A newly-identified species of ghostshark has been found living off the coast of California. The Eastern Pacific black ghostshark also exists in museums, but has only recently been named as a distinct species, says Douglas Long, natural science curator at the Oakland Museum of California.

The newfound ghostshark belongs to the "big black chimeras," a group whose species number has exploded in recent years, thanks to improved diagnostic techniques, according to the new study, published in the September issue of the journal Zootaxa.

Chimeras display some unusual features not seen in other living animals, Long said.

Male chimeras, for example, have retractable sexual appendages sprouting from their foreheads. These organs, which resemble a spiked club at the end of a stalk, may be used to stimulate a female or to pull her closer—though these are still assumptions, Long said.

Link

(image credit: MBARI)

Cynthia Blair-Hoover of Granby, Colorado crashed on the way to Denver when her car went off a cliff near Central City. Although the fall left the 52-year-old woman with eleven broken ribs, broken vertebrae, and a punctured lung, she began inching her way towards an old mine by sliding on her back.

For five and a half days and nights, Hoover sucked moisture off her hair and did her best to stay warm through rain, hail and even snow at the 8,000 foot mark in the mountains. By the following Tuesday, she was able to hear voices coming from the mine, where they were conducting tours. When the voices stopped, she would yell for help and after several minutes, one of the men heard her cries for help.

"I couldn't believe she was able to survive," said Fire Chief, Gary Allen. "We have mountain lions, bears and other critters up here. It is a miracle she wasn't mauled to death."

Hoover was airlifted to a hospital in Denver, where she is currently recovering in the intensive care unit. Link -via Arbroath

You think big hair was big in the 1980s? In the 18th century, ladies of a certain station took hairstyling to absurd lengths -or heights, actually. Social critics and caricaturists of the day had fun with the trend, as you can see in this collection of images from the period at BibliOdyssey. Link

September 22nd is Elephant Appreciation Day, celebrated since 1996. The official website has many suggestions for ways to celebrate the holiday, but you can use your imagination to honor elephants in your own way. Tell elephant jokes, send an ecard, watch elephant videos on YouTube, or make a donation to one of the many organizations dedicated to the care and protection of the world’s largest land mammal. Link -via mental_floss

(image credit: Flickr user Carmelo Aquilina)

Whatever the occasion, someone will say it with a cake. Someone somewhere is probably very happy it was just a cold sore! See more embarrassing cakes at Stupid Idiots. http://bigstupididiot.com/2009/09/21/15-most-embarrassing-cakes/ -via Digg

If you’re going to wear a mask to prevent catching the flu, why not make it something worth looking at? Now That’s Nifty has a roundup of interesting face masks from all over. Link

New technologies are often blamed for the “dumbing-down” of new generations, but it’s hard to see that any generation is “dumber” than the one before it in a historical context. Professor Andrea Lunsford of Stanford University studied college students' writing and how it changed from 2002 to 2006.

The first thing she found is that young people today write far more than any generation before them. That's because so much socializing takes place online, and it almost always involves text. Of all the writing that the Stanford students did, a stunning 38 percent of it took place out of the classroom—life writing, as Lunsford calls it. Those Twitter updates and lists of 25 things about yourself add up.

It's almost hard to remember how big a paradigm shift this is. Before the Internet came along, most Americans never wrote anything, ever, that wasn't a school assignment. Unless they got a job that required producing text (like in law, advertising, or media), they'd leave school and virtually never construct a paragraph again.

On the one hand, you may look at YouTube comments and chat rooms and think literacy is going into the dumpster. On the other hand, those are millions of people who would otherwise never communicate a thought in public if the internet were not available to them. Writer Clive Thompson says the new technology has changed the meaning of writing for younger people.

The fact that students today almost always write for an audience (something virtually no one in my generation did) gives them a different sense of what constitutes good writing. In interviews, they defined good prose as something that had an effect on the world. For them, writing is about persuading and organizing and debating, even if it's over something as quotidian as what movie to go see.

Of course, not every young internet commenter will go on to be a Stanford student. Do you see the internet as an aid or a hindrance to literacy? Link -via Metafilter

(image credit: Mads Berg)

If you recall the Tetris Shower and wanted one of your own, you’re going to love this. A tile supplier in England makes ceramic tiles in Tetris shapes! Pick up to seven colors for the six shapes and design your own video game bathroom or kitchen. For faster installation, they also offer sheets of mosaic tiles with preset patterns. Link -via Evil Mad Scientist Laboratories

Tom Houk of Steamboat Springs, Colorado built a putting green in his yard, and got into the habit of leaving his golf balls where they landed until he returned. A few months ago, he woke to find all his golf balls gone! Houk produced more balls, but the next day, they would be gone, too. This continued until Houk finally spotted the thief.

A hairless fox was standing there with one of his golf balls in his mouth.

"We just couldn't believe it and we thought he just snatched one," Houk said.

The fox had more than one golf ball in mind.

"He doesn't just take one ball," Sally Houk said. "He came back and forth and back and forth until he took all of them."

Tom Houk thinks the fox has taken nearly 100 of his golf balls.

What does a fox do with a hundred golf balls? Jerry Neal of the Colorado Division of Wildlife thinks he probably plays with them. No word on what size clubs the fox uses. Link -via Arbroath

Have you ever wondered what horizontal cross sections of the human body look like? Here is an animation of a full-body MRI from head to toe! Don’t blink or you’ll miss a vital organ. Link -via Blame It On The Voices

Update: According to several commenters, the images used in this animation are from The Visible Human Project and were taken from a deceased body, using MRI and CT scans and cryogenic cross sections. That body belonged to 39-year-old Joseph Paul Jernigan, who was executed for murder and had donated his body to science.

James Bowthorpe of London pedaled his bicycle 18,000 miles around the world in 174 days, 20 fewer days than the world record holder. He arrived back in Hyde Park to complete the journey on Saturday.

Mr Bowthorpe cycled through France, Belgium, the Netherlands, Germany, Poland, Ukraine, Romania, Bulgaria, Turkey, Iran, India, Thailand, Malaysia, Singapore, Australia, New Zealand, Canada and the United States - taking flights where necessary - before coming back to Europe.

This week he pedalled through Spain and France before catching a ferry across the English Channel to Portsmouth where he met his mother and father.

He finished his ride back at his Hyde Park starting point accompanied by his brothers and 20 other cyclists.

The trip around the world raised £55,000 for research into Parkinson’s disease. Link -via Unique Daily

Bibliophiles, you can now wear books around your neck! Etsy seller TheBlackSpotBooks offers this necklace with eleven tiny books made from a mix of antique and scrap leather. Each is hand-made and no two are alike. Custom books designs are available by request. Link -via Bioephemera

We often describe our social relationships in temperature metaphors, like “cold shoulder” or “warm memories” or even “she’s hot!” This is no coincidence. An experiment last year from the University of Toronto showed that thinking about an incident where the subject felt socially excluded led them to estimate the room’s temperature to be lower than those subjects who recalled a better experience. Three more experiments from Hans IJzerman and Gün R. Semin of Utrecht University show the converse to be true as well: warm or cold temperatures affect how people perceive relationships. In the first experiment, subjects rated a relationship on the social proximity, or overlap, between the subject and a person they were asked to think about.

The participants had been divided into two groups at the beginning of the experiment. Those in the warm condition had been given a warm drink to hold when they entered the room, while those in the cold condition had been given a cold one. It was found that the perceived degree of overlap with the known other was significantly greater for those participants handed a warm drink at the start of the experiment than those handed a cold one. Similarly, another recent study found that those who hold a hot cup of coffee judged others to be more generous and caring than those who held a cup of iced coffee.

Get yourself a nice hot cup and read about the other two experiments at Neurophilosophy. Link

(image credit: Flickr user bitzcelt)

Neuroscientist Craig Bennett bought a salmon to test an fMRI machine and work out some protocols.

So, as the fish sat in the scanner, they showed it “a series of photographs depicting human individuals in social situations.” To maintain the rigor of the protocol (and perhaps because it was hilarious), the salmon, just like a human test subject, “was asked to determine what emotion the individual in the photo must have been experiencing.”

The salmon, as Bennett’s poster on the test dryly notes, “was not alive at the time of scanning.”

Those involved got a laugh out of the situation, until the scans came back and showed that activity was detected in different areas of the brain when the fish was “shown” the pictures. Remember, the fish was dead.

The result is completely nuts — but that’s actually exactly the point. Bennett, who is now a post-doc at the University of California, Santa Barbara, and his adviser, George Wolford, wrote up the work as a warning about the dangers of false positives in fMRI data. They wanted to call attention to ways the field could improve its statistical methods.

Which is not to say that scans aren’t a useful research tool, but that they must be carefully monitored to avoid false positive results. Link -via reddit

Schools are spending less time than ever teaching the art of cursive handwriting, especially as more time is devoted to typing in the early grades. On the 2007 SAT essay questions, only 15% of college-bound students used cursive writing. The rest wrote in print. Some teachers argue that writing in script helps hand-eye coordination, even though average legibility peaks around 4th grade.

Text messaging, e-mail, and word processing have replaced handwriting outside the classroom, said Cheryl Jeffers, a professor at Marshall University's College of Education and Human Services, and she worries they'll replace it entirely before long.

"I am not sure students have a sense of any reason why they should vest their time and effort in writing a message out manually when it can be sent electronically in seconds."

For Jeffers, cursive writing is a lifelong skill, one she fears could become lost to the culture, making many historic records hard to decipher and robbing people of "a gift."

What do you think? Is it important for children to learn cursive, or should it go the way of the dinosaur? Link -via Digg

(image credit: AP/Bob Bird)