifle and took aim at Tusko the elephant. With a squeeze of the trigger he scored a direct hit on the animal's rump, firing a cartridge full of the hallucinogenic drug LSD into the animal's bloodstream.
The dose was 3,000 times what a human might take for recreational purposes, and the results were extraordinary. Tusko charged around and trumpeted loudly for a few minutes before keeling over dead.
Thomas and his colleagues maintained the mishap was the result of a scientific experiment to investigate whether LSD brought on an unusual condition in which elephants become aggressive and secrete a sticky fluid from their glands. In a report of the incident submitted to the US journal Science four months later, the team concluded: "It appears that the elephant is highly sensitive to the effects of LSD."

Who would have guessed that?

New Scientist magazine has a 'top ten' of the 'most bizarre experiments' ever carried out. Elephant On Acid is just one of the truly weird experiments under discussion :

One experiment in the 1960s saw 10 soldiers board an aircraft for what they believed was a routine training mission from Fort Hunter Liggett airbase in California. After climbing to around 5,000 feet the plane suddenly lurched to one side and began to fall. Over the intercom, the pilot announced: "We have an emergency. An engine has stalled and the landing gear is not functioning. I'm going to attempt to ditch in the ocean."
While the soldiers faced almost certain death, a steward handed out insurance forms and asked the men to complete them, explaining it was necessary for the army to be covered if they died.
Little did the soldiers know they were completely safe. It was merely an experiment to find out how extreme stress affects cognitive ability, the forms serving as the test. Once the final soldier had completed his form the pilot announced: "Just kidding about that emergency folks!"
A later attempt to repeat the experiment with a new group of unwitting volunteers was ruined by one of the previous soldiers, who had penned a warning on a sickbag.
One of the most gruesome experiments to make New Scientist's list was performed by the Soviet surgeon Vladimir Demikhov. In 1954 he unveiled a two-headed dog, created in the lab by grafting the head, shoulders and front legs of a puppy on to the neck of a German shepherd dog. Journalists brought in to examine the creature noted how milk dribbled from the stump of the puppy's head when it attempted to lap milk. Occasionally, the two would fight, with the German shepherd trying to shake the puppy off, and the puppy retaliating by biting back.
The unfortunate creation lived for six days, though Dr Demikhov repeated the experiment 19 more times over the next 15 years, with the longest-lived lasting a month. Although the work was dismissed as a publicity stunt outside the Soviet Union, Dr Demikhov was credited with developing intricate surgical techniques that paved the way for the first human heart transplant.
Predictably, sex also appears on the magazine's list of bizarre experiments. When investigating the sexual arousal of male turkeys researchers at Penn State University were impressed to see that the birds would attempt to mate with lookalike dummies. Piece by piece they removed parts of the dummy and found that the males were still highly aroused when presented with no more than a head on a stick.

2007-10-24T00:27:00.000+10:00

Attack Of The 'Killer' Monkeys

More than 10,000 monkeys roam the streets and back alleys of India's crowded capital, Delhi. They steal food, break into homes, spread disease, fight with cats and dogs for scraps and occasionally attack the human population.

The deputy mayor of Delhi, SS Bajwa, is believed to have been fighting off a horde of monkeys when he fell from his apartment balcony and was killed.

The mayor of Delhi has admitted defeat in the battle between the authorities and the monkeys.

"We have neither the expertise nor the infrastructure to deal with the situation," said Delhi's mayor Aarti Mehra, amid a barrage of criticism.

Culling is unacceptable to Hindus who revere the monkeys as a living link to the deity Hanuman, a monkey god who symbolises strength.

The animals routinely invade parliament, ministries, courts and government offices.

In May, federal lawmakers demanded protection from the marauding simians, which have even broken into the complex that houses Prime Minister Manmohan Singh's office.
Activist Kartick Satyanarayanan, who heads Wildlife SOS, said the problem was due to the "constant erosion" of the animal's natural habitat.

2007-10-20T15:23:00.000+10:00

Brazil Overrun By Invasion Of Giant Snails

A report from National Geographic on the B-grade horror movie plot, but very real environmental disaster, of giant African snails "thriving in nearly every state" of Brazil.

The giant mollusks, which can grow to 20cm long and weigh up to half a kilogram, were first introduced as a gourmet delicacy, but have now adapted to Brazil's climate so well that experts think they will be impossible to eradicate :

There is no record of when the species was first imported, but an agribusiness fair in southern Brazil in 1988 was probably pivotal in sparking the invasion.

At the fair, people sold kits with snails and brochures detailing how to raise them.

At first the African snails seemed promising for food: They had more meat, grew faster, and were more resistant to disease than the garden snail. The African snail was also cheaper to keep.

Brazilians countrywide began growing the giant snail in their backyards, planning to sell the mollusks to fancy restaurants.

Yet eating escargot is unusual in Brazil, and the few diners who would pay to eat the delicacy were not willing to substitute it for a new species with different texture and taste—and suspicious origin. This resulted in thousands of frustrated people with unwanted snails slithering through their backyards.

Most of the snails were then released in the wild, where they rapidly grew in number.

The snails are believed to be responsible for infecting people with meningitis.

2007-10-16T01:17:00.000+10:00

Water : $US100 A Litre

It's water, but not as you know it. Well, it's wet, it's clear, it's water, but it's not water, it's water.

Boutique water to be exact. Water from rare springs, water with a low mineral content making for a "smooth" taste, water from glaciers and icebergs, 'fresh' water sucked from the bottom of salty seas where it has swirled for thousands of years.

More here :

...purveyors are given advice on which water is best suited to what occasion.

Occasion? Like thirst? You don't get it, do you? Fine water is the new wine, according to the boutique water store in a flash London hotel :

Finé artesian water from Japan is said to be "a perfect companion" to sushi, sashimi and caviar, while Waiwera Mineral Water from the Waiwera Thermal Resort in New Zealand has a low mineral content which goes well with grilled and fried meat.
For those suffering from exhaustion or trying to get over jet lag, OGO spring water from Tilburg in the Netherlands contains 35 times more oxygen than regular water to revitalise the drinker.
The most expensive on the menu is 420 Volcanic, spring water from Tai Tapu in New Zealand, which can be bought for £21 for 42 cl - the equivalent of £50 per litre.
Its low mineral content and "smooth sensation on the palate" comes from its journey from the source at the bottom of an extinct volcano through 200 metres of volcanic rock.
Included on the list is 10 Thousand BC, water that comes from the melted ice of the Hat Mountain Glacier and is more than 10,000 years old...

2007-10-12T10:32:00.000+10:00

Mexican Horror Writer Embraces 'The Method'

When police entered the home of an aspiring Mexican horror writer, they found the manuscript of a novel called 'Cannibalistic Instincts'.

Then they found his girlfriend's leg in the refrigerator, bones in a bowl and the remains of her torso stuff into a closet.

Writers are often told to "write about what you know" and do "lots of research".

Clearly these rules should not apply when you're writing a novel about cannibalism :

Jose Luis Calva told police he had boiled some of his girlfriend's flesh but that he hadn't eaten it, the spokesman said on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to talk about the case.
Investigators were trying to determine if chunks of fried meat found in a pan in the apartment were human, the spokesman said.
Police came to Calva's apartment Monday after neighbors reported a fetid smell.
The family of Galeana, a 30-year-old pharmacy clerk, reported her missing on Friday and told police of her relationship with Calva, the official said.
Calva is being investigated in the killings of two other women, including an ex-girlfriend, also a pharmacy worker, whose dismembered body was found in 2004, and an unidentified prostitute who was killed earlier this year.

2007-10-11T04:24:00.000+10:00

The Thinking Baboon's Baboon

There's really no valid reason, other than religion-guided education, why most people today don't already know that man's closest relatives think and feel many of the same basic thoughts and emotions as we do.

Science, however, is still filling in those reality gaps, and bringing us closer to the truth about what really separates man from the apes - not much at all.

From the New York Times :

...baboons’ minds are specialized for social interaction, for understanding the structure of their complex society and for navigating their way within it.

The shaper of a baboon’s mind is natural selection. Those with the best social skills leave the most offspring.

“Monkey society is governed by the same two general rules that governed the behavior of women in so many 19th-century novels,” Dr. Cheney and Dr. Seyfarth write. “Stay loyal to your relatives (though perhaps at a distance, if they are an impediment), but also try to ingratiate yourself with the members of high-ranking families.”

Baboon society revolves around mother-daughter lines of descent. Eight or nine matrilines are in a troop, each with a rank order. This hierarchy can remain stable for generations.

By contrast, the male hierarchy, which consists mostly of baboons born in other troops, is always changing as males fight among themselves and with new arrivals.

Rank among female baboons is hereditary, with a daughter assuming her mother’s rank.
Baboons live with danger on every side. Many fall prey to lions, leopards, pythons and the crocodiles that in the wet season stalk the fords where baboons cross from one island to another. Baboon watchers are subject to the same hazards. Dr. Cheney and Dr. Seyfarth say their rules are not to work alone or to wade into water deeper than knee high. They often find themselves sitting in a tree with baboons waiting out a lion below. But going into New York is more petrifying, they contend, than dodging Botswana’s predators.

The baboons will bark to warn of lions and leopards, but pay no attention to some other species dangerous to humans like buffalo and elephant. On two occasions, baboons have attacked animals, a leopard and a honey badger, that threatened their human companions. “We haven’t lost any post-docs,” Dr. Seyfarth said.

For female baboons, another constant worry besides predation is infanticide. Their babies are put in peril at each of the frequent upheavals in the male hierarchy. The reason is that new alpha males enjoy brief reigns, seven to eight months on average, and find at first that the droits de seigneur they had anticipated are distinctly unpromising. Most of the females are not sexually receptive because they are pregnant or nurturing unweaned children.

An unpleasant fact of baboon life is that the alpha male can make mothers re-enter their reproductive cycles, and boost his prospects of fatherhood, by killing their infants. The mothers can secure some protection for their babies by forming close bonds with other females and with male friends, particularly those who were alpha when their children were conceived and who may be the father. Still, more than half of all deaths among baby baboons are from infanticide.

So important are these social skills that it is females with the best social networks, not those most senior in the hierarchy, who leave the most offspring.

Although the baboon and human lines of descent split apart some 30 million years ago, the species have much in common. Both are primates whose ancestors came down from the trees and learned to survive on the ground in large social groups. The baboon mind may therefore shed considerable light on the early stages of the evolution of the human mind.
Baboons may be good at perceiving and thinking in a combinative way, but their vocal output consists of single sounds that are never combined, like greeting grunts, the females’ sexual whoop and the males’ competitive “wahoo!” cry. Why did language, expressed in combinations of sounds, evolve in humans but not in baboons?

A possible key to the puzzle lies in what animal psychologists call theory of mind, the ability to infer what another animal does or does not know. Baboons seem to have a very feeble theory of mind. When they cross from one island to another, ever fearful of crocodiles, the adults will often go first, leaving the juveniles fretting at the water’s edge. However much the young baboons call, their mothers never come back to help, as if unable to divine their children’s predicament.

But people have a very strong ability to recognize the mental states of others, and this could have prompted a desire to communicate that drove the evolution of language. “If I know you don’t know something, I am highly motivated to communicate it,” Dr. Seyfarth said.

It is far from clear why humans acquired a strong theory of mind faculty and baboons did not.

But both chimps and humans use tools. Possibly social life drove the evolution of the primate brain to a certain point, and the stimulus of tool use then took over. Use of tools would have spurred communication, as the owner of a tool explained to others how to use it. But that requires a theory of mind, and Dr. Cheney and Dr. Seyfarth are skeptical of claims that chimpanzees have a theory of mind, in part because the experiments supporting that position have been conducted on captive chimps. “It’s bewildering to us that none of the people who study ape cognition have been motivated to study wild chimpanzees,” Dr. Cheney said.

“Baboons provide you with an example of what sort of social and cognitive complexity is possible in the absence of language and a theory of mind,” she said. “The selective forces that gave rise to our large brains and our full-blown theory of mind remain mysterious, at least to us.”

One interesting thought spawned of reading this story is this : why do we immediately assume that our evolutionary track was for the better of our species? Baboons may be perfectly happy where they are on the evolutionary ladder.

Humans evolved fast, compared to the slow progress of many other species. Some species have barely evolved at all for tens of millions of years.

Maybe we should not be asking what makes baboons similar to humans, but what it is that makes humans similar to baboons.

Perhaps baboons don't have this 'theory of mind' because they don't need it. Maybe they began to develop it, before we built cities, and decided it was more trouble than it was worth.

But the story raises another interesting question : why are we so fascinated by our hairy relatives, but they pay no more than the scantest interest in us?

2007-10-11T04:07:00.000+10:00

World's Biggest Living Organism? Fungus

The world's biggest living organism is not the 220 ton Blue Whale. It's a fungus in Oregon, and not only is it the biggest living organism in the world, it may also be the oldest :

Next time you purchase white button mushrooms at the grocery store, just remember, they may be cute and bite-size but they have a relative out west that occupies some 2,384 acres (965 hectares) of soil in Oregon's Blue Mountains. Put another way, this humongous fungus would encompass 1,665 football fields, or nearly four square miles (10 square kilometers) of turf.

The discovery of this giant Armillaria ostoyae in 1998 heralded a new record holder for the title of the world's largest known organism, believed by most to be the 110-foot- (33.5-meter-) long, 200-ton blue whale. Based on its current growth rate, the fungus is estimated to be 2,400 years old but could be as ancient as 8,650 years, which would earn it a place among the oldest living organisms as well.
Armillaria has the unique ability to extend rhizomorphs, flat shoestringlike structures, that bridge gaps between food sources and expand the fungus's sweeping perimeter ever more.

A combination of good genes and a stable environment has allowed this particularly ginormous fungus to continue its creeping existence over the past millennia.
...humongous may be in the nature of things for a fungus. "We think that these things are not very rare," Volk says. "We think that they're in fact normal."

2007-10-11T00:59:00.000+10:00

Pssst, Lookout! - Plants 'Chatter' To Warn Each Other Of Danger

If you've ever had one of those strange, passing thoughts about whether or not a carrot screams when it is ripped out of the ground, maybe you shouldn't read this story :

Plants chatter amongst themselves to spread information, a lot like humans and other animals, new research suggests.

A unique internal network apparently allows greens to warn each other against predators and potential enemies.

Many herbal plants such as strawberry, clover, reed and ground elder naturally form a set of connections to share information with each other through channels known as runners—horizontal stems that physically bond the plants like tubes or cables along the soil surface and underground. Though connected to vertical stems, runners eventually form new buds at the tips and ultimately form a network of plants.

“Network-like plants do not usually produce vertical stems but their stems lie flat on the ground and can hence be used as network infrastructure,” said researcher Josef Stuefer from the Radboud University in the Netherlands.
Here is how it works: If one of the network plants is attacked by caterpillars, the other members of the network are warned via an internal signal to upgrade their chemical and mechanical resistance—making their leaves hard to chew on and less desirable. This system works to spread the information amongst the plants and to ward off caterpillars.
“This is an early warning system, very much like in military defense, but then more effective: each member of the network can receive the external signal of impending herbivore danger and transmit it to the other members of the network,” Stuefer said. The attacked leaf is lost. However, the remaining leaves are protected against predators.

Weird, but fascinating.

2007-10-10T14:12:00.001+10:00

Attack Of The RoboBugs And Cyborg Moths

It's a surveillance freak's dream : an Army of fly-sized robot spy cameras, that can wing their way into the midst of a peace protest, zoom through a terrorist training camp gathering visual data, or hide in the corner of a room while foreign diplomats are holding secretive meetings relaying conversations by mini-microphone.

But how close are we to a world where tiny robotic insects are swarming through our cities and towns?

Closer than you might think.

This fascinating, and disturbing, story from the Washington Post details where various military, university and private surveillance companies are at on bringing micro-robo-bugs into reality (excerpts) :

No agency admits to having deployed insect-size spy drones. But a number of U.S. government and private entities acknowledge they are trying. Some federally funded teams are even growing live insects with computer chips in them, with the goal of mounting spyware on their bodies and controlling their flight muscles remotely.
The robobugs could follow suspects, guide missiles to targets or navigate the crannies of collapsed buildings to find survivors.
The technical challenges of creating robotic insects are daunting, and most experts doubt that fully working models exist yet.
...the CIA secretly developed a simple dragonfly snooper as long ago as the 1970s. And given recent advances, even skeptics say there is always a chance that some agency has quietly managed to make something operational.
Robotic fliers have been used by the military since World War II, but in the past decade their numbers and level of sophistication have increased enormously. Defense Department documents describe nearly 100 different models in use today, some as tiny as birds, and some the size of small planes.
All told, the nation's fleet of flying robots logged more than 160,000 flight hours last year -- a more than fourfold increase since 2003. A recent report by the U.S. Army Command and General Staff College warned that if traffic rules are not clarified soon, the glut of unmanned vehicles "could render military airspace chaotic and potentially dangerous."
But getting from bird size to bug size is not a simple matter of making everything smaller.

"You can't make a conventional robot of metal and ball bearings and just shrink the design down," said Ronald Fearing, a roboticist at the University of California at Berkeley. For one thing, the rules of aerodynamics change at very tiny scales and require wings that flap in precise ways -- a huge engineering challenge.
In one approach, researchers funded by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) are inserting computer chips into moth pupae -- the intermediate stage between a caterpillar and a flying adult -- and hatching them into healthy "cyborg moths."
The Hybrid Insect Micro-Electro-Mechanical Systems project aims to create literal shutterbugs -- camera-toting insects whose nerves have grown into their internal silicon chip so that wranglers can control their activities. DARPA researchers are also raising cyborg beetles with power for various instruments to be generated by their muscles.
Researchers at the California Institute of Technology have made a "microbat ornithopter" that flies freely and fits in the palm of one's hand. A Vanderbilt University team has made a similar device.

With their sail-like wings, neither of those would be mistaken for insects. In July, however, a Harvard University team got a truly fly-like robot airborne, its synthetic wings buzzing at 120 beats per second.
"It showed that we can manufacture the articulated, high-speed structures that you need to re-create the complex wing motions that insects produce," said team leader Robert Wood.
The fly's vanishingly thin materials were machined with lasers, then folded into three-dimensional form "like a micro-origami," he said. Alternating electric fields make the wings flap. The whole thing weighs just 65 milligrams, or a little more than the plastic head of a push pin.
Still, it can fly only while attached to a threadlike tether that supplies power, evidence that significant hurdles remain.
In August, at the International Symposium on Flying Insects and Robots, held in Switzerland, Japanese researchers introduced radio-controlled fliers with four-inch wingspans that resemble hawk moths. Those who watch them fly, its creator wrote in the program, "feel something of 'living souls.' "
Others, taking a tip from the CIA, are making fliers that run on chemical fuels instead of batteries. The "entomopter," in early stages of development at the Georgia Institute of Technology and resembling a toy plane more than a bug, converts liquid fuel into a hot gas, which powers four flapping wings and ancillary equipment.

The whole story is worth a read.

2007-10-10T01:29:00.000+10:00

Biggest Pumpkin...Ever

At more than 1500 pounds, this is an absolutely huge pumpkin. Interesting, if you're into this sort of thing.

Hell, it'll kill a couple of minutes at worst, and make you think about having pumpkin soup for lunch.

2007-10-04T11:00:00.001+10:00

The Ancient Bacteria Of The Antarctic Comes Out Of Its Ice Age

For millions of years, prehistoric bacteria and organisms have been locked under the ice of the Antarctic. But now the ice is melting. The UK Independent asks if the world will see the return of some unimaginable 'prehistoric plague' :

Now, a little more than a hundred years on from Scott's exhibition, US scientists have discovered that the icy landscapes may not be so barren after all. Microbiologists from New Jersey have chanced upon tiny frozen organisms that have remained alive for millions of years, embedded in some of the oldest ice on the planet.

Dr Kay Bidle of Rutgers University, who was part of the research team, extracted DNA and bacteria from ice found barely metres beneath the surface of a Dry Valleys glacier, and, remarkably, claims to have grown the bacteria in a lab. "This is by far the oldest ice in which we have found encased microbes, cultured them and formed a growth," he says.

The discovery of such ancient viable genetic material has far-reaching implications, not least the possibility that global warming could melt Antarctic ice to such an extent that an army of invidious pathogens will be released to wreak havoc on humans. But a more realistic outcome is that the experiment will aid our understanding of evolution, and how life could survive on other planets. Not bad for organisms that are eight million years old, originating four million years before humans first got up and strolled about on two legs. "The study is interesting because it extends understanding of the period of time over which organisms remain viable," adds Dr Bidle, who published his research earlier this month.
The scientific community has heralded the discovery as "significant", but the team's conclusions might disappoint science-fiction buffs. There will be no global pandemic – or at least there shouldn't be. The scientists say that while extremely old bacteria will be released into the world's oceans as a result of global warming, it is not a "cause for concern". Dr Bidle says that marine bacteria and viruses are less harmful to human health than those found on land. "Clearly this melting has happened many times over the Earth's history," he says. "We didn't find any pathogens. What we found were organisms closely related to common environmental bacteria."

The experts are keen to point out that even if ancient pathogens were released, they would not be very good at making people ill. In order to be effective they would have had to evolve in tandem with their original "target" – impossible for organisms that have been cut off for millenia.

Whenever the ice caps melt they inject a huge amount of genetic material into the oceans. Bacteria can incorporate external DNA into their own genetic material – through a process known as "lateral transmission"– and if they are good genes they can help the bugs survive. If they are not, they won't. "[Lateral transmission] can be advantageous or it can be deleterious. This is one of main ways in which microbes get new data," Bidle says. "It's up to natural selection to sort that out." In other words, the thawing of Antarctic ice could fast-track the microbes' evolution.
Antarctica's Dry Valleys are among the most desolate places on the planet. Here, no plants cling to the slopes, no small mammals scurry among the scree. The freeze-dried landscapes, with their rocks chiselled by the wind, seem utterly lifeless. When Captain Scott first chanced upon their craggy peaks and troughs in 1905, he labelled them the "valleys of the dead".

2007-10-04T10:40:00.000+10:00

Ice Cap Melt Causes Increase Of Earthquakes

The effects of rapid climate change are showing just how interconnected so many natural events of this planet actually are.

From the UK Guardian :

The Greenland ice cap is melting so quickly that it is triggering earthquakes as pieces of ice several cubic kilometres in size break off.
Scientists monitoring events this summer say the acceleration could be catastrophic in terms of sea-level rise and make predictions this February by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change far too low.
The glacier at Ilulissat, which supposedly spawned the iceberg that sank the Titantic, is now flowing three times faster into the sea than it was 10 years ago.
Robert Corell, chairman of the Arctic Climate Impact Assessment, said in Ilulissat yesterday: "We have seen a massive acceleration of the speed with which these glaciers are moving into the sea. The ice is moving at 2 metres an hour on a front 5km [3 miles] long and 1,500 metres deep. That means that this one glacier puts enough fresh water into the sea in one year to provide drinking water for a city the size of London for a year."
He is visiting Greenland as part of a symposium of religious, scientific, and political leaders to look at the problems of the island, which has an ice cap 3km thick containing enough water to raise worldwide sea levels by seven metres.
Dr Corell, director of the global change programme at the Heinz Centre in Washington, said the estimates of sea level rise in the IPCC report were based on data two years old. The predicted rise this century was 20-60cm (about 8-24ins) , but it would be at the upper end of this range at a minimum, he said, and some believed it could be two metres. This would be catastrophic for European coastlines.
He had flown over the Ilulissat glacier and "seen gigantic holes in it through which swirling masses of melt water were falling. I first looked at this glacier in the 1960s and there were no holes. These so-called moulins, 10 to 15 metres across, have opened up all over the place. There are hundreds of them."
This melt water was pouring through to the bottom of the glacier creating a lake 500 metres deep which was causing the glacier "to float on land. These melt-water rivers are lubricating the glacier, like applying oil to a surface and causing it to slide into the sea. It is causing a massive acceleration which could be catastrophic."
The glacier is now moving at 15km a year into the sea although in surges it moves even faster. He measured one surge at 5km in 90 minutes - an extraordinary event.
Veli Kallio, a Finnish scientist, said the quakes were triggered because ice had broken away after being fused to the rock for hundreds of years. The quakes were not vast - on a magnitude of 1 to 3 - but had never happened before in north-west Greenland and showed potential for the entire ice sheet to collapse.
Dr Corell said: "These earthquakes are not dangerous in themselves but the fact that they are happening shows that events are happening far faster than we ever anticipated."

2007-09-29T03:20:00.000+10:00

Tom Cruise Builds Multi-Million Dollar Bunker 'To Protect Against Attacks By Aliens'

Who cares if this tabloid story is a complete fabrication? What a great headline!

From This Is London :

Hollywood star Tom Cruise is planning to build a bunker at his Colorado home to protect his family in the event of an intergalactic alien attack, according to new reports.
The Mission Impossible actor, who is a dedicated follower of Scientology, is reportedly fearful that deposed galactic ruler 'Xenu' is plotting an evil revenge attack on Earth.
According to American magazine Star, a source said: "Tom is planning to build a US$10 million bunker under his Telluride estate."
"It's a self-contained underground shelter with a high tech air purifying shelter."
The facility is said to have enough room for ten people - including wife Katie Holmes, 17-month-old daughter Suri and his adopted children Isabella, 14, and Connor, 12

A spokesperson for the actor has denied the reports, saying: "This is completely untrue. He is not building on his property at all."

Well, they would say that, wouldn't they? Presumably Tom is building his 'alien attack bunker' with room enough for the spokesperson.

You can only pray that Cruise gets pissed off enough about this story to sue.

Can't wait for the court case.

2007-09-25T00:58:00.000+10:00

Look Up In The Sky...It's Only A Cloud, But It's Beautiful

(image credit: Ulrich Brieger)

Why don't people look up more? It's a question that cloud lovers always wonder.

If you're a cloud lover and you've tried to enthuse on your sky passions to friends or family, most often you will get strange looks, or the fast nod.

Why don't people turn their eyes to the sky and enjoy the show more often? Why do they ignore the cathedrals of clouds that so often unroll above our heads in a sky-wide exhibit of spectacular and jaw-dropping beauty?

We are told that those who stare off into the sky are day dreamers, meaning they are time wasters.

Can't think of a better way to waste some time than to see imagery like this :

There's a glorious selection of spectacular cloud photograph over at Dark Roasted Blend.

Go Here For That

Or, if you want to come into others who share your passion, consider a visit to :

The Cloud Appreciation Society

Where you can find pages like this :

Clouds That Really Do Look Like Things

And yes, they really do.

2007-09-24T23:36:00.000+10:00

The 'War On Terror' Becomes The War To Control Your Mind

'Psychotronics' is one of those weird Cold War-era Russian mind control conspiracies. Except it isn't.

There is a growing, multi-billion dollar industry taking root across the world focused singularly on finding ways to 'read' the human mind, from a distance, and, at the same time, to control the mind, to direct it, to influence human behaviour in a non-physical way. Naturally, the United States' involvement in pscyhotronic research is all to do with the 'War on Terror'. They're spending millions on R & D into mind control to stop terrorism. The 'Fight Against Terror' has become the greatest excuse of modern times for breaking through the final wall of human privacy - the right to think whatever you like, free of surveillance, or intrusion.

That right of free thought is now going up in smoke.

It's probably best you read this story for yourself.

Science fiction writer Philip K Dick used to believe in the early 1970s that Russian scientists were possibly bouncing energy beams off satellites to send information directly into his brain. It sounded ridiculous. This story makes PKD's theory sound, well, not so nuts. And that's a disturbing thought. I just hope it's my own :

The future of U.S. anti-terrorism technology could lie near the end of a Moscow subway line in a circular dungeon-like room with a single door and no windows. Here, at the Psychotechnology Research Institute, human subjects submit to experiments aimed at manipulating their subconscious minds.
The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) has gone to many strange places in its search for ways to identify terrorists before they attack, but perhaps none stranger than this lab on the outskirts of Russia's capital. The institute has for years served as the center of an obscure field of human behavior study -- dubbed psychoecology -- that traces it roots back to Soviet-era mind control research.
What's gotten DHS' attention is the institute's work on a system called Semantic Stimuli Response Measurements Technology, or SSRM Tek, a software-based mind reader that supposedly tests a subject's involuntary response to subliminal messages.
SSRM Tek is presented to a subject as an innocent computer game that flashes subliminal images across the screen -- like pictures of Osama bin Laden or the World Trade Center. The "player" -- a traveler at an airport screening line, for example -- presses a button in response to the images, without consciously registering what he or she is looking at. The terrorist's response to the scrambled image involuntarily differs from the innocent person's, according to the theory.

Marketed in North America as SSRM Tek, the technology will soon be tested for airport screening by a U.S. company under contract to the Department of Homeland Security.

"If it's a clean result, the passengers are allowed through," said Rusalkina, during a reporter's visit last year. "If there's something there, that person will need to go through extra checks."
This May, DHS announced plans to award a sole-source contract to conduct the first U.S.-government sponsored testing of SSRM Tek.
Igor Smirnov (was) a controversial Russian scientist whose incredible tales of mind control attracted frequent press attention before his death several years ago.

Smirnov...is called the father of "psychotronic weapons," the Russian term for mind control weapons. Bearded and confident, Smirnov in the video explains how subliminal sounds could alter a person's behavior. To the untrained ear, the demonstration sounds like squealing pigs.

In the United States, talk of mind control typically evokes visions of tinfoil hats. But the idea of psychotronic weapons enjoys some respectability in Russia. In the late 1990s, Vladimir Lopatin, then a member of the Duma, Russia's parliament, pushed to restrict mind control weapons, a move that was taken seriously in Russia but elicited some curious mentions in the Western press. In an interview in Moscow, Lopatin, who has since left the Duma, cited Smirnov's work as proof that such weaponry is real.
"It's financed and used not only by the medical community, but also by individual and criminal groups," Lopatin said. Terrorists might also get hold of such weapons, he added.
The slow migration of Smirnov's technology to the United States began in 1991, at a KGB-sponsored conference in Moscow intended to market once-secret Soviet technology to the world. Smirnov's claims of mind control piqued the interest of Chris and Janet Morris -- former science-fiction writers turned Pentagon consultants who are now widely credited as founders of the Pentagon's "non-lethal" weapons concept.
Smirnov died in November 2004, leaving the widowed Rusalkina -- his long-time collaborator -- to run the institute.
Despite Smirnov's death, Rusalkina predicts an "arms race" in psychotronic weapons. Such weapons, she asserts, are far more dangerous than nuclear weapons.

She pointed, for example, to a spate of Russian news reports about "zombies" -- innocent people whose memories had been allegedly wiped out by mind control weapons.
The U.S. war on terror and the millions of dollars set aside for homeland security research is offering Smirnov a chance at posthumous respectability in the West.
Smirnov's technology reappeared on the U.S. government's radar screen through Northam Psychotechnologies, a Canadian company that serves as North American distributor for the Psychotechnology Research Institute. About three years ago, Northam Psychotechnologies began seeking out U.S. partners to help it crack the DHS market. For companies claiming innovative technologies, the past few years have provided bountiful opportunities. In fiscal year 2007, DHS allocated $973 million for science and technology and recently announced Project Hostile Intent, which is designed to develop technologies to detect people with malicious intentions.
Larry Orloskie, a spokesman for DHS, declined to comment on the contract announcement. "It has not been awarded yet," he replied in an e-mail.
"It would be premature to discuss any details about the pending contract with DHS and I will be happy to do an interview once the contract is in place," Ioffe, of Northam Psychotechnologies, wrote in an e-mail.
Mark Root, a spokesman for ManTech, deferred questions to DHS, noting, "They are the customer."

Philip K Dick has long been written off as something of a wacko, by the uneducated and unenlightened, for some of the claims he made during the 1970s, in particular that Russian scientists were testing psychotronic weapons on innocent Americans.

Maybe he was speaking the truth, after all.

The 'War on Terror' is morphing into a war to control our minds and thoughts. It doesn't mean 'psychoecology' will actually work, but the Department of Homeland Security is interested enough to be spending money investigating the possibilities. That in itself should be a cause for concern.

2007-09-20T10:50:00.001+10:00

Greed, Hangings, Murder, Debauchery : History Doesn't Have To Be Boring

Ian Crofton has put together a fabulous book called History Without The Boring Bits. From what we've seen, it certainly lives up to its name.

Here's a few excerpts from the the book, as published in the UK Independent :

1264
16 August – Henry III of England pardoned one Inetta de Balsham, who had been condemned to death for harbouring thieves. She had been hanged, but reportedly survived after three days swinging on the end of the rope.

1473
Attacking the neighbouring Aztec city of Tlatelolco, the army of Axayacatl of Tenochtitlan was surprised to be met by an army of naked women, who sought to distract their enemies by spraying them with milk from their breasts. However, this ruse did not save Tlatelolco, which was sacked, and many of its people sacrificed.

1919
A 12-year-old black boy called Clayton Bates lost his left leg after it was mangled by a conveyor belt in a cotton mill in his native South Carolina. Undeterred, "Peg Leg" Bates had, by the age of 15, become " the undisputed king of one-legged dancers" (according to the Tap Dance Hall of Fame), bringing new life to such steps as the Suzy Q by exploiting the contrast between the metallic tap of his right shoe and the wooden note of his peg leg. He was still pursuing a successful career in vaudeville in the 1960s, and died in 1998. "Life means do the best with what you've got," he used to say.

1946
The Bournemouth Evening Echo carried the following story: "Mrs Irene Graham of Thorpe Avenue, Boscombe, delighted the audience with her reminiscence of the German prisoner of war who was sent each week to do her garden. He was repatriated at the end of 1945, she recalled. 'He'd always seemed a nice friendly chap, but when the crocuses came up in the middle of our lawn in February 1946, they spelt out Heil Hitler.'"

Go Here For More From History Without The Boring Bits

2007-09-19T19:26:00.000+10:00

"The Pornography Of Cruelty" - Cannibal's Home Video Of Slaughter Feast Makes Judge Vomit

You don't need to see the home video shot by 'the Cannibal of Rotenburg' as he encourages his willing victim to mutilate himself. Just reading about it is bad enough.

The video has been described as the "bite-by-bite chronicle of how he amputated, cooked, ate and froze the limbs and organs of a software engineer."

And it gets much much worse. The pathologist, Professor Risse, who examined the remains of the willing victim, describes what he saw in a new book and interviews :

“There was the foot, for example. Meiwes had placed it on a plate, stuck it with a knife and a fork, poured sauce over it and photographed it with the intention of putting the picture on the internet. Then there was the skull, bones, chunks of skeleton and soft organs as well as about 30 sealed packets of meat waiting to be eaten. Other inscriptions were like those you find in a supermarket, you know – mincemeat with sauce.”
It was the home movie that disturbed Professor Risse the most. “A shiver went down my spine, my palms were moist,” he said. “I have been doing this job 20 years, have carried out 5,000 autopsies, seen maybe 30,000 corpses but the cannibal’s film was the most repulsive experience.”
The film was so shocking that one of the judges vomited after she saw it in a closed showing, while the jury was shown only 19 minutes. In one sequence Brandes urges Meiwes to cut off his penis so that they can fry it. At one point, while bleeding heavily, he jokes: “If I’m still alive in the morning, we can eat my balls for breakfast.”
The film shows Brandes on the butcher’s table. It was the pathologist’s task to determine whether he was still alive then. “A decisive question in the trial was whether the victim was still alive when Meiwes applied the final slash to his throat. He was. His heart must have been beating because blood started to bubble strongly out of his throat.”
He added: “The extraordinary thing about this film is that . . . one can follow the suffering and death of the victim step by step. You can see directly how Mr Brandes is responding to the pain of his destruction, you can see when he loses consciousness and how long he clings on to life.”

You couldn't make up something so horrific.