Spc. Matthew Mortensen is a combat medic, charged with providing aid to wounded front line soldiers, but that was no protection against harm. He was shot by a sniper while on patrol in Baghdad on December 10th.

"After I was shot, I had my platoon sergeant examine for a wound and he found one on my right shoulder blade," said Mortensen. "Then I jumped into the truck, threw off my kit because I couldn't reach my right side with my kit on. After I took it off, I started cleaning up some of the blood with gauze then I used the package for the gauze and created a pressure dressing over the wound just in case it penetrated my chest cavity. I didn't know what happened to the bullet so that was the only thing I was really worried about"

Mortensen even directed his own medical evacuation. He was awarded a Purple Heart and a Combat Medical Badge the next day. Mortensen is now recovering in the US and expects to be back in Iraq in February. Link -via Digg

The Salary Theorem proves mathematically that those who know more make less money. Therefore, if you know nothing, you should be fabulously wealthy! Link -via Digg

Children of the Victorian Era had to be tough, because this Santa Claus would have given me nightmares! This picture is a detail of a larger family portrait from Flickr user stevechasmar. For sheer weirdness, it just might beat out the previous creepy Santa post. See more Victorian Christmas ephemera in his photostream. http://www.flickr.com/photos/opiummuseum/4179068965/in/photostream/ -via Buzzfeed

Archaeology magazine has eight stories of archaeological hoaxes that made the news throughout history, with bonus links to their earlier articles about hoaxes.

The reasons for perpetrating hoaxes and forgeries range as widely as the kinds of fakes. Common motives for making bogus artifacts include publicity and self-promotion, monetary gain, practical jokes, and revenge, but some fakers have had the goal of supporting their own theories about the human past. Fakes have often been inspired by nationalism, with patriotic perpetrators boosting their country through spurious links to past civilizations.

People are taken in by hoaxes and fakes for many reasons. Successful bogus artifacts often match expectations or preconceived ideas of antiquities. Spectacular fakes have worked because those who buy them are blinded by their own pride of ownership--and the higher the price tag, the harder it is to make an embarrassing admission that it's a fake.

Shown is the Fawcett idol, which led Percy Fawcett to search for Atlantis in the jungles of South America. He never returned. Link -via Metafilter

GOOD magazine has a graphic that shows how big the news stories of 2009 were compared to other news stories. The information used is from Journalism.org, which calculates the percentage of coverage news stories get every week. Link -via Nag on the Lake

Elves have come a long way from the not-well-liked pranksters of medieval times. Shakespeare gave elves a boost, and Tolkien made them heroes. Cracked examines the split between toy-making elves and fierce video game elves.

Toward the end of the European renaissance, it appears the elves diverged into two distinct sub-species. The first consisted of the smaller, craftier elves, the kind that enjoy building toys or baking cookies. They maintained their predecessors' small, plump, ugly appearance, but they appear to have moved away from the habits of kidnapping peasant babies and killing livestock.

Link -via Digg

(YouTube link)

The guys who brought you An Engineer's Guide to Cats are having a friendly battle with Christmas laser beams. Things turn ugly when the nuclear hairball is deployed! -via Laughing Squid

There's no way of knowing whether the tiger that made a meal for five men was really the last Indochinese tiger in China, but no one has seen any others in years. Kang Wannian of Yunnan Province in China claims he killed the tiger in self-defense last February. Then he ate it.

The only known wild Indochinese tiger in China, photographed in 2007 at the same reserve, has not been seen since Kang's meal, the Yunnan-based newspaper Life News reported earlier this month.

The paper quoted the provincial Forestry Bureau as saying there was no evidence the tiger was the last one in China.

A local court sentenced Kang to 10 years for killing a rare animal plus two years for illegal possession of firearms, the local web portal Yunnan.cn reported. Prosecutors said Kang did not need a gun to gather clams.

Four villagers who helped Kang dismember the tiger and ate its meat were also sentenced from three to four years for "covering up and concealing criminal gains", the report said.

The Indochinese tiger is on the brink of extinction, with small populations in Laos, Vietnam. Cambodia, Thailand, and Burma. Link -via Arbroath

(image credit: Cburnett)

(YouTube link)

By the Bowen Beer Bottle Band. Link -via Metafilter

Sarah Reinertsen was born with a birth defect called proximal femoral focal deficiency. Her left leg was small, and wouldn't grow with the rest of her body, so it was amputated when she was seven years old. Still, she always wanted to be an athlete. Reinertsen began running at age eleven, and competed in the Paralympics at age 16. In college, she started running marathons, but that wasn't enough.

She is the first female amputee to win an Ironman competition. She climbed the Great Wall of China and scaled a giant cliff in Vietnam during the 10th season of the CBS television show The Amazing Race. And when she’s not running or biking or swimming, she’s trying on artificial limbs to test the latest body armor for a company that makes prosthetics. She also rallies soldiers who have lost their limbs to war. She is a hometown hero talking to runners who have known her since she was an 11-year-old who climbed into a sneaker and began running for her life.

Read more of Reinertsen's story for a real inspiration. Link -via Digg

A brain-machine interface has been developed that has been successfully tested on a patient with Locked-in Syndrome {wiki}. An unnamed 26-year-old man paralyzed for ten years by a brain stem stroke was implanted with electrodes five years ago. Researchers waited as the brain grew around the electrodes.

Three years after implantation, the researchers began testing the brain-machine interface for real-time synthetic speech production. The system is “telemetric” - it requires no wires or connectors passing through the skin, eliminating the risk of infection. Instead, the electrode amplifies and converts neural signals into frequency modulated (FM) radio signals. These signals are wirelessly transmitted across the scalp to two coils, which are attached to the volunteer’s head using a water-soluble paste. The coils act as receiving antenna for the RF signals. The implanted electrode is powered by an induction power supply via a power coil, which is also attached to the head.

The signals are then routed to an electrophysiological recording system that digitizes and sorts them. The sorted spikes, which contain the relevant data, are sent to a neural decoder that runs on a desktop computer. The neural decoder’s output becomes the input to a speech synthesizer, also running on the computer. Finally, the speech synthesizer generates synthetic speech (in the current study, only three vowel sounds were tested). The entire process takes an average of 50 milliseconds.

The tests on the first patient are quite promising.

To confirm that the neurons in the implanted area were able to carry speech information in the form of formant frequency trajectories, the researchers asked the volunteer to attempt to speak in synchrony with a vowel sequence that was presented auditorily. In later experiments, the volunteer received real-time auditory feedback from the speech synthesizer. During 25 sessions over a five-month period, the volunteer significantly improved the thought-to-speech accuracy. His average hit rate increased from 45% to 70% across sessions, reaching a high of 89% in the last session.

Although the current study focused only on producing a small set of vowels, the researchers think that consonant sounds could be achieved with improvements to the system.

Link -via J-Walk Blog

The cookies we all know and love started out as a mistake!

In 1930, a dietitian who owned a tourist lodge was cooking and baking for her guests. Unfortunately, she ran out of the baker’s chocolate she needed for the chocolate cookies that were on the menu. She hurriedly substituted a chocolate bar — cut up into tiny pieces — assuming they would melt. They didn’t — they just softened, instead.

The mistake turned out all right for her in the end, and even brought her a lifetime supply of chocolate! http://www.baconbabble.com/index.php/2009/12/15/the-history-of-the-chocolate-chip-cookie/ -via the Presurfer

Aerospace engineer Kirk Sorensen became interested in nuclear energy by reading records of experiments done by Alvin Weinberg and his team after World War II at the Oak Ridge Nuclear Plant. What really captured Sorenson's attention was the promise of thorium, which has advantages over uranium as a nuclear fuel. Uranium worked best for nuclear weapons, but it is rare, dangerous, and produces lots of nuclear waste.

When he took over as head of Oak Ridge in 1955, Alvin Weinberg realized that thorium by itself could start to solve these problems. It’s abundant — the US has at least 175,000 tons of the stuff — and doesn’t require costly processing. It is also extraordinarily efficient as a nuclear fuel. As it decays in a reactor core, its byproducts produce more neutrons per collision than conventional fuel. The more neutrons per collision, the more energy generated, the less total fuel consumed, and the less radioactive nastiness left behind.

Even better, Weinberg realized that you could use thorium in an entirely new kind of reactor, one that would have zero risk of meltdown. The design is based on the lab’s finding that thorium dissolves in hot liquid fluoride salts. This fission soup is poured into tubes in the core of the reactor, where the nuclear chain reaction — the billiard balls colliding — happens. The system makes the reactor self-regulating: When the soup gets too hot it expands and flows out of the tubes — slowing fission and eliminating the possibility of another Chernobyl. Any actinide can work in this method, but thorium is particularly well suited because it is so efficient at the high temperatures at which fission occurs in the soup.

Sorenson is leading a campaign to revive thorium as a nuclear fuel by bringing scientists and engineers together on his blog called Energy From Thorium. A bill is now before congress to provide funds for thorium research. At least one commercial company is already using thorium. Could this be the element that saves nuclear power? Link -via reddit

(image credit: Thomas Hannich)

Infographics are not new, they are just easier to make and pass around on the internet. BibliOdyssey has a collection of posters, pages, and pamphlets from the Victorian era that make information into an art form. Pictured is the Tableau De L'Histoire Universelle (History of the Universe Chart).

This is a fold-out print depicting all of human history from the time of creation (4693 BC = Adam & Eve; the great flood = 3300 BC) up to the date of publication (1858 by Eug. Pick, Paris). Vignettes of historically significant people, places and buildings etc are arranged along the borders.

The designer has employed something of a metaphorical display choice: civilisations are presented as a series of rivers -- the widths likely imply the comparative population level of each group versus the world's population -- which 'flow' down through history.

See also graphics on geography, biology, astronomy, and more. The pictures are all linked to larger Flickr versions. Link

Lapland, a region of Fenno-Scandinavia that lies mostly within the Arctic Circle, is where tourists go to find Santa Claus, reindeer, dog sledding, skiing, the Northern Lights, and unbelievable scenery. In this post, it's easy to see why Santa Claus wants to live in Lapland -I fell in love with the place just from the author's charming use of English!

A more traditional mode of travel – dog sledding. Here management is not so elementary, because dogs often have their own ideas about the itinerary and you do not have a lot of ways to persuade them to move in the right direction. So it will take all possible strength and agility, but it only makes the trip more interesting.

Link -via Digg