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A litter of six Bengal kittens and their mother watch Japanese skater Daisuke Takahashi perform on television. And try to catch him. I was surprised by this, as my cats prefer nature documentaries to sports. -via Buzzfeed
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People who make toys, dollhouses, or other miniatures know that certain laws of physics apply that make miniaturization difficult. Certain laws of biology apply, too, but the fairy wasp seems to do an end-run around some of those rules. How else could an insect exist that is smaller than many single-celled creatures? Some are revealed by Alexey Polilov from Lomonosov Moscow State University, who has studied these tiny wasps for years.
There are other tricks tiny insects use to maintain life in miniature, which you can read at Not Exactly Rocket Science. Link
Polilov found that M.mymaripenne has one of the smallest nervous systems of any insect, consisting of just 7,400 neurons. For comparison, the common housefly has 340,000 and the honeybee has 850,000. And yet, with a hundred times fewer neurons, the fairy wasp can fly, search for food, and find the right places to lay its eggs.
On top of that Polilov found that over 95 per cent of the wasps’s neurons don’t have a nucleus. The nucleus is the command centre of a cell, the structure that sits in the middle and hoards a precious cache of DNA. Without it, the neurons shouldn’t be able to replenish their vital supply of proteins. They shouldn’t work. Until now, intact neurons without a nucleus have never been described in the wild.
And yet, the fairy wasp has thousands of them. As it changes from a larva into an adult, it destroys the majority or its neural nuclei until just a few hundred are left. The rest burst apart, saving space inside the adult’s crowded head. But the wasp doesn’t seem to suffer for this loss. As an adult, it lives for around five days, which is actually longer than many other bigger wasps. As Zen Faulkes writes, “It’s possible that the adult life span is short enough that the nucleus can make all the proteins the neuron needs to function for five days during the pupal stage.”
There are other tricks tiny insects use to maintain life in miniature, which you can read at Not Exactly Rocket Science. Link
George Merryweather was a doctor in Whitby, on the British coast of Yorkshire. He was also an inventor.
The Tempest Prognosticator proved to be surprisingly accurate, but did not catch on because it was not considered scientific enough. Read more about the device at Cabinet of Wonders, on a visit to the Whitby Museum, where Merryweather's device is housed. Link
...the thing which Mr. Merryweather became truly famous for was his "Atmospheric, Electromagnetic Telegraph, conducted by Animal Instinct," or, more shortly, his Tempest Prognosticator," which he built for the Great Exhibition of 1851. It is a beautiful structure, with a bell at the top designed to look like the dome at St. Pauls. Around the bottom are placed a dozen glass bottles; threading from tiny hammers around the edge of the bell are threads, which connect to a piece of whalebone just inside the neck of each bottle. Inside each bottle is poured an inch of rainwater and then -- oh happy home! -- each bottle is occupied by a leech. A common, ordinary surgical leech.
Being a doctor, Merryweather had observed that medical leeches responded to barometric pressure or electrical charge in the air, or whatever it is that allows smaller animals to know when bad weather is afoot. The leeches' response was to climb -- probably a good response for water-dwelling creatures just before a rain, so that they don't get washed away. So when Merryweather's leeches climbed to the top of the bottle, they nudged the piece of whalebone, which caused the string to move and ring the bell. It's not clear, but it appears that the more the bell rang before a storm, the worse the weather to come.
The Tempest Prognosticator proved to be surprisingly accurate, but did not catch on because it was not considered scientific enough. Read more about the device at Cabinet of Wonders, on a visit to the Whitby Museum, where Merryweather's device is housed. Link
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More than 2,500 still photos were taken to make this video. At first, you'll wonder why they used stop-motion animation, but it soon becomes necessary. Then there are a few "how did they do that?" moments. If you like it, continue for the improved photographic stunts in the sequel. -via Metafilter
In 2009, Jesse Dimmick entered the home of Jared and Lindsay Rowley and held them at knifepoint for a couple of hours. The three watched the movie Patch Adams and had snacks. When Dimmick fell asleep, the couple escaped and police, who had been in pursuit of Dimmick over a murder and a car theft, arrested him. Dimmick was shot during the arrest.
An attorney for the Rowleys says, of course, that any contract with Dimmick is not valid. Link -via Boing Boing
Various lawsuits followed. Dimmick sued the city of Topeka over the shooting, and (possibly because of the prospect that he might get money from that suit) the Rowleys sued Dimmick last September for trespass, intrusion and negligent infliction of emotional distress. That seems to have given Dimmick the idea to sue the Rowleys, and he brought a counterclaim against them for breach of contract.
You see, Dimmick alleges that, after breaking into the Rowleys' home with a knife and gun, they all then sat down and hashed out a deal under which they would hide him from police (the police who were right outside) for an unspecified amount of money. "Later," he complained, "the Rowleys reneged on said oral contract, resulting in my being shot in the back by authorities." Ergo, breach of contract.
An attorney for the Rowleys says, of course, that any contract with Dimmick is not valid. Link -via Boing Boing
Three men were arrested for theft from the Notcutt Garden Centre in Pembury, Kent, England. They broke two CCTV cameras, but did not see others that caught their movements.
The three Grinches who tried to steal Christmas later pleaded guilty to theft charges. Link -via Arbroath
In a scene straight out of the Special Branch files, police cars cut off all exits around the site after security staff reported the incident.
Officers then moved in - catching one thief attempting to escape, and finding two more hiding in bushes.
Officers then followed a trail of pine needles to the thieves’ van, where 138 Christmas trees of various sizes, as well as 48 boxes of Christmas lights and two wheelbarrows were found stacked nearby, ready to be loaded. The haul was worth almost £7,000.
The three Grinches who tried to steal Christmas later pleaded guilty to theft charges. Link -via Arbroath
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This dog has a lot of energy! She manages to burn it up, while cats are ready for a nap anytime. -via Buzzfeed
Art Conservator Gwynne Ryan
Dead sharks? Edible statues? Contemporary artists rely on exotic materials to push the boundaries of art. And they're using a new breed of conservators to fix things when they go bad.
Forget the white coats, Forget the magnifying glasses and tiny brushes. Sure, classical art conservators still spend their days and nights obsessing over ways to remove centuries of grime from Renaissance frescoes, but contemporary art preservation is an entirely different picture. After all, how do you save a putrefying shark? How do you deal with an avant-garde video installation that's blinking out? And what do you do when the industrial-grade fireworks stuffed in the headless cow carcass stubbornly refuse to light? Modern art represents the Wild West of art preservation -a world in which artists push the envelope with outrageous ideas and materials, and conservators use any means necessary to keep those works in one piece and on display.
We asked top pros to share the inside stories behind some of the most outlandish and challenging conservation projects. Norman Rockwell paintings these ain't.
The shark was, well, rotting. Despite its portentous title, Damien Hirst's 1991 masterwork was pretty straightforward: a dead tiger shark suspended in an acrylic glass tank filled with 224 gallons of water. The problem was that the huge fish began to decompose almost immediately -Hirst had failed to preserve it properly. To stem the stench, London's Saatchi Gallery pumped bleach into the water, but that only made the shark decompose faster. None of this stopped an American hedge-fund manager from buying the work for $8 million in 2004, making it one of the most expensive contemporary art sales ever.
An almost comical series of attempts to preserve the putrid predator ensued. Hirst and his conservators had the shark skinned and its hide tanned and mounted onto a fiberglass skeleton. But the result, intended to inspire terror, looked like a rejected prop from Jaws 3-D.
So Hirst threw in the fish towel. He struck a deal with the buyer: For a six-figure fee, he simply acquired another dead shark from an Australian fisherman, and this time preserved it with formaldehyde. Shark number two is a foot shorter, but its gaping jaws are wider and scarier. If all goes well, it will last 250 years. "That piece is like the Sistine Chapel, it's so iconic," says Gwynne Ryan, sculpture conservator at the Smithsonian's Hirshhorn Museum, who has worked on other Hirst pieces. "Will we look back on all these changes and say: 'God, what a ridiculous thing to do?' It's kind of hard to know."
As for shark number one? It went from a multimillion dollar artwork to 1,800 pounds of biological waste in the blink of an eye.
Even back when cathode-ray tube (CRT) televisions were the norm, repairing one was a headache. It meant hauling the heavy box to a cluttered shop, where a guy named Murray in a stained shirt would place it on a shelf, and then call you two weeks later with a Kansas-sized bill. Now imagine having to fix 70 of them, with the added problem that CRTs are obsolete and Murray is retired or dead.
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Dead sharks? Edible statues? Contemporary artists rely on exotic materials to push the boundaries of art. And they're using a new breed of conservators to fix things when they go bad.
Forget the white coats, Forget the magnifying glasses and tiny brushes. Sure, classical art conservators still spend their days and nights obsessing over ways to remove centuries of grime from Renaissance frescoes, but contemporary art preservation is an entirely different picture. After all, how do you save a putrefying shark? How do you deal with an avant-garde video installation that's blinking out? And what do you do when the industrial-grade fireworks stuffed in the headless cow carcass stubbornly refuse to light? Modern art represents the Wild West of art preservation -a world in which artists push the envelope with outrageous ideas and materials, and conservators use any means necessary to keep those works in one piece and on display.
We asked top pros to share the inside stories behind some of the most outlandish and challenging conservation projects. Norman Rockwell paintings these ain't.
(Image credit: Fickr user Rupert Ganzer)
The shark was, well, rotting. Despite its portentous title, Damien Hirst's 1991 masterwork was pretty straightforward: a dead tiger shark suspended in an acrylic glass tank filled with 224 gallons of water. The problem was that the huge fish began to decompose almost immediately -Hirst had failed to preserve it properly. To stem the stench, London's Saatchi Gallery pumped bleach into the water, but that only made the shark decompose faster. None of this stopped an American hedge-fund manager from buying the work for $8 million in 2004, making it one of the most expensive contemporary art sales ever.
An almost comical series of attempts to preserve the putrid predator ensued. Hirst and his conservators had the shark skinned and its hide tanned and mounted onto a fiberglass skeleton. But the result, intended to inspire terror, looked like a rejected prop from Jaws 3-D.
So Hirst threw in the fish towel. He struck a deal with the buyer: For a six-figure fee, he simply acquired another dead shark from an Australian fisherman, and this time preserved it with formaldehyde. Shark number two is a foot shorter, but its gaping jaws are wider and scarier. If all goes well, it will last 250 years. "That piece is like the Sistine Chapel, it's so iconic," says Gwynne Ryan, sculpture conservator at the Smithsonian's Hirshhorn Museum, who has worked on other Hirst pieces. "Will we look back on all these changes and say: 'God, what a ridiculous thing to do?' It's kind of hard to know."
As for shark number one? It went from a multimillion dollar artwork to 1,800 pounds of biological waste in the blink of an eye.
(Image credit: Flickr user Ian T Edwards)
Even back when cathode-ray tube (CRT) televisions were the norm, repairing one was a headache. It meant hauling the heavy box to a cluttered shop, where a guy named Murray in a stained shirt would place it on a shelf, and then call you two weeks later with a Kansas-sized bill. Now imagine having to fix 70 of them, with the added problem that CRTs are obsolete and Murray is retired or dead.
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The moral of the story is: if you are going to sail off the coast of Wales on December 5th, you may want to change your name to Hugh Williams. But is this a true story? Any records from these incidences seem to be at least second-hand. I found a post at The Scuttlefish that may shed a bit of light on how "coincidental" the story really is. And be sure to check out the comment from Hugh Williams. Link
The Philips company introduces lights that run without electricity or solar power. Instead, they harness the bioluminescence of bacteria. You have to feed them fuel, namely methane and compost. The lights developed so far aren't bright enough to read by, but they may have other uses, like illuminating dark roads and exit signs. Link -via Buzzfeed
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It may look like a simple piece of plastic, but this robot has the moves! In fact, that's what it is for -to test out news ways for a robot to move. Developed by researchers at Harvard University, this soft robot was inspired by the movements of squid and worms. Link -via Cosmic Variance
The economy was tanking. Millions lost their jobs. Stocks were down. And since bankers seemed to be riding out the bad times better than anyone, the government appointed a commission to look into who was to blame for the crash. But this was 1933, and Ferdinand Pecora was chief counsel to the U.S. Senate’s Committee on Banking and Currency.
That was just the beginning. The proceedings became a "circus" and a media sensation. Read about how Pecora unearthed the dirty secrets of the banking industry that led to the Great Depression at Past Imperfect. Link
Assigned to probe the causes of the 1929 crash, he led what became known as the “Pecora commission,” making front-page news when he called Charles Mitchell, the head of the largest bank in America, National City Bank (now Citibank), as his first witness. “Sunshine Charley” strode into the hearings with a good deal of contempt for both Pecora and his commission. Though shareholders had taken staggering losses on bank stocks, Mitchell admitted that he and his top officers had set aside millions of dollars from the bank in interest-free loans to themselves. Mitchell also revealed that despite making more than $1 million in bonuses in 1929, he had paid no taxes due to losses incurred from the sale of diminished National City stock—to his wife. Pecora revealed that National City had hidden bad loans by packaging them into securities and pawning them off to unwitting investors. By the time Mitchell’s testimony made the newspapers, he had been disgraced, his career had been ruined, and he would soon be forced into a million-dollar settlement of civil charges of tax evasion. “Mitchell,” said Senator Carter Glass of Virginia, “more than any 50 men is responsible for this stock crash.”
That was just the beginning. The proceedings became a "circus" and a media sensation. Read about how Pecora unearthed the dirty secrets of the banking industry that led to the Great Depression at Past Imperfect. Link
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