Chinese woman boiled man’s head to cure psychiatric problems
Lin Zongxiu, from the southwestern province of Sichuan, heard in 2008 that soup made with a man’s head could help cure her daughter who had suffered from psychiatric problems for years, the Chengdu Commercial newspaper reported.
Lin and her husband decided to enlist the help of a man in December who knocked unconscious a drunk 76-year-old passer-by before beheading him, the paper claimed.
The couple then gave their 25-year-old daughter soup made from the man’s head, and duck.
A local court sentenced the murderer to death with a two-year reprieve on Monday, and Lin was convicted of helping to destroy evidence that included the culprit’s bloody clothes and shoes, the paper said.
The murderer’s reprieve means that his sentence will likely be commuted to life in prison as long as he commits no further offences in the next two years.
Tazmanian wallabies get high on opium, make crop circles then crash out.
Wallabies snacking in opium poppy fields are getting “high as a kite” and hopping around creating crop circles. Tasmania is the world’s largest producer of legally-grown opium for the pharmaceutical market. Tasmania attorney-general Lara Giddings told a budget hearing that she recently read about the wallabies in a brief on the state’s large poppy industry. She said: “We have a problem with wallabies entering poppy fields, getting as high as a kite and going around in circles. Then they crash. We see crop circles in the poppy industry from wallabies that are high.”
A manager for one of two Tasmanian companies licensed to take medicinal products from poppy straw said wildlife and livestock — including deer and sheep — that eat the poppies are known to “act weird”. Tasmanian Alkaloids field operations manager Rick Rockliff said: “There have been many stories about sheep that have eaten some of the poppies after harvesting and they all walk around in circles.” Tasmania supplies about 50% of the world’s raw material for morphine and related opiates. About 500 farmers grow the crop on 49,420 acres of land.
Christian stand up
It’s not that funny and the audience don’t seem to be amused but the name is the best part – EVERYTHING IS TERRIBLE.
Inside Nature’s Giants: A gory attempt to disprove ‘intelligent design’ theories
f the many extraordinary sights revealed in Channel 4’s upcoming four-part series Inside Nature’s Giants, which uses dissection to take us inside the bodies of an elephant, giraffe and crocodile, the most remarkable is surely afforded by an autopsy carried out on a 65-foot long, 60-ton fin whale (a species second only in size to the blue whale) beached off the coast of Ireland.
“I am always awed by how magnificently large and streamlined whales are,” says Dr Joy Reidenberg, the comparative anatomist who oversaw the in situ dissection amid gales, driving rain and hail. Working against the effects of rapid decomposition and an advancing tide that threatened to engulf the whale, Reidenberg’s team had only a few hours to complete the dissection. “It’s a messy operation,” Reidenberg explains. “You have to dissect it from the inside out. At one point I crawled under the ribcage to get to the heart. All you could see were my boots sticking out.”
The team excised over 200 feet of guts, which were loaded onto dumper trucks and laid out on tarp sheets the size of an Olympic swimming pool. Other markers of the whale’s immensity included jaws weighing three tons each, a heart the size of a small car and a windpipe wide enough, says Reidenberg, “that I could actually wear it like a dress”.
Inside Nature’s Giants, which starts on Channel 4 – Monday, is the brainchild of producer David Dugan of Windfall Films (also behind The Operation: Surgery Live). “I had been reading about Darwin and early animal dissections carried out by his friend Richard Owen,” Dugan says. “Each animal’s evolutionary past is hidden within its anatomy. These dissections gave us the chance to show how natural selection created these animals.”
Left-handers ‘think’ more quickly
Left-handed people can think quicker when carrying out tasks such as playing computer games or playing sport, say Australian researchers. Connections between the left and right hand sides or hemispheres of the brain are faster in left-handed people, a study in Neuropsychology shows.The fast transfer of information in the brain makes left-handers more efficient when dealing with multiple stimuli. Experts said left-handers tended to use both sides of the brain more easily. Study leader Dr Nick Cherbuin from the Australian National University measured transfer time between the two sides of the brain by measuring reaction times to white dots flashed to the left and right of a fixed cross.
The 16 year old baby that never grows up
Brooke Greenberg is the size of an infant, with the mental capacity of a toddler. She turned 16 in January.
“Why doesn’t she age?” Howard Greenberg, 52, asked of his daughter. “Is she the fountain of youth?”
Such questions are why scientists are fascinated by Brooke. Among the many documented instances of children who fail to grow or develop in some way, Brooke’scase may be unique, according to her doctor, Johns Hopkins School of Medicine pediatrician Lawrence Pakula, in Baltimore.
“Many of the best-known names in medicine, in their experience … had not seen anyone who matched up to Brooke,” Pakula said. “She is always a surprise.”
Win Derren Brown ENIGMA tickets for 29 June 2009
Please note this was for June 2009 tickets and this competition is therefore closed.
Yes that right there’s a competition over at the facebook page run by Abeo:
http://www.facebook.com/DerrenBrown
Send your entries here. Again you can enter as many times as you like although this time it’s a little harder. We’re not so concerned if your not a fantastic artist/photoshop guru (like the one above from 6yr old Sarah) as it’s ideas that will win us over. However if you enter a stunning piece of artwork (that is your own!!!) that will impress us too.
Get your crayola out and good luck.
PD+Abeo.
Smoke ring causes people to have “religious experience”
There really was a smoke ring in the sky, and if you look through the comments or watch the attached news video, you will see that many other people saw the same thing in the sky (and even had religious experiences due to it). I am convinced now that this smoke ring did come from the volcano ride.
There was not much wind that day, so the smoke ring somehow stayed intact . . . I’m not sure how, but it did. I have spoken with others from my work who were there and they have said they witnessed the same smoke ring actually come from the Volcano ride. I hope this clears up some of the questions out there.
The Girl with the X-Ray Eyes
Natasha Demkina (born in 1987, in the city of Saransk) is hailed in Russia as “the girl with X-ray eyes”. The girl claims to have the gift of second sight, which enables her to see internal organs of the human body. She describes her phenomenal abilities it as follows:
“I have two sights. I can switch any minute without reason, should I want to see the state of health of a person,” Natasha said. “This switching makes no difficulty to me; I just need to think about it. I can see the full structure of a human body – how internal organs are positioned and how they function. It’s hard to explain how I identify diseases. Afflicted organs produce a kind of radiation. The second sight is active only in the daytime; it does not work at night.”
At the same time Natasha is unable to see her own internal organs.
UPDATE:
Richard Wiseman produced a Discovery documentary back in 2004 with this girl – more information about it here.
As part of the programme, tests were performed on Natasha by the Committee for the Scientific Investigation of Claims of the Paranormal (CSICOP) and the affiliated Commission for Scientific Medicine and Mental Health (CSMMH) to scientifically assess the young woman’s claims. The tests were intended as a first stage – if she could ‘pass’ this then her claims would merit further research and testing. However Natasha only succeeded in correctly matching four target conditions out of a possible seven, and the scientists required a score of five to warrant continuing their investigations
Massive Stingray Migration: Amazing photos
Looking like giant leaves floating in the sea, thousands of Golden Rays are seen here gathering off the coast of Mexico. The spectacular scene was captured as the magnificent creatures made one of their biannual mass migrations to more agreeable waters.
Gliding silently beneath the waves, they turned vast areas of blue water to gold off the northern tip of the Yucatan Peninsula . Sandra Critelli, an amateur photographer, stumbled across the phenomenon while looking for whale sharks. She said: “It was an unreal image, very difficult to describe. The surface of the water was covered by warm and different shades of gold and looked like a bed of autumn leaves gently moved by the wind.
Measuring up to 7ft (2.1 metres) from wing-tip to wing-tip, Golden rays are also more prosaically known as cow nose rays.
