Wanna know the secret of raven relationships? It's "never go to the nest angry."
A study by Orlaith Fraser of the University of Vienna in Austria revealed that a pair of ravens that got into a fight with one another reconcile later:
Plenty of primates and other mammals reconcile after a conflict, but previously no birds were known to do so, says Orlaith Fraser of the University of Vienna in Austria.
Monitoring a group of seven captive ravens (Corvus corax), Fraser and colleague Thomas Bugnyar found that pairs of birds were likely to be more friendly to each other if they had fought each other in the previous 10 minutes.
"It wasn't just standard friendly behaviour," Fraser says. Rather the ravens sat touching each other, and sometimes touched their beaks together or preened each other. Ravens are not tactile like primates, so sitting in contact is a strong social signal.
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No stranger to controversy and publicity stunts, PETA is back - and this time, the animal rights group is putting money where its mouth is: PETA is offering a $1 million reward to the first scientist to produce and bring to market lab-grown meat.
Scientists around the world are researching or seeking the funds to research ways to produce meat in the laboratory—without killing any animals. In vitro meat production would use animal stem cells that would be placed in a medium to grow and reproduce. The result would mimic flesh and could be cooked and eaten. Some promising steps have been made toward this technology, but we're still several years away from having in vitro meat be available to the general public.
PETA is now stepping in and offering a $1 million reward to the first scientist to produce and bring to market in vitro meat.
Would you eat lab-grown meat? Link
Remember the very cheap Wolverine costume we featured before on Neatorama? Well, its creator Vó Maria is back, this time with DIY Magneto Helmet: Link
On April 3rd, 1973, 38 years ago today, Martin Cooper made a phone call while walking down the street in New York City. At the time, he was the general manager of Motorola's communications division. He had promoted the idea that phone numbers shouldn't be tethered to a place, but to people. And they should be able to take their phones with them, anywhere they went.
Cooper, now 82 years old, still works in communications. And he carries his cell phone with him everywhere -but not the 1973 model. Link -via reddit
When Martin Cooper made that first cell phone call, he did not make it to another cell phone. People didn't have them yet -- who could he call?
No, he made the cell phone call to a land line -- specifically, to the land line of his chief competitor at Bell Labs. Motorola had beaten Bell to become the first company to make personal cell phones work. Cooper, you might say, rubbed it in. Think how the Bell Labs research engineer must have felt when he heard Cooper calling him from the noisy streets of Manhattan.
That first cell phone was so big that it was often described as resembling a shoe, or a brick. It weighed 2½ pounds. Cooper would joke to friends and colleagues that the calls from that phone would have to be short in duration: Who had the strength to hold it to an ear for very long?
Cooper, now 82 years old, still works in communications. And he carries his cell phone with him everywhere -but not the 1973 model. Link -via reddit
(Video Link)
If you'd like to hear stories about the dark side of humanity -- or just the stupid side -- talk to ER nurses. Oh, the tales that they can tell! Here's a comparatively mild example. Shawn needed to get a tiny hat to stay on his head. It was, of course, too small to stay on by itself. Did he acquire a larger hat? No. He used superglue to get the hat to stick. The next day, after the fancy dress party, he realized that he may have acted hastily and reported to the local hospital for assistance. This clip from a BBC Three program showed how the hospital staff tried to solve the problem. To Shawn's credit, he's a good sport about it.
via Ace of Spades HQ
What determined the length of the audio CD developed by Sony? It was based on the length of the longest recording of Beethoven's Ninth Symphony. Tyler Cowen quotes from Tim Büthe and Walter Mattli's book The New Global Rulers: The Privatization of Regulation in the World Economy:
Amazon Link via Marginal Revolution | Photo by Flickr user Leo-setä used under Creative Commons license
Sony had initially preferred a smaller diameter, but soon after the beginning of the collaboration started to argue vehemently for a diameter of 120mm. Sony’s argument was simple and compelling: to maximize the consumer appear of a switch to the new technology, any major piece of music needed to fit on a single CD…Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony was quickly identified as the point of reference — according to some accounts, it was the favorite piece of Sony vice-president Norio Ohga’s wife. And thorough research identified the 1951 recording by the orchestra of the Bayreuther Festspiele under Wilhelm Furtwängler, at seventy-four minutes, as the slowest performance of the Ninth Symphony on record. And so, according to the official history, Sony and Philips top executives agreed in their May 1980 meeting that “a diameter of 12 centimeters was required for this playing time.”
Amazon Link via Marginal Revolution | Photo by Flickr user Leo-setä used under Creative Commons license
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YouTube user GatheringSticks is quite a garage machinist! He's built a functional single-shot 12 gauge shotgun from a pipe and a stapler. The firing pin is a sharpened drill bit and the shoulder rest is padded with a piece of a Croc.
via Everyday, No Days Off
In 2008, Sandra Critelli shot this excellent photo of Golden Rays off the Mexican coast:
She said: "It was an unreal image, very difficult to describe. The surface of the water was covered by warm and different shades of gold and looked like a bed of autumn leaves gently moved by the wind.
"It's hard to say exactly how many there were but in the range of a few thousand.
"We were surrounded by them without seeing the edge of the school and we could see many under the water surface too.
Golden Rays grow up to seven feet across and migrate within the Caribbean.
Photo Link and Article Link via reddit
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YouTube user thearchipelago went frog gigging and brought back these three whoppers. When he adds salt to the raw meat, they start twitching wildly. Why does this happen? Marshall Brain of How Stuff Works explains:
Because these are fresh frog legs, the cells inside them are all still intact. The biochemical machinery still functions. There is still a source of energy for the muscles in the form of unused ATP molecules stored in the cells. All that the muscles need is something to activate them and they can still contract and relax (until they run out of ATP or something else shuts down the biochemical machinery).
http://blogs.howstuffworks.com/2009/12/21/how-twitching-frog-legs-work-a-little-gross-yes-but-fascinating/ via Geekosystem
Australian Steve Clibborn had just about given up any hope that his champion horse Diamond Mojo would survive a bout of colic. As a last, desperate move, he resorted to old bush wisdom about feeding horses beer. It worked:
That's the right approach: whiskey for my men and beer for my horses.
Link via Jammie Wearing Fool | Photo: Adam Head/Courier-Mail
"I had pretty much kissed him goodbye," he said.
"I had spent 23 hours straight with him but nothing worked and then I remembered an old bush tale that said you could feed them beer.
"I don't know whether I really believed it or not but it was worth a shot and as soon as he had that beer, he burped and perked right up. So I gave him another couple."
Over the following days, Steve repeated the dose using Queensland's own XXXX lager until his prized endurance horse rediscovered his mojo.
That's the right approach: whiskey for my men and beer for my horses.
Link via Jammie Wearing Fool | Photo: Adam Head/Courier-Mail
Hipsters may consider dogboarding to be way cooler than horseboarding, but both pale in comparizon to "spider-boarding" - a technique that has been used by mantidfly larvae for millions of years.
The larvae of most mantidfly species are fussy diners – they only eat the eggs of spiders. That seems like a dangerous enough strategy, for spiders are formidable hunters. But it gets crazier – some mantidflies find spider egg sacs by hitching a ride on the backs of adults... The “spider-boarders” can’t chew through the egg sacs. Instead, they ensure that they get inside the sac as it is being built. They climb aboard passing females, wrapping themselves around the base of their abdomens so they can’t be caught.
The photo above, by Michael Ohl of Berlin's Museum of Natural History, shows a spider embedded in a 44 million year old piece of amber. "And there, latched onto its underside just as its modern relatives do, is a mantidfly larva... it’s facing to the right and you can clearly see the three legs on its right side."
Additional details (and a photo of an adult mantid-like mantidfly) available at Not Exactly Rocket Science.
Link.
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Be sure to check out all crazy Apparel & Accessories available at the NeatoShop!
Kelly Angood has created this screen-printed cardboard Hasselblad lookalike. It's a fully functional 35mm pinhole camera. You can make your own from the A4 sized, 8 page PDF available at the artist's site and when you're done you can post the images you produce on her blog.
http://www.kellyangood.co.uk/ - Via Notcot
http://www.kellyangood.co.uk/ - Via Notcot
