Scientists on a research trip in the North Pacific got a treat: they sighted a white killer whale!
Holly Fearnbach, a research biologist at NOAA’s National Marine Mammal Laboratory in Seattle, was able to photograph the whale’s white fin and back. “With hundreds of killer whales documented around the Aleutian Islands, this was equivalent to finding a needle in a haystack,” she said.
Captain Ahab not avaible for a comment: Link
So, think you can take on Yo Yo Ma, hotshot? Well, take this Cello Challenge from Berliner Philharmoniker and see how you stack up.
The Flash game is quite simple: it's you vs. Camille Saint-Saëns (um, despite the first name, Camille is a guy, okay? How to pronounce his name is different matter entirely).
Take the bow with your mouse, and move it in rhythm of the music - if you do it wrong, you'll hear it ...
http://philharmoniker.web-feedback.de/index.asp [Flash] - via MonkeyFilter
"Too bad the only people who know how to run the country are busy driving cabs and cutting hair."
- George Burns, comedian (1896-1996)
To help celebrate sandwich shop Erbert and Gerbert celebrate their 20 year of making "subs worth discovering," Dustin Black and friends built this amazing contraption: Candle Cannon, the world's most powerful air vortex cannon. Why? To blow the birthday candles, of course!
Check it out: Hit play or go to Link [YouTube] | CandleCannon website - Thanks Adam and Dustin!
Null Hypothesis: The Journal of Unlikely Science has a neat compilation of 10 of the most unscientific urban legends. Like this one of when Alabama tried to redefine the value of pi, for example:
The story goes that state of Alabama tried to redefine the value of pi to be exactly three – a far more precise and biblical number. You can’t have constants, such as pi, running around with infinite numbers of decimals after all – it’s far too untidy.
According to the Bible, King Solomon made a bowl that was 10 cubits from rim to rim and 30 cubits in circumference, which would seem to indicate that the value of pi is in fact exactly three. Surely the Bible knows what it’s talking about? Although we should probably ignore the fact that this biblical item was not a pure mathematical shape but a solid object with a thick rim to confuse calculations. Anyway the important thing is that in Alabama, the ratio of the circumference of a circle to its diameter has now been returned to its proper value.
Well, no not really. But it was a rather funny report from Mark Boslough on April Fool’s day 1998. The story later mutated and spread across the Internet. Part of its appeal might be the element of truth – in 1897 the Indiana House of Representatives unanimously passed a bill stating that ‘a circular area is to the square on a line equal to the quadrant of the circumference, as the area of an equilateral rectangle is to the square of one side’; fortunately the Senate decided to postpone the act indefinitely (probably because it made absolutely no sense - Ed). Thus pi to this day remains an extremely irritating and untidy number.
Check out the whole list: Link - Thanks Jon Jason!
New Scientist has a very interesting article on Dr. James Barry, a pioneering military surgeon and Inspector General of Military Hospitals in Canada in the early 1800s. Barry was medical reformer who fought for better food, sanitation, and proper medical care for soldiers, civilians, prisoners and lepers (He once won a duel to get a leper colony built.)
Funny thing was: there was no such man as Dr. James Barry - "he" was actually a "she" and her name was Margaret Ann Bulkley:
The flaw in the scheme was that no British medical school admitted women. If Margaret was to qualify as a doctor, she would have to masquerade as a boy for three whole years.
The disappearance of Margaret Bulkley and the appearance of a young medical student called James Barry was carefully orchestrated. The Bulkleys were unknown in Scotland, so they planned to establish themselves there as aunt and nephew. Du Preez discovered that they traveled to Edinburgh by sea, rather than stagecoach. Newly enrolled at university, the freshly minted "James Barry" wrote to Reardon: "It was very usefull for Mrs Bulkley (my aunt) to have a Gentleman to take care of her on Board Ship and to have one in a strange country." This indicates precisely when the metamorphosis of Margaret took place, says du Preez. She must have had to board the ship already dressed as a boy, or risk shipboard rumours following them to Edinburgh.
To protect Margaret's secret, the pair cut themselves off from friends and family. Only the conspirators knew who they were and where they were. From now on, Margaret kept herself to herself, always wore an overcoat and lied about her age to avoid questions about her smooth chin and high voice.
Scott McLeod of Dangerously Irrelevant blog wrote to us about his post, titled "Out of Control K-12 Classrooms," secretly (or not so-secretly) taped by student cell phone cameras.
Scott asks:
Do we want students bringing to public attention these types of classroom incidents? Should students be punished or applauded for filming and posting these?
//In the first clip on the post, I can't help but actually symphatize with the teacher. The YouTube clip was titled "Classroom Hot Head," but I think the teacher handled the situation very well. Seems like kids today have very little respect for their teachers.
That's an old shoe-fitting x-ray machine, which was a popular gimmick in shoe stores in the late 1940s and early 1950s. The machine went the way of the dodo bird when it was discovered that the hazards from x-ray radiation weren't worth the proper fit of shoes:
The primary component of a shoe-fitting x-ray unit was the fluoroscope which consisted essentially of an x-ray tube mounted near the floor and wholly or partially enclosed in a shielded box and a fluorescent screen. The x-rays penetrated the shoes and feet and then struck the fluorescent light. This resulted in an image of the feet within the shoes. The fluorescent image was reflected to three viewing ports at the top of the cabinet, where the customer, the salesperson, and a third person (your mother?) could view the image at the same time.
The radiation hazards associated with shoe fitting x-ray units were recognized as early as 1950. The machines were often out of adjustment and were constructed so radiation leaked into the surrounding area.
This particular unit, however, was in operation in a shoe store in West Virginia as late as 1981: Link - Thanks choggie!
Here's Brian, the dog from Family Guy, singing the world's most famous tune (Come on, admit it, it's a catchy tune!) Hit play or go to Link [YouTube]
It's long been known that girls develop superior language abilities earlier than boys, but until now, no one has any scientific proof.
Now, researchers at Northwestern University and the University of Haifa got the biological proof:
... areas of the brain associated with language work harder in girls than in boys during language tasks, and that boys and girls rely on different parts of the brain when performing these tasks.
"Our findings -- which suggest that language processing is more sensory in boys and more abstract in girls -- could have major implications for teaching children and even provide support for advocates of single sex classrooms," said Douglas D. Burman, research associate in Northwestern's Roxelyn and Richard Pepper Department of Communication Sciences and Disorders.
Previously on Neatorama: Is Single-Sex Education Better Than Coeducation?
Ladies and gentlemen, meet your ancestor - in fact the ancestor of all animal life on Earth - the comb jelly.
Biologist Casey Dunn of Brown University and colleagues used DNA data from various species to determine that the comb jelly (Ctenophore), which emerged some 600 million years ago, is our true ancient ancestor:
Textbook knowledge says that sponges were the first cab off the rank when multicellular life began to diversify. Our study shows comb jellies, which have well-developed tissues and a nervous system, branched off from other animals even before the lowly sponge (which don't have any tissues or nerve cells). This radically changes our understanding of one of the most fundamental steps on the path to modern animals."
If comb jellies branch first, as the new tree shows, then either sponges aren't as primitively simple they seemed (new hypothesis: they could have simplified later) or else comb jellies evolved a complex body plan separately from the rest of us.'
Don't mess with Joe Weston-Webb's business! He's devised what is probably the ultimate anti-burglar system after being targeted by vandalism, break-ins, and even arson:
Every night Joe Weston-Webb loads chicken droppings into a 30ft catapult and primes a cannon that used to fire his wife with a railway sleeper, all in the name of security.
The police aren't amused:
... police have told him he will be prosecuted if he unleashes the wrath of the 30ft-tall Roman catapult - filled with chicken poo collected from a nearby farm - on any yobs he catches on his property.
The businessman has even put up a sign outside his property reading: "WARNING. These premises are protected by Smart Poo and railway sleeper projectiles."
Mr Weston-Webb vowed to ignore the warning - and said his battle highlighted the plight of worried home-owners across the country.
Neuroscientists from UC Berkeley have developed a rudimentary brain scanner that can "read your mind" to tell you what you're looking at:
The scientists used a functional magnetic resonance imaging machine -- a real-time brain scanner -- to record the mental activity of a person looking at thousands of random pictures: people, animals, landscapes, objects, the stuff of everyday visual life. With those recordings the researchers built a computational model for predicting the mental patterns elicited by looking at any other photograph. When tested with neurological readouts generated by a different set of pictures, the decoder passed with flying colors, identifying the images seen with unprecedented accuracy.
http://www.wired.com/science/discoveries/news/2008/03/mri_vision
Suicide is non-existent among the Tiv of Nigeria, the Andaman Islanders, and the Yahgans of Tierra del Fuego.
Suicide is present but very rare among black American females, Irish Catholics, Mexicans, and Muslims in Egypt; Suicides are common in Hungary, Germany, Austria, Czechoslovakia, Japan, and Finland. (Source: Comprehensive Textbook of Suicidology)
Elizabeth Barrett looks like any other 17-month-old babies, with one exception: she can read!
Her mother Katy, a speech pathologist who is married to Michael, another speech pathologist, said that most people don't believe their infant is a reader.
"The joke is that since we see kids with language problems, we think anybody with normal language skills is a genius. But as time goes on, it's harder to deny that she's exceptional," said Katy. [...]
Elizabeth talks like she's 1, but she reads like she's 7.
So what does her doctor think? Dr. Steve Stripling, Elizabeth's pediatrician, says at 14 months he saw her sight read the word avocado. "I was floored", he said.
http://www.koaa.com/wacky_stories/x408978918 (with video) - via Arbroath
