The redneck rapper Krispy Kreme put his Christmas wish list into song. Ya think he's a little obsessed with pro wrestler John Cena? -via The Daily What
Miss Cellania's Blog Posts
Remember the eBay scams where the small print would say "this auction is for the picture of the computer only"? That's what this reminds me of -but I'm sure the original idea was to say "pitcher" of beer. Spotted at Criggo. Link
Simon's Cat tries to catch a squirrel, but he's not the skinny, agile, outdoor cat he thinks he is! Artist Simon Tofield teaches us to draw the squirrel, too. Continue reading for a short tutorial.
The heroic Viewmaster robot takes pity on the cassette tape, because he knows what obsolescence feels like. MIEW produced this video as a tribute to the audiocassette on the occasion if its demise. -via Geeks Are Sexy
The well-known Serbian vampire Sava Savanović lived in a water mill near the village of Zarožje. The Jagodic family bought the mill and turned it into a tourist attraction. However, they neglected to keep the mill in good repair, because they were afraid of disturbing the vampire. Recently, the structure collapsed and fears that Savanović is looking for a new home have locals terrified. The local council advised citizens to guard against vampire attack.
Local mayor Miodrag Vujetic admitted: "People are worried, everybody knows the legend of this vampire and the thought that he is now homeless and looking for somewhere else and possibly other victims is terrifying people. We are all frightened."
He added that it was all very well for people who didn't live in the area to laugh at their fears but he said nobody in the region was in any doubt that vampires do exist.
He confirmed that the local council had advised all villagers to put garlic on their doors and windows to protect them from the vampire as it was well known they can't stand the smell.
He added: "We have also reminded them to put a Holy cross in every room in the house."
Garlic has been selling like hotcakes in Zarožje. Link -via Arbroath
Rcrowley32 is an American living in Belfast with her husband and four children. Every week she takes a picture of their dog Bones dressed up in human clothes and puts it in her kids' lunches to surprise them. The top picture is the school uniform. The second picture was for the day after Thanksgiving, which is a regular school day in Ireland. Redditors are demanding that she now submit a new picture every Friday. Link
Dan Milano, writer, puppeteer, and voice actor for Robot Chicken and Greg the Bunny, made his baby daughter into the Stay Puft Marshmallow Man! Here she is, among the other Ghostbusters characters, recreating the climactic scene from the movie. Link -via Blame It On The Voices
Google has a font generator that looks up each of your letters in its image search and produces them from the results for your words. Not only that, but your results will change every time you do it! Link -via the Presurfer
Before Thanksgiving weekend is over, you should take a minute to be thankful for awful cakes that make us laugh. Cake Wrecks has two, count 'em, two roundups of badly decorated Thanksgiving cakes. Most try to render the image of a turkey, but don't quite make it. I think that's what this cake is supposed to be, but it really reminds me of a snail. And how did they spell Thanksgiving? I'm not sure.
Link
Link to more
This photo is from the Netherlands, dated 1933. The little cutie looks a bit apprehensive, but you know his whole family enjoys ice skating, so he's got to get into the groove sooner or later. Luckily, he has something to fall back on! Link
The Durch choir Dario Fo perform he Skrillex tune "Bangarang." If you're familiar with the song, you may find it astonishing that a choir can recreate the song a cappella at all. They do, and do it well.
Have you ever heard a fox sing? This is more of a trilling chatter, but it is cute because Kevie is cute. -via Daily PIcks and Flicks
On the Mediterranean island of Sardinia, cave tombs were cut into the rocky hills around 5,000 years ago by the Ozieri people. The nickname "house of fairies" is modern nickname; they are officially named Domus de Janas, derived from the Roman goddess Diana. The 2,000 tombs come on all sizes.
Although now mainly used by shepherds as sheep pens, the caves cut into the rock faces of the mountains were once sealed and elaborately adorned with red paint and bulls’ heads, representing male fertility and regeneration. Vague outlines of horns and spirals still remain on the walls of some of the Domus, although the reuse of the tombs for burials into Roman times and the Middles Ages has left few of the original sites undisturbed.
See more pictures, including an interior view, at Atlas Obscura. Link
(Image credit: Wikipedia member Giovanni Seu)
Fifty years ago, Dr. Michael Alpers went to Papua New Guinea to investigate kuru, a horrible sickness that killed many of the native Fore people, and no one knew why. He ended up devoting his life to solving the mystery of the disease. Today, the decades of research by many scientists have added mightily to the body of biological knowledge. Kuru was not spread by bacteria, nor by a virus, nor any distinct species, but by something completely new to the scientific community: prions, indestructable self-propagating proteins that change shape and attack the body. And that was just part of the mystery. How did the Fore people become infected, and why did some contract it while others did not? Could it possibly be spread by the ritual of eating their loved ones who died?
“We made a list, Carleton and I, and there were lots of changes. The introduction of new foods, new animals, the cessation of certain activities. But the one that was biologically the most relevant was the mortuary practices, at least in my view.” A couple of years later, field surveys confirmed the disease had died out in children younger than 10 — which fitted with the kiaps effectively administering new rules of behaviour through the district. The rules were, says Alpers, “No fighting, build roads, no cannibalism, no child marriage, and plant coffee. And they did it.”
When Alpers put his data together for a presentation in Washington in 1967 “the argument for cannibalism — and I don’t use that term anymore, but it was used then — was compelling. Everything fitted. Why did women and children get the disease? Because they were the ones that carried out the practice — the men didn’t. It explained why it was dying out in young children — because the kiaps had proscribed cannibalism. You could also conclude that the disease was not being transmitted vertically from mother to child. No one born since 1960 was coming down with kuru. The penny dropped”.
The humbling lesson for scientists and doctors was that while their labours might have helped solve the puzzle, they had not halted the disease. The honour for the life-saving intervention belonged to the officers, both black and white, who administered the new laws of the land.
And the research into kuru continued, because Alpers wanted to know how the disease began, and why some who were exposed seemed to be immune. And he's just now winding down, by getting all 2,700 of his case files in order. The story of Dr. Alpers' battle against kuru is condensed into a fascinating article at The Global Mall. Link -via Metafilter
(Image courtesy of Michael Alpers)
PS: Neatorama webmaster Alex Santoso got a Ph.D. by researching prions, so he may be able to answer questions that aren't covered by the linked article.
Anna Sumner craved sleep, and therefore figured she must need sleep. She slept more and more from the time she was a teenager until it interfered with her job as a lawyer, sometimes for days at a time. After Sumner was diagnosed with "hypersomnolence," neurologist David Rye of Emory University and his team looked for the cause, but only got a clue from the reactions of different drugs that were prescribed to help her stay awake.
Rye’s group and several others around the world had also noticed that flumazenil had positive effects on some people with hypersomnolence. But in the wake of the scandal, Rye put this line of research on hold. “People got a very bad taste in their mouths,” he says. The general feeling in the field was “we got duped on this one, and that’s not going to happen again.”
But when Anna Sumner came along, Rye’s team at Emory thought it was time to dust off the old theory. In May 2007, they gave her a spinal tap, an invasive procedure that collects cerebrospinal fluid (CSF), the clear substance that’s produced in the middle of the brain and flows down the spinal cord. CSF protects the brain mechanically, by keeping it buoyant, but it’s also chock-full of proteins and chemicals involved in brain-cell communication.
Sumner’s CSF was quantifiably abnormal. It contained a high level of a substance that, like benzodiazepines, activates the chemical messenger GABA. This neurotransmitter acts as a shutdown switch in the brain, dialing down consciousness so we can sleep. Sumner, it seemed, was carrying a bona fide endozepine.
Andy Jenkins, an anesthesiologist at Emory working on Sumner’s case, joked with her that if another woman were carrying around the same amount of GABA-activating sedative, she could practically be operated on. “That’s what I was walking around with on a daily basis,” Sumner says.
Scandal? Yes, researchers thought they'd identified an "endozepine," or naturally-occurring benzodiazepine (drugs used in sleeping pills) produced by the brain before, in a case from Italy in the 1980s. That research was exposed as useless, a turn down the wrong alley, and it only made Rye's newer discovery harder for the scientific community to swallow. Meanwhile, Sumner and other sufferers of hypersomnolence had to pay the price for less-than-rigorous research from decades earlier, as the effective medicine (flumazenil) is not easy to obtain or to administer. After years of rigorous research, Rye and his team still cannot fully identify the chemical compound that caused Sumner's sleepiness, but what they do know has finally been published. Finding the exact brain chemical that causes hypersomnolence may lead to more effective sleeping aids, better help for insomnia sufferers, and yes, big profits for pharmaceutical companies. Read the fascinating story of Sumner and her malady at The Last Word On Nothing. Link -via Not Exactly Rocket Science
(Image credit: Flickr user Umberto Salvagnin)
Email This Post to a Friend