Bizarre Stuffed Animals To Be Sold At Auction
“A collection of bizarre stuffed animals including a unicorn, flying cat, yeti, and other curious creatures purportedly discovered by a Victorian adventurer are to be sold at auction.
The fictional menagerie of deceased critters also boasts an extended sausage dog, furry fish, mermaid and a bizarre bat-like winged beast with webbed feet.
They formed part of a museum of taxidermy that has closed and now are to go under the hammer.
They were billed in the 19th century as having been brought to the UK by fictional adventurer Professor Copperthwaite.
Some Victorians might even have believed these impossible creatures existed because some, like the Siamese sheep, were real.
Others such as the Jackalope – a nearly extinct antlered species of rabbit ‘found almost exclusively on the high plains of Wyoming’ – were not.”
Read more at The Telegraph (thanks, KirstyJ)
3D Space Pictures Of Moons, Galaxies And Nebulae
“Remember the 1990s craze of Magic Eye posters? Just like those, the spectacular space pictures in this gallery can be brought to life in 3D when viewers use a trick of the eye – with no need for special glasses. Stare into the screen and allow your eyes to defocus. You will get double vision as each eye sees the L & R images separately. Move your head towards and away from the screen until the two middle images overlap. The single overlapping image should be in 3D.”
Read more at The Telegraph (thanks, Dmaco)
Using Facebook to Curb Disease?
“When it comes to curbing epidemics, it makes sense to understand social networks. Figuring out who might have a disease and is most likely to spread it to others is essential to controlling an outbreak.
But scientists haven’t had good ways to do that. They often rely on unrealistic models that assume all people interact with each other with equal frequency. Think of a bag of Shake ‘n Bake: chances are all the pieces of meat will be coated with equal amounts of breadcrumbs simply because they’re tossed together.
Stanford researchers Marcel Salathe and James Holland Jones have come up with a better, more strategic way to track and curb the spread of disease that reflects real-life relationships. Developing an algorithm and testing it on Facebook data, they’ve figured out how to identify the social interactions between communities — the relationships most likely to link one group to another and get more people sick.
Their “community bridge finder” algorithm is presented in a paper published in the April 8 edition of PLoS Computational Biology.
The model takes into account community structure, social networks and the fact that tightly knit groups are often connected by just a few individuals — ideas that seem obvious but have not been applied by epidemiologists.”
Read more at Dr Dobbs
Miltonian Keynes
After the raucous delights of Northern audiences, it was down South to a very different sort of place. Again, the energy of the city was reflected in the audience, which is always so interesting: this time quiet and attentive, quite different from the previous nights. I spoke about this with a lovely couple who come to see the show a lot, back at the hotel over post-show booze and soup. The lady, a resident of Milton Keynes, insightfully pointed out that as a new town, MK has no real sense of community, no generation of people having grown up there, and correspondingly there was no sense of the audience as a solid, living entity in the same way there is in, say, Sunderland or Edinburgh where we had recently played. Instead, I felt, the MK crowd were (thankfully) polite and awaited their cues from me: a ‘vertical’ line of communication with little happening between them: little ‘horizontally’, as it were.
Acoustically the room held back a lot of the reactions too, so all in all the first night was a slight culture shock. The second night, as happens, felt warmer (in part, it was, and in part I had got used to the room). The nights were a pleasure to play, and volunteers were bright and fun. I have though been lulled into enjoying attentive and courteous audiences: tonight I am in Belfast, where once again there is a rich and powerful sense of community (or perhaps more strictly, communities), and much more tendency to heckle (not that I get much of that). Doubtless I’ll have a little shock again, and then tomorrow I shall ride it with ease.
I have spent the afternoon with a couple of talented friends from the mentalism world (Belfast’s David Meade and Toronto’s Thomas Baxter), chatting in part about some of the magnificently awful ways the medium Doris Stokes would garner information about her audience. Friendships with some of her touring party yielded some juicy secrets.
I must leave for the Waterfront. The crew have been there all day putting up the show in this massive concert hall: perhaps not aesthetically the best environment for the show, but a great room and a lovely in-house crew. If you’re coming tonight, I can’t wait to see you.
x
Giant Penguins Once Roamed Peru Desert
“Penguins about the size of humans roamed South America some 35 million years ago, and they didn’t need ice to survive.
That’s the result of a new study by North Carolina State University paleontologist Julia Clarke and her colleagues.
The discovery pushes the date of penguin migration to equatorial regions back more than 30 million years, to one of the warmest periods of the last 65 million years.
The find also casts doubt on climate as the main factor in penguins’ choice of habitat through history.
“The public is very familiar with the image of penguins and icebergs,” Clarke said.
Today’s penguins are cold-adapted and therefore at grave risk from global warming, she said, but the new fossils suggest that hasn’t always been true.”
Read more at National Geographic
A Guide To The Apollo Hoax Theories
“9/11 and Kennedy aside, no event in world history has generated quite so many conspiracy theories than the Apollo moon landings. But do they stand up? Here are the best reasons why it couldn’t have happened, and the rebuttals. Of course, you may disagree.”
Read more at The Independent
Richard Dawkins Pushes For Pope’s Arrest
“RICHARD DAWKINS, the atheist campaigner, is planning a legal ambush to have the Pope arrested during his state visit to Britain ‘for crimes against humanity’.
Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens, the atheist author, have asked human rights lawyers to produce a case for charging Pope Benedict XVI over his alleged cover-up of sexual abuse in the Catholic church.
The pair believe they can exploit the same legal principle used to arrest Augusto Pinochet, the late Chilean dictator, when he visited Britain in 1998.
The Pope was embroiled in new controversy this weekend over a letter he signed arguing that the ‘good of the universal church’ should be considered against the defrocking of an American priest who committed sex offences against two boys. It was dated 1985, when he was in charge of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, which deals with sex abuse cases.”
Read more at Times Online
Dawkins comments on the issue:
“‘Should Pope Benedict XVI be held responsible for the escalating scandals over clerical sexual abuse in Europe?’
Yes he should, and it’s going to escalate a lot further, as more and more victims break through the guilt of their childhood indoctrination and come forward.
“Should he be investigated for how cases of abuse were handled under his watch as archbishop of Munich or as the Vatican’s chief doctrinal enforcer?”
Yes, of course he should. This former head of the Inquisition should be arrested the moment he dares to set foot outside his tinpot fiefdom of the Vatican, and he should be tried in an appropriate civil – not ecclesiastical – court. That’s what should happen. Sadly, we all know our faith-befuddled governments will be too craven to do it.”
Read more at the Washington Post (thanks, GadgetFreakk)
One In Five Adults Believe Aliens Are Disguised Among Us
“The poll questioned 23,000 adults in 22 countries and found that more than 40 per cent of people from India and China believe that alien life exists with a human facade on this planet.
European respondents in the survey were more sceptical with only eight per cent of people from Belgium, Sweden and the Netherlands convinced that life from outer space exists on earth.
Men were more likely to believe in extra-terrestrial life than women with 22 per cent convinced compared to 17 per cent of women.”
Read more at The Telegraph (thanks, Tiram)
Earthworms Form Herds And Make ‘Group Decisions’
“Earthworms form herds and make ‘group decisions’, scientists have discovered. The earthworms use touch to communicate and influence each other’s behaviour, according to research published in the journal Ethology. By doing so the worms collectively decide to travel in the same direction as part of a single herd.
The striking behaviour, found in the earthworm Eisenia fetida, is the first time that any type of worm, or annelid, has been shown to form active herds. ‘Our results modify the current view that earthworms are animals lacking in social behaviour,” says Ms Lara Zirbes, a PhD student at the University of Liege in Gembloux in Belgium. ‘We can consider the earthworm behaviour as equivalent the of a herd or swarm.’”
Read more at The BBC
CO2 May Cause Near Death Experiences
“Near death experiences could be caused by something as mundane as raised levels of carbon dioxide, scientists suggest. People who claim to have felt such experiences describe them as life flashing before their eyes, feelings of peace and joy and supernatural encounters. An ‘NDE’ is usually an experience described by someone who has been declared clinically dead or appears very close to death.
Improved resuscitation rates mean more NDEs are being reported but the causes for them are not known. Many scientists put them down to hallucinations while psychics or religious groups are more likely to consider them as evidence of an afterlife. A number of studies have been undertaken over the years but this is the first one that has taken carbon dioxide levels into consideration.”
Read more at Yahoo News (thanks, PaulB)
