How do you study an extinct virus? They don't leave fossils behind! But some of them have left their DNA in other living things, including humans.
Over the expanse of evolutionary time, the genomes of virtually every animal species have become riddled with these proviral sequences, the so-called endogenous retroviruses (ERVs). Most ERV sequences have been degraded by the accumulation of mutations but are still recognizable as retroviral in origin. The human genome alone contains hundreds of thousands of HERVs (Human ERVs), outnumbering our genes. Extrapolate these numbers across the entirety of the animal kingdom, and collectively ERV loci may well comprise a “fossil” collection numbering in the hundreds of millions of specimens.
Find out more about paleovirology, the study of extinct viruses, at Small Things Considered. Link -via Boing Boing
The Star Wars Uncut project has been moving right along since we first reported on it. It's a collaboration among hundreds of filmmakers to recreate the movie Star Wars shot-by-shot, with each 15-second segment done by a different director in his or her own style. The entire movie will be shown at the CPH:PIX Festival April 19 in Copenhagen. In honor of the event, here are a few minutes of the movie. -via Buzzfeed
Recycling is a potent concept. Many regard it as simply the repurposing of objects in order to prevent waste, but in the right hands, it can be a process that charts all sorts of powerful aesthetic and cultural shifts. The "Throne of Weapons" and "Tree of Life" are two pieces of "recycling" that do just this. Made from decommissioned AK47s and other instruments of death from the Mozambique civil war, they take the physical remains of war and transform them into the collective hopes of a nation traumatized by violence and cruelty.
Both objects are the product of the imaginatively entitled "Transforming Arms into Tools" project. But despite its rather functional name, the scheme, set up in 1995 by the Christian Council of Mozambique, is consistently creating some of the most the most poignant "recycled" art in recent memory. These guns began life in the poisonous smelting factories of Russia, Eastern Europe, Korea or Portugal, before being put to bloody use in the dense jungles of Mozambique's coastal lowlands. Now, under the initiative of Bishop Dinis Sengulane, they are crafted into icons that carry a nation's hopes for peace.
Under the guidance of the Christian Council, teams from the project (known as Transformação de Armas em Enxadas, or TAE) cut up the guns and re-mould them into sculptures: an elaborate, if disturbing chair, and a tree dedicated to 'life'. The chair alone is composed of guns that originated in seven different countries, pointing up the resolutely unresolved issue of international arms trade. The resulting artworks are not only hauntingly beautiful for the casual observer, but also draw together many intersecting currents for the people of Mozambique.
In one sense, we might think of them as cathartic: they perform a cleansing or purging movement, ridding us of painful emotional excess, not unlike the original intentions of Greek Tragedy. They give outer form to Mozambique' s collective surplus of sorrow, left to stew long after the firing stopped, a form of relief that prevents such pain from eating its people up, or worse still, erupting into further violence. Conversely, they also enable us as viewers to experience their pain in a controlled form, fostering a sense of profound empathy for the victims of such a tragic conflict, perhaps an implicit form of advice that we should never let this happen again.
At another level, they are also signs of peace that point the way to happier times. Just as these sculptures recycle guns that brought misery into art that brings pleasure, so they recycle the memories of those who perished, into a new feeling of humanity, brotherhood and charity. They serve as reminders of what came to pass, and of why we should strive to avoid human conflict in the future. In this sense they embody a change, and one for the good, that we hope is sweeping through the villages of Mozambique and other war-torn countries the world over.
The pieces were acquired by the British Museum in 2005 and spent the next few years touring the major cities of Britain, garnering huge applause. Now on display in the museum, they are definitely worth a trip to London we think; these moving sculptures may be recycled monuments to death, but crucially, also to life and a peaceful future.
Thanks to authorChris Ingham Brooke of Environmental Graffiti.
Many people find spiders terrifying, but they have a convenient shape for a robot as many legs radiating from a central core gives a mobile robot stability. Wired has a gallery of 13 robotic spiders built for all kinds of purposes from art to war to toys. Pictured is the Military Micro-Spider Bot, created for spying on the enemy. Link
This is the third Beer Geography quiz from Mental_floss (see the earlier quizzes here and here). Do you know where your favorite (and not-so-favorite) beers are brewed? I, no beer expert, was lucky to score as high as 44%. You can beat that! Link
Josh Millard turned a little idea into a flier which turned into a meme. Deservedly so, don't you think? Other people are now putting them up in far-flung places. Link -via Metafilter Update: Josh has started a blog to document these useless fliers.
When two dogs meet they can be rivals or playmates, and it's sometimes hard to tell. The secret is the "bow", which is explained at The Thoughtful Animal.
At first glance, the use of bows in play may appear random. They do not occur every N actions, or every N seconds. But it turns out that the bow has a very important function: the bow is regularly used before and/or after other actions that could be misinterpreted by the other dog, and could disrupt the social play. For example, bows were used either immediately before or after bites during play 74% of the time in infant and adult domesticated dogs, 79% in infant wolves, and 92% in infant coyotes.
In addition to communicating "I want to play," bows performed during the play sequence itself seem to mean "I still want to play despite what I am going to do or just did." It's like what your Mom used to tell you - it's always fun until someone gets hurt. The dogs seem to have internalized that rule, and continually make it clear that any damage done was all done in good fun. No hard feelings. (What I learn from this is: if my brother had simply bowed to me when we were kids, there wouldn't have been any fights in the first place. Right?)
Observations show that coyotes use the bow more often than domestic dogs, probably because a coyote fight is serious business for the pack. Link
I love antique plates just the way they are, but these will appeal to modern sensibilities as well. Etsy seller BeatUpCreations offers old plates with new additions like side show performers, political faces, music stars, artworks, and movie characters transferred onto the porcelain. Link -via mental_floss
Fard is an animated short directed by Luis Bricenco and David Alapont. It's in French with no subtitles, but the plot is visual. The action really gets going about four minutes in. The style and effects make it quite memorable. Link -via Metafilter
At this point, "antique typewriters" sounds like a redundancy. These eleven are early typewriters, before the qwerty keyboard layout became standard. In the 19th century, new and innovative typewriter designs fought to become the standard, but many just became rare and valuable artifacts. Link -via Dark Roasted Blend
The numbat {wiki} lives in western Australia and eats termites. To do this, they have specialized equipment. This video is from the BBC series Life of Mammals. -via Laelaps
You won't find a better gift for a Star Wars geek than soap in the shape of Han Solo as he was encased in Carbonite in the movie The Empire Strikes Back. $6.50 from Luxury Lane Soap. http://luxurylanesoap.bigcartel.com/product/solo-soap -via The Daily What
Meinhardt Raabe was a pilot in the Civil Air Patrol during World War II, a carnival barker, and a spokesman for Oscar Mayer. He earned a bachelors degree in accounting in 1937 and a masters degree in 1970. But he was best known for his role as the Munchkin coroner in the 1939 movie The Wizard of Oz, where he delivered the immortal lines
As coroner, I must aver I thoroughly examined her. And she’s not only merely dead, She’s really most sincerely dead.
Raabe, only 23 years old when the movie was made, spent the rest of his life repeating those lines as a motivational speaker for schools and civic groups. He was also Little Oscar, “the World’s Smallest Chef,” and drove the Oscar Mayer Weinermobile for 30 years. Raabe passed away yesterday at his home in Orange Park, Florida. He was 94. Link -via Stinque
The Illinois Poison Control Center posted stories of the 282 calls they took in one day. The calls range from requests for information to emergency room consultations. Here is a small sample:
# An adult female called worried because she took 2 Aleve® for her headache and then noticed that the pills expired 5 years ago. # An adult woman called because a battery leaked out of her personal massager and she was concerned about battery acid burns. # An emergency room called regarding a 29 year old male patient who had chewed and swallowed a fentanyl transdermal patch in an attempt to get high. He was found unresponsive by his mother and brought in via ambulance. # An adult male called concerned about his friend who drank a very large amount of alcohol over the course of the previous evening after losing his job. His friend had vomited numerous times and had very garbled speech but is awake. # An adult female called after she accidentally took 2 of her melatonin tablets. # A 20 year old college student drank 2 Red Bulls® and took 6-7 Ritalin® tablets that belonged to a friend to help her stay awake and concentrate to study for a big exam. She stated she was having palpitations, vomiting and tremors.
This post drew interest from a local TV station, which then did a report on the poison center's funding problems. Incidentally, the nationwide number for poison control is 1-800-222-1222. Link -via Metafilter
