As a child, Nathaniel Bowditch (1773-1838) of Salem, Massachusetts was a prodigy in multiple subjects. He taught himself Greek, Latin, Spanish, German, and French. At the age of 16, he found an error in Sir Isaac Newton’s Principia. He surveyed his hometown and designed his own barometer.
At the age of 21, Bowditch went to sea and put his fantastic mind to work at the task of celestial navigation. He was so superbly skilled at determining the precise location of his ships that he literally rewrote the book on the subject. The classic text The Practical Navigator became The New American Practical Navigator.
During its 10-year run starting in 1978, The Love Boat was noted for its vast array of guest stars posing as guests on the cruise ship Pacific Princess. Each episode began with a rundown of those guest stars, many of whom are still famous and worth seeing cruising.
If there was any disappointment with The Love Boat, it’s that it didn’t push the envelope with its choice of guest stars. The blog Love Boat Insanity imagines who else might have ended up on the Pacific Princess if the directors had been a bit more daring and the show had lasted longer.
Need to pass a kidney stone? Slip away with your spouse for a couple hours and you can greatly improve your chances. The authors of a study recently published in the medical journal Urology conducted an experiment with 3 study groups of kidney stone patients. The first group was asked to have sexual intercourse 3-4 times a week. The second group was given the drug tamsulosin. The third group was a control group.
General anesthesia can be dangerous to young children--especially babies. So sometimes surgery on infants is done with local anesthesia or just sedation. That became a problem for one baby in Shenzhen, China. He began crying and squirming during an operation. To calm him, a nurse picked him up and began breastfeeding him. This soothed him enough that the surgeon could complete the operation. Shanghaiist reports:
According to Sina, the nurse named Li Baoxia didn't hesitate for a moment to help the crying baby. After drinking, the infant quietly lay down in the nurse's arm and the surgeons were able to complete the operation. Everyone present remarked that it was an incredibly moving experience.
After the surgery was completed successfully, the baby's father came to thank Li. "Thank you! You didn't only treat my child, you also nursed him!" he said. "As a father, you have my endless gratitude. You are an angel nurse!"
These two Basset Hounds from Jennie Hibbert's Maple Street Bassets start out at the same tempo, but alternating beats. They gradually blend their rhythms until they're wagging their tails synchronously. They look like two furiously fast-paced orchestra conductors.
Now no one is proposing that you do this on your own at home. Forget those DIY videos on YouTube. Fecal transplants are a task that you should leave to professionals. Fortunately, there's a such a thriving market for top-shelf poop (and the precious bacteria in them) that you can make money at poop banks. You can receive fecal transplants orally now and even receive donations from your spouse.
But there's no poop like your own. That's why some doctors are suggesting that patients bank their own poop so that when they need a fecal bacteria transplant, they've got their very own immediately available. Jesse Jacobs writes for the New York Times:
The scientific term for this is “autologous fecal transplant.” In theory, it could work like a system reboot disk works for your computer. You’d freeze your feces, which are roughly half microbes, and when your microbiome became corrupted or was depleted with antimicrobials, you could “reinstall” it from a backup copy. […]
As currently practiced, however, the transplant material usually comes from someone else. Even with careful screening, that presents some risk. It’s theoretically safer to receive one’s own microbes. North York General Hospital in Toronto recently completed a pilot study banking incoming patients’ own stool. Should any of these patients develop infections after antibiotics, their own microbes were on hand for reconstitution.
None fell sick in this case, so the transplants weren’t needed. But the project proved feasibility, and achieved a processing time — gathering, blending and freezing — of less than one hour.
Karen Dolley, 43, of Indianapolis woke up in the middle of the night to find a strange man in her bedroom. She's a member of the Society for Creative Anachronism--an organization that, among other things, practices medieval martial arts. She knows how to hurt people the good, old-fashioned way.
She immediately began punching him, landing about 10 blows and sending him reeling back into a corner of the room. Then she reached into a nightstand drawer for her gun. But, in the confusion of the encounter, she couldn't find it.
So Dolley reached for her backup weapon: a ninja sword. With her ninjato, she held the intruder at sword-point until police arrived to arrest him.
Dolley would don armor and engage in unchoreographed fights using rattan swords, which are safer than steel. She fought against men who stood taller than 6 feet and had 20 years experience.
In the beginning, her opponents could guess her moves because she was afraid she was going to hurt someone, she said, so an early lesson was to move confidently and aggressively after someone.
Now Dolley is using those lessons to help in roller derby, where she's a new recruit known as Foul Morguean with Naptown Roller Girls.
The lessons helped during Thursday’s break-in too, she said.
“I definitely don’t need to work on my aggression, I guess,” Dolley said.
(Photo of a real wedding in Argentina by Hamner_Fotos)
It can be fun to go to a wedding. But in Argentina, marriage is becoming increasingly unpopular among young people. They just aren't getting married, so they're not having weddings.
The solution for the threatened wedding industry and people who enjoy attending weddings is to conduct elaborate, dramatic weddings with actors. The Guardian reports:
“It all started two years ago with a group of friends: we realized we hadn’t been to a wedding in a long time because hardly anybody is getting married anymore,” says 26-year-old publicist Martín Acerbi. Together with four friends from the university town of La Plata, 32 miles (50km) south of the capital city of Buenos Aires, Acerbi decided to organize a fake wedding instead.
To their surprise the event was a roaring success, and the one-off wedding became a business: Acerbi and his friends founded the Falsa Boda company in November 2013 – and have had steady work ever since.
The company hires real wedding locations, caterers and DJs for the parties, Acerbi said. “These wedding professionals have become our strategic allies, we organize it like it’s the real thing, except the marriage itself is fake,” he said.
Hired actors play the bride, groom and a surprise third party: a spurned lover or secret boyfriend who arrives “unexpectedly” – and with dramatic results.
Because they're scripted plays conducted by actors, people who attend these wedding parties can expect high drama:
The groom fingers his collar as he waits nervously before the justice of the peace. The bride is radiant in virginal white. As she makes her way down the aisle, some guests – overcome with emotion – dab tears from their eyes.
But before the couple can exchange their vows, a voice cries out and a man steps forward, proclaiming his love for the groom.
The bride flees in tears and – rather than let the ceremony go to waste – the two men get married instead.
The Sponge Suit is made of an absorbent material that fits inside a 3D printed shell. The fabric absorbs pollutants in the water and seals them away from the skin. It releases the contaminants only when subjected to extreme heat. The designers explain how it works:
This material has multi-model porosity (micro/mezzo/macro porous) that allows it to be a light yet strong absorber with its undulating texture (visible through Electron Microscope). Absorbing everything but water, the material is a powerful tool for water and contaminant separation. The super-porous nature allows the Sponge to absorb in high capacity, up to 25 times of its own weight depending on the density of the substance absorbed. The Sponge does not release the absorbed materials unless it is heated in high temperatures (1,000 degrees Celsius) to re-obtain its original liquid form. This property allows the Sponge to be recyclable as the liquid form is ready to be reshaped having been separated from its contaminants.
Michael Long sets up a bowling trick that is impossible--right up until the end when it works perfectly.
He sets two pins in the middle of the lane. Then he spins a bowling ball and sets it slowly moving forward. Meanwhile, he knocks over all but two pins with a second bowling ball.
The spinning ball slowly moves down the lane, weaving in between the pins set in the middle. Then it knocks over the two remaining pins at the end. Amazing!
I can't find much information about Nizar Ali Badr. He is a Syrian artist from the port city of Latakia and may or may not still be in that country. He makes sculptures by arranging stones into scenes, often tender or gut-wrenching images of family life. They are simple and minimalist, but are also sharp narratives that are easily read. You can find more photos of his work at Kedistan (translation).
Kerry Hughes, an artist in London, recently experimented with balloon art in a short series called Pneumatic Anatomy. Floating balloons would make good organ replacements, don't you think? They're colorful and cheap.
It's called "The Story of Sarah & Juan." The couple meets in high school. Whenever they need to break the ice between them a bit, a stick of gum moves the conversation forward. Singer Haley Reinhart performs a cover of "Can't Help Falling in Love with You," an old love song made famous by Elvis Presley. The agency Energy BBDO and the production company Rattling Stick use the song and the two actors to weave a tight but tender love story in just 2 minutes.
The cells of older and larger animals divide more times than those of smaller and younger animals. So, hypothetically, large animals that live a long time should be at greater risk for developing cancer. Ewen Callaway describes in Scientific American the paradox developed by epidemiologist Richard Peto:
Peto noted that, in general, there is little relationship between cancer rates and the body size or age of animals. That is surprising: the cells of large-bodied or older animals should have divided many more times than those of smaller or younger ones, so should possess more random mutations predisposing them to cancer. Peto speculated that there might be an intrinsic biological mechanism that protects cells from cancer as they age and expand.
It is very rare for the notably large and long-lived elephants to have cancer. Why? Two scientific papers that were recently and independently published explain that elephants have multiple copies of a cancer-fighting gene:
Elephants have 20 copies of a gene called p53 (or, more properly, TP53), in their genome, where humans and other mammals have only one. The gene is known as a tumour suppressor, and it snaps to action when cells suffer DNA damage, churning out copies of its associated p53 protein and either repairing the damage or killing off the cell.
What movie could you watch over and over again without getting bored? For Walt Hickey of the statistics blog FiveThirtyEight, it's the 2009 film Star Trek. But that's just his personal taste. He conducted an online poll asking people to name the most rewatchable films of all time. Here are the top 10:
I certainly agree with the #1 pick. Star Wars never really gets old--especially Episode IV. I am a bit surprised with Gone with the Wind, though. Is it really that compelling?
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