Archive for February 1st, 2008

World's Most Unique Newspapers

From our pal mental_floss blog, who continues to amaze us with neat posts every day, here is a list of 8 Unique Newspapers from around the world. Like this one, for example:

1. Most Extreme Climate:
The Antarctic Sun

The Antarctic Sun serves the scientists and others living and working in Antarctica. Funded by the U.S. National Science Foundation, The Antarctic Sun’s topics cover Antarctic current events, the Clothing Distribution Center in New Zealand, Sir Edmund Hillary’s death, and other topics of concern to Antarctica residents. The 10-year-old newspaper is published once a week each austral summer, from mid-October through early-February, with occasional midwinter special editions. All the past issues are available in PDF form on the Sun’s site.

Link (Part of their "Countdown" – don’t miss the 9 Bizarre but Entertaining Card Games) – Thanks Adam Fuhrer!

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Scientists Created Sperm from Bone Marrow of a Woman: Man No Longer Needed for Reproduction

No thanks to University of Newcastle scientists, us men are about to be no longer necessary when it comes to human reproduction (Boo, science!)

The University of Newcastle team that has achieved the feat is now applying for permission to turn the bone marrow of a woman into sperm which, if successful, would make the method more practical than with embryonic cells.

It raises the possibility of lesbian couples one day having children who share both their genes as sperm created from the bone marrow of one woman could be used to fertilise an egg from her partner.

Link – via Environmental Graffiti, Thanks Rob Knox!

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The Rarest Things in the World

AOL Money & Finance has a neat list of the Rarest Items in the World. Like this, for instance:

Rarest Wine
One of the rarest bottles of wine ever sold was purchased by Christopher Forbes for a mere £105,000 ($160,000). It was an unmarked green glass bottle with the inscription of "1787 Lafitte Th. J." (now known as Lafite and thought to be owned by Thomas Jefferson), found behind a wall in Paris.

Link – Thanks Pam!

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The Eliphante Art House

Artist Michael Kahn and his wife Leda Livant built their home Eliphante from found materials. Twenty eight years later, it’s literally a sculpture that they live in:

ANY fool can hire an architect to draw up a plan for a house, but it takes a truly inspired fool — which is to say, an artist — to start building and see where the earth and driftwood and shards of broken pottery take him, and an equally impassioned fool — say, a woman in love — to go along and carry the rocks on her back.

This is how it was with the little-known sculptural home that is Eliphante, three acres of fantastical domes, shacks and follies created over 28 years by Michael Kahn and his wife, Leda Livant. Here there is the residence, which has 25-foot ceilings and incorporates rocks and scraps from construction sites; there, a studio, one wall of which is the Ford pickup that brought the couple west; and a labyrinthine art gallery called Pipedreams, in which every painting has its own environment.

The building that gave the compound its name has a long, trunklike entrance made of rock and an irregularly mounded roof. “Aaah, Ella-fahn-tay,” a friend joked soon after it was built, giving it a playful faux-French pronunciation.

A neat article at the New York Times by Joyce Wadler on this fascinating house: Link (Photo: David Kadlubowski) – Thanks Preston Pittman!

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Scientists Discovered How Starlings Stay in Formation, Want to Use it to Create a Swarm of Robots

Scientists have discovered how thousands of starling birds can fly in formation without colliding with each other.

Naturally, they’re now applying what they’ve learned to make … swarms of robots:

… it turns out that the secret is for each bird to track seven others, says the first detailed direct observations to have been reported by STARFLAG – Starlings in Flight – a European project involving biologists, physicists, and economists. [...]

The team also concludes that the birds are smarter than was thought. “An interaction based upon the number of neighbours, rather than their distance, implies rather complex cognitive capabilities in birds,” adds Irene Giardina, a fellow researcher, of the Centre for Statistical Mechanics and Complexity in Rome.

Link – via Environmental Graffiti, thanks Chris Ingham Brooke!

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The Great Pacific Garbage Patch: Floating Heap of Debris Twice the Size of Texas!

In the middle of the Pacific Ocean, somewhere between San Francisco and Hawaii, there is a floating heap of debris the size of a continent!

In reality, the rogue bag would float into a sewer, follow the storm drain to the ocean, then make its way to the so-called Great Pacific Garbage Patch – a heap of debris floating in the Pacific that’s twice the size of Texas, according to marine biologists.

The enormous stew of trash – which consists of 80 percent plastics and weighs some 3.5 million tons, say oceanographers – floats where few people ever travel, in a no-man’s land between San Francisco and Hawaii.

Marcus Eriksen, director of research and education at the Algalita Marine Research Foundation in Long Beach, said his group has been monitoring the Garbage Patch for 10 years.

"With the winds blowing in and the currents in the gyre going circular, it’s the perfect environment for trapping," Eriksen said. "There’s nothing we can do about it now, except do no more harm."

The patch has been growing, along with ocean debris worldwide, tenfold every decade since the 1950s, said Chris Parry, public education program manager with the California Coastal Commission in San Francisco.

Link – Thanks Aar000n! (Photo: Kat Wade / Chronicle)

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Geeky Phones of Yore

Love, love, love this Pac-Man phone! Incidentally, it was the first phone sold by the Bell System with an push button dial.

Just 1 of 6 Vintage Geek: Weird Phone slideshow at geeksugar – Thanks Angelica!

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Crumbling Paper: Scans of Old Comic Strips

Steven Stwalley of Stwallskull blog wrote to tell us about his Crumbling Paper project, where he scanned comic strips from the dawn of modern comic strip era (many comics are over 100 years old and have not been reprinted in any form since their initial publication)

The one above is the wonderful big-headed cartoon of Lulu and Leander by F.M. Howarth (full size here), published in the Chicago Examiner and American on August 19, 1906.

Links: Crumbling Project | Index of all cartoons and cartoonists scanned – Thanks Steven, what a wonderful idea!

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Naked Mole Rat is Impervious to Acid and Feels No Pain

Photo: Rochelle Buffenstein / City College of New York

Quick: what is the toughest animal on earth? I mean the one that can withstand the most pain inflicted by burning acid without flinching. Did you think of a gorilla? A lion maybe? Or perhaps a charging bull?

Well, you’d be wrong: it is the naked mole rat. Here’s why:

"They’re the nicest, sweetest animals I’ve ever worked with — they look frightening, but they’re very gentle," said neurobiologist Thomas Park at the University of Illinois at Chicago. [...]

As vulnerable as naked mole rats seem, researchers now find the hairless, bucktoothed rodents are invulnerable to the pain of acid and
the sting of chili peppers.

Why are they so impervious to acid?

Scientists theorize naked mole rats evolved this insensitivity to acid due to underground living. The rodents exhale high levels of carbon dioxide, and in such tight, poorly ventilated spaces it builds up in tissues, making them more acidic. In response, the mole rats became desensitized to acid.

"To give you an idea of what they experience, we normally all breathe in carbon dioxide levels of less than 0.1 percent. If people are exposed to an air mixture with as low as 5 percent carbon dioxide, we’ll feel a sharp, burning, stinging sensation in our eyes and nose," Park said. "We hypothesize that naked mole rats live in up to 10 percent carbon dioxide."

This work may help lead to better understanding and treatment of chronic pain in human: Link – via Politicontrabajista

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Rules for Teachers

Teaching has never been an easy profession, but at least most teachers don’t have to start the fire in this century! That was probably a dangerous task while wearing two petticoats. Link -via Phil’s Phun

Then I found these rules from 1872 at the Rusk County Historical Society Museum. Among them:

4. Men teachers may take one evening each week for courting purposes, or two evenings a week if they go to church regularly.
5. After ten hours on school, the teachers may spend the remaining time reading the bible or other good books.
6. Women teachers who marry or engage in unseemly conduct will be dismissed.
7. Every teacher should lay aside from each pay a goodly stime of his earnings for his benefit during his declining years so that he will not become a burden on society.

In other words, live your life exactly as we tell you to, but don’t expect a pension. Link

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	BuckyBalls Magnetic Toys are 216 rare earth magnet balls that can be shaped and molded into virtually any shape. Tear 'em apart and snap 'em back together in unlimited ways for hours of fun! Watch the video for a quick demo of what BuckyBalls can do. Remember to get two for twice the fun! Link
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Man Grows New Jaw from Stem Cells

A 65-year-old Finnish man received a new upper jaw that was grown in his abdomen using his own stem cells. Scientists had isolated stem cells from the patient’s fat, and sorted out the type of cells that could grow into bone tissue. The cells were applied to a custom jaw-shaped scaffold and implanted in his abdomen for nine months. Tissues grew around the scaffolding, which was removed and attached to the man’s skull to replace his upper jaw, which had been removed due to a tumor.

“There have been a couple of similar-sounding procedures before, but these didn’t use the patient’s own stem cells that were first cultured and expanded in laboratory and differentiated into bone tissue,” said Riitta Suuronen of the Regea Institute of Regenerative Medicine, part of the University of Tampere.

She told a news conference the patient was recovering more quickly than he would have if he had received a bone graft from his leg.

“From the outside nobody would be able to tell he has been through such a procedure,” she said.

Growing custom parts from a patient’s own stem cells not only bypasses the shortage of organs, but also eliminates the risk of tissue rejection. Link -via Metafilter

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Moon, Fish, Ocean is the New Zen Version of Rock, Paper, Scissor

Craig Conley has facilitated the reincarnation of the game of Rock, Paper, Scissors into the zen version: "Moon, Fish, Ocean."

Zen disciples play Moon * Fish * Ocean as a form of mindful meditation, or to determine who will chop wood and who will carry water.

Hey, that’s my preferred method of determining who does the dishes!

Link (you can even play online) – Thanks Craig!

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Quote: Oscar Wilde on Sincerity

"A little sincerity is a dangerous thing, and a great deal of it is absolutely fatal."

– Oscar Wilde, poet (1854 – 1900)

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Processing Music Videos by Robert Hodgin

Remember the old trippy display of Windows Media Player? Well, these videos by Robert Hodgin of Flight 404 are like that but infinitely better.

I’m going to show you two of my favorites:

These videos were made with open-source software Processing, with audio from The Flashbulb – Thanks KM Alexander!

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10 Strange Versions of Soccer

Haha.nu has a neat post about 10 "alternatives" to the good ol’ sport of soccer (that’s football to the rest of the world). This one to the left is Ice Soccer:

ICE SOCCER™, offered by Taylor Sports, L.L.C., is a totally new team sport designed for competitive play on indoor ice hockey arenas (or outdoor ice surfaces of comparable size). It is a perfect sport for growth from middle and high-school play to college intramural competition and, ultimately, into franchised, professional league play.

I wonder if they brawl just like hockey players do … Anyhoo, check out the top 10 list: Link – Thanks haha.nu!

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Erosion and Flood Control Map Symbols

By golly! (gully?) If you’ve ever come across an old terrain map and wondered what those squiggly lines mean, here’s the answer:

Dams, bulkheads, arches, ditches, flumes, outlet spreaders, outlet baffles, revetments, riprap, fence, gullies, borings, test pits, siphons, retaining walls, culverts, inlet transitions, jump structure, overfall, tree plantings, sheet erosion plantings, streams, lakes, terraces, ground water, water seepage, water limits, drains, percolators … the language of erosion and flood control in 1930s America.

The above symbols are selected from five pages (full PDF) in Symbols and Instructions for Maps and Plans, a book compiled and published by the U.S. Department of the Interior Office of Indian Affairs in 1941.

Making Maps blog by John Krygier, author and Associate Professor of Geography at Ohio Wesleyan University, has more: Link – Thanks Marilyn Terrell!

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The Skate Study House

The Skate Study House is an art project by Gil Le Bon de Lapointe and Pierre-André Senizergues. The two skateboarding enthusiasts created furnitures in the style of mid-century modern classics found in Eames’ Case Study Houses … out of skateboards.

Link [with auto-start music]- Thanks wrongdistance!

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The Amazing Adventures of Little Batman

Joe Valenti of Valenti Vision Films created The Amazing Adventures of Little Batman, starring little kids (with great costumes and tons of great props – where did he get that awesome Batmobile?).

Based on the 1966 Batman TV series, a very young Bruce Wayne takes on the famous, pint-sized villains of Gotham City. Directed, shot and edited by Joe Valenti of Valenti Vision Films and Produced by Jordan Wachtell. In Part 1, the Dynamic duo discover Gotham’s latest jailbreak. In Part 2, the Dynamic duo discover the secret hideout of the criminals and duke it out. In Part 3, the Dynamic duo are about to be finished off …

Here are the cutest Batman film EVAR! Thanks dd!

Part I: YouTube Link (9 min 47 sec)

Part II: YouTube Link (7 min 15 sec)

Part III: YouTube Link (8 min 45 sec)

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Government Rewarded Water Conservators by ... Raising Water Rates!

We’ve all been told how important it is to conserve water. But municipalities in the Greater Toronto Area are find out the inconvenient truth about water conservation: the high cost of using less water.

Asked about declining water consumption, [Durham Region's works czar Cliff Curtis] told the Star: "Conservation is killing us."

Realizing what he’d just said, Curtis smiled broadly and quickly added that there were, of course, a thousand reasons to conserve.

But one thing is certain: Conservation is putting cash-strapped municipalities in a bit of a pickle.

So, what do local governments do when their campaigns of asking their citizens to use less water are actually working? They raised the water rates:

Peel Region treasurer Dan Labrecque estimates his region has lost $7 million to so-called "revenue or billable flows shortfall." The need to make up for that lost money accounts for nearly half of Peel’s proposed 16 per cent water rate hike (expected to be phased in at 12.5 per cent). [...]

"It’s ironic," chuckled Mississauga Councillor George Carlson, chair of the city’s environment committee, speaking of the success of the water-conservation message. The payoff for cleaning up our act may be that we end up paying more.

Link – Thanks Dougall!

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Trivia: Why King James II of Scotland Banned Golf in 1457

King James II of Scotland banned golf in 1457 because it was distracting his soldiers from practicing archery.

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Fascinating animation explaining HIV replication

Here is an excellent five minute animated video demonstrating how HIV infects cells and replicates, an amazingly complex process. The video also quickly demonstrates how anti-retroviral drugs impede the process. [YouTube]

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Lions: Just Big Housecats?

(Daily Motion link)
How similar are housecats and lions? In this TV clip from Japan Probe, you can see how lions play with cat toys, fall under the spell of catnip, learn to open a door, and deal with mirrors. Link -via Arbroath

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New Elephant Shrew

Scientists report that a new species of animal has been found in Tanzania. Rhynochocyon udzungwensis {wiki} is a type of giant elephant shrew, also called a sengi. The species was first observed on film in 2005, and specimens were collected in 2006. The animal is not a shrew, but is closely related to a group of African mammals which include elephants, sea cows, aardvarks and hyraxes.

“This is one of the most exciting discoveries of my career,” said Galen Rathbun, from the California Academy of Sciences, who helped to confirm the animal was new to science along with an international team of colleagues.

It is the first new species of elephant shrew discovered in 126 years. The BBC described it as looking like “ a cross between a miniature antelope and a small anteater.” Link -via the Presurfer

Update 2/1/08 by Alex – Conservation International has the photo gallery (and later in the week, a chat with one of the members of the expedition team) – Thanks Lindsay Walter-Cox!

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Light Emitting Pegboard Display

The folks at Evil Mad Scientist Laboratories made their own LED pegboard and named it Peggy. You can change the design or message any time you like without rewiring it, and you can program individual lights to go on and off. You can make your own with a kit and some downloadable instructions. Link

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Rip Someone's Heart Out

Indy Mogul has posted two Instructables on grisly special effects for film that you can do yourself, How To Rip a Heart Out of Someones Chest (a la Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom), and a Decapitation Effect. With videos. These could be handy for Halloween, too! Link to heart effect. Link to head affect.

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