An artificial uterus sounds like a scene from Brave New World. In reality, scientists at the Port Stephens Fisheries Institute in New South Wales, Australia, have so far only nursed six embryos of a wobbegong shark through their last 18 days before birth successfully in a souped-up aquarium with delicately balanced chemicals, filters, and monitors that copy a shark's womb. The ultimate goal is to incubate embryos of the endangered grey nurse shark throughout their gestation. What's really strange is the reason they need to do it. The grey nurse shark is endangered in part because of its weird way of reproducing:
After mating, a female produces as many as 40 fertilized embryos, separated between two separate wombs. The embryos take nearly a year to fully develop, but they begin hunting long before that. After about two months, their own yolk sacs go dry. Hungry, they start eating their brothers and sisters. After the rampant in utero cannibalization, only one shark — the biggest and strongest — is left in each womb.
At birth they’re three feet long and experienced hunters, with a good chance of survival. But the tiny brood size, nearly year-long gestation period, and relatively restricted maternal capacity — after giving birth, mothers must wait a year to reproduce again — limit the number of young sharks.
Read more about this research in artificial shark gestation at Wired Science. Link
A killer whale named Luna was separated from his family and lived off the coast of Vancouver Island until his death in 2006. He was friendly with people in boats who went out to visit him, but did he like the people or the boats? In this video, he is imitating the sound of a boat motor. Was he trying to communicate with the boat? Read more about the orca at Wikipedia. Link -via Buzzfeed
In most films, the audience knows who is going to survive way before the plot makes it obvious. It takes the characters a little longer to figure out how important they are. -via Buzzfeed
Justin Lee of Auckland, New Zealand, received a speeding ticket in the mail in 2004. He noticed a typo in the facts that stated the offense took place in 1974. Since that was a long time ago, he asked his mother for his alibi details. Then Justin wrote back to let the police know exactly where he was on June 23rd, 1974.
Firstly, the 'date of offence' is listed as the 23rd of June 1974 with the time being at or around half past six in the evening. This is of grave concern to me because I was not issued a drivers license until sometime in 1990 and I have no desire to be charged with driving while not legally licensed. I do not have a clear recollection of very much at all before I was three and a half years old, so I rang Mum to see if she remembered what I was doing that day. She said that - coincidentally - I was born that day!!
Mum mentioned that I was born at around five o'clock in the evening on that day in Porirua, which is not far from Wellington. She also said Porirua was a bustling suburb of young, low-income people who were trying to get ahead. Back in the 70's, people were coming to terms with oil shocks, high-inflation and wage freezes, but that's not important right now.
There's more to his entertaining letter. And how did this episode turn out? Find out the final disposition of the case at Letters of Note. Link
YouTube member sloanchurman was born deaf. Now 29 years old, her husband recorded the moment her hearing implant is activated. She explained in the YouTube comments:
"I had an implant put in 8 weeks ago called The Esteem Implant by Envoy Medical. I was born deaf and have worn hearing aids from the age of 2, but hearing aids only help so much. I have gotten by this long in life by reading lips. This was taken as they were activating the implant."
Our friends at Improbable Research awarded the annual Ig Nobel Prizes last night at Harvard's Sanders Theater for research that makes you laugh, and then think. This is the 21st year for the awards. Ten prizes were awarded in different disciplines; here are some of the more notable:
BIOLOGY PRIZE: Darryl Gwynne (of CANADA and AUSTRALIA and the USA) and David Rentz (of AUSTRALIA and the USA) for discovering that a certain kind of beetle mates with a certain kind of Australian beer bottle
CHEMISTRY PRIZE: Makoto Imai, Naoki Urushihata, Hideki Tanemura, Yukinobu Tajima, Hideaki Goto, Koichiro Mizoguchi and Junichi Murakami of JAPAN, for determining the ideal density of airborne wasabi (pungent horseradish) to awaken sleeping people in case of a fire or other emergency, and for applying this knowledge to invent the wasabi alarm.
LITERATURE PRIZE: John Perry of Stanford University, USA, for his Theory of Structured Procrastination, which says: To be a high achiever, always work on something important, using it as a way to avoid doing something that's even more important.
PEACE PRIZE: Arturas Zuokas, the mayor of Vilnius, LITHUANIA, for demonstrating that the problem of illegally parked luxury cars can be solved by running them over with an armored tank.
Pictured are researchers Darryl Gwynne and David Rentz accepting their prize for biology. See the complete list of winners at Improbable Research. Link
Would you live in a city near an active volcano? Many people do, all over the world. Environmental Graffiti shows us ten cities in which the people live side-by-side with the threat of explosions, ash, and lava. Shown is the city of Pasto, Colombia, (population 450,000) which is only 9 kilometers from the active volcano Galeras. Link
The Ein Prat Fountainheads welcome the High Holidays with a joyful adaptation of Shakira’s World Cup song "Waka Waka". The lyrics are at the YouTube link. Dip your apple in the honey! Happy Rosh Hashanah! -via The Daily Beast
Jack Sprat is a greyhound who put every ounce of heart he had into racing, clocking 40 miles per hour in training. But when he made his professional debut at Wimbledon last year, he came in last in both of his races. It was only after his owner retired him and sent him to Dogs' Trust in Snetterton, Norfolk, England, that veterinarians figured out how much effort Jack really put into racing -and everything he does. It turns out that the dog is blind!
Vets at the animal charity examined Jack and realised a rare condition had left him completely blind in his left eye and with only 20 per cent vision in his right.
They diagnosed him with Chorioretinitis, a swelling and irritation of the middle layer of the eye, which is irreparable.
Kate Brewster, 27, of the Dogs' Trust, said Jack would have been 'terrified' racing with no vision in his left eye - used by dogs to follow the rabbit.
She said: 'We don't think Jack's racing owner realised the severity of his blindness and it would have been terrifying for him to race because of the noise.
'He must have followed the other dogs or maybe used his sense of smell to get around the track. He clearly had no way of seeing the rabbit.'
Jack stills runs very fast at the shelter, where he knows exactly where the fences are. The animal charity says Jack will make a great pet, and hopes to find him a home with no small children or other pets. Link -via Arbroath
To inaugurate the new partnership between LEGOland and Ford, engineers built a Ford Explorer out of LEGO bricks for the theme park in Florida. It probably took them a long time to put the 380,000 bricks together, but thanks to time=lapse video, you can watch it in about 90 seconds. -via Buzzfeed
You'll laugh at how well road signs work to illustrate movies we are all familiar with. Unreality magazine has a list of 15 posters that mashup films with common road signs gleaned from the Photoshop masters at Something Awful. Link
The Mississippi River seems eternal, but it changes over time. How much? You can see in a collection of colorful maps at Visual News. Cartographer Harold N. Fisk produced them in 1944, with different colors to show the past and current flow of the mighty Mississippi. Link -via the Presurfer
Want to know how a bunch of brawny apes evolved into brainy humans? It all comes down to a pair of tongs and a flame.
People and animals eat basically the same food; the only difference is that we cook our meals. But does the ability to flame-broil a burger and burn a meal really make us that special? According to Harvard anthropology professor Richard Wrangham, it does.
Armed with mounting evidence, Wrangham believes that fire-kissed foods are what separated man from beast, allowing our ancestors to grow bigger brains and evolve into the intelligent creatures we are today.
THE MISSING LINK
The story starts roughly 2 million years ago in the age of the habiline -the so-called "missing link" between humans and apes. Habilines walked upright, made primitive stone tools, and had brains the size of oranges (roughly half the size of our brains today). Like chimpanzees, they subsisted mainly on fruits and veggies, with the occasional bit of raw meat on the side. They had strong teeth to chew all that plant matter, and big guts to process all that fibrous material. For them, digestion took an extremely long time. In fact, it's believed that their bodies were constantly engaged in processing food. (Even today, chimpanzees spend more than six hours a day just chewing.)
So, how did Homo habilis evolve into Homo erectus? The dominant theory since the 1950s has been that meat-eating was responsible for the shift because it required habilines to gradually develop human intelligence. There's something to the idea: To hunt game, our apelike ancestors had to reply on more than just physical prowess; they had to be clever and cooperate. The better they got at hunting, the smarter they became.
But the "meat made humans" hypothesis rankled biologist Richard Wrangham. In his 2009 book Catching Fire, Wrangham argues that meat-eating alone cannot account for the tremendous physical changes that occurred in the evolution of humans. Instead, he believes that man's discovery of fire -and more importantly, cooking- did the heavy lifting.
(Image credit: Banksy work, photo by Flickr user Lord Jim)
For decades, many scientists dismissed cooking as a pleasant byproduct of civilization, a symbol of man's dominion over nature. But Wrangham builds the case that cooking was crucial to human evolution because it made digestion so much more efficient, increasing the amount of energy our bodies derived from what we ate. As a result, humans became better able to think, hunt, sing, dance, paint on walls, and invent new tools. Ultimately, the top chefs were more likely to survive, reproduce, and pass along cooking techniques to their offspring, along with the physical evolutionary changes that come with them -namely, bigger brains.
The idea that cooked food offers more energy than uncooked food doesn't immediately make sense. After all, recent studies show that cooking can leach food of its calories and nutrients. To understand the answers, we need to look inside -literally.
Have you ever seen an albino hummingbird? Fifteen-year-old Marlin Shank took lots of lovely photographs of this rare white ruby-throated hummingbird he saw at a park in Staunton, Virginia. Link to article. Link to photo gallery. -via Buzzfeed
September 24th through October 1st is Banned Books Week. In honor of the occasion, here is a guest post from actor, comedian, and voiceover artist Eddie Deezen. Visit Eddie at his website.
Talk about an easy subject to research! It might have been easier to write up a "books that have never been banned anywhere" list. The banning of books seems so ridiculous, simplistic, and stupid to most of us. But man, in all his Jeckyll and Hyde glory, will all-too-often, when trying to solve a problem, come up with a solution much worse. This is "the 29th annual Banned Books Week." The week is used to condemn censorship and "thought police."
O.K., let's take a look at a brief (in the scheme of these things) list of books that have been (ironically) banned here in the U.S....
1. Fahrenheit 451 by Ray BradburyFahrenheit 451 has to head this list of "ironic books banned." Why? Fahrenheit 451 is an entire novel about the future and the banning (and burning) of books. It was banned, ironically, because one of the books that eventually gets banned and burned is the Bible. Drawn your own conclusions, my (hopefully) intelligent readers.
2. The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain Mark Twain was a racist? A product of the times? Twain uses the bombshell "N" word so as to illustrate the awfulness of the word (and all its connotations). This vicious word is still, far and away, the most highly-charged and controversial word in the English language. So, the knee-jerk reaction is to ban the book. Or better still, as in more recent examples, issue the book with the "N" word cleverly edited out.
3. Catcher in the Rye by J.D. Salinger There isn't enough time to edit out all the examples of the expression "f*** you" being used in this one. Also banned because it promotes youthful rebellion and disrespect of authority. Catcher in the Rye was the book that guy was reading when he shot and killed John Lennon. So maybe if it were still banned... hmmm, slippery slope, isn't it?
4. Where's Waldo? by Martin Handford Misprint, right? Uh, no. The very first Where's Waldo? book was, indeed, banned, because in one of the Where's Waldo? drawings a beach is shown featuring a woman lying on the sand with part of her breast showing. It was actually just a side view of her breast, with a penciled-in microscopic nipple shown. Do you realize the meticulous research and hours of time it must have taken whoever discovered this "offensive" character amidst all the thousands and thousands of characters featured in a Waldo book?
5. The Diary of a Young Girl by Anne Frank This is the incredible story of an ever-hopeful and ever-wistful young girl who is eventually killed in the Holocaust. In some ways, it is the ultimate example of the ever-classic theme of "Good vs. Evil." Or one very good person in the face of perhaps the greatest evil of the past several centuries. Yet despite her incredibly horrible enemies and fate, this remarkable teenage girl still believes in "the basic goodness of mankind." Banned by the Alabama State Textbook Committee in 1983 for being "a real downer."
6. To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee Like our pal Huck Finn, this book has been banned because of the free-flowing use of the "N" word. And like Twain's book, it is used to paint an accurate picture of the period (and all its ignorance). It has been banned across America for "racial slurs" and for "promoting white supremacy." Also because a parent thought the way "blacks are treated by members of [the] white community in a way that would upset black children." Only ironic because never, but never, in the entire history of literature, has good and evil been so clearly portrayed and delineated. Real (not ersatz) racism is shown under a clear magnifying glass, in all its vicious cruelty. (As a sidebar, to those of you who do not like reading -definitely see the movie. To Kill a Mockingbird is without question one of the greatest movies ever made. One of those rare times "the movie is equally as great as the book it is based upon.")
7. The Harry Potter Series by J.K. Rowling The Harry Potter books are far and away the most banned books of the past decade. Extremely ironic in that the Harry Potter series has probably inspired more young people to read than all the Hooked on Phonics and Pizza Hut books in the world. Also one other point for all those people who have worked so tirelessly to ban these highly-popular books: strip away the magic and the Dr. Seuss creatures and the wizards and sorcerers, and ultimately the series boils down to the message that love, understanding, and tolerance are the most important things in the world.
8. Little Red Riding Hood (You can't make this stuff up, folks!) Little Red Riding Hood has been banned for the use of alcohol (one of the items in Red Riding Hood's basket is a bottle of wine).
9. Sleeping Beauty The fairy tale was banned for promoting witchcraft and magic.
10. The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck This classic was banned for "vulgar language."
11. Harriet the Spy by Louise Fitzhugh Why do I feel like I am writing a Monty Python sketch? Could there possibly be a more harmless, innocuous book than Harriet the Spy? O.K. this one was banned because it "teaches children to lie, spy, back-talk, and curse."
12. Uncle Tom's Cabin by Harriet Beecher Stowe This book was banned in the South during the Civil War because of its anti-slavery content. Well, heck, that was over 150 years ago. Fortunately, as we all know, man has come a long way since those days of ignorance.
