Rare fire tornado caught on film
“Severe drought and strong dry winds in Sao Paolo have caused a rare fire tornado in the northwest city of Aracatuba. A three month drought in the region has led to brush fires across Brazil, creating the conditions for the fire tornado. Fire tornados, also known colloquially as fire devils, happen when a fire acquires a vertical rotating column of air. Some can be more than a half a mile tall and contain winds over 100 mph.
In 1923, Great Kanto earthquake in Japan, ignited a firestorm that raged through the city and produced a gigantic fire tornado that killed 38,000 in 15 minutes in the Hifukusho-Ato region of Tokyo.”
Read more at The Telegraph (Thanks @whispywolf)
The Pizza Burger: A 2,500-Calorie ‘Fat Bomb’
“Burger King is set to launch the Pizza Burger – a two-in-one dish that contains more than 2,500 calories and is four times the size of the chain’s Whoppers.
The meal will delight fast-food fans when it is exclusively introduced at Burger King’s Whopper Bar in Times Square, New York, next month. Besides the beef and a 9.5-inch sesame bun, the Pizza Burger is topped with pepperoni, mozzarella, Tuscan pesto and marinara sauce. It also comes in six slices, just like a pizza.
According to blogger Me So Hungry, it is the perfect mix between a pizza and a burger. “The visual highlight was the New York Pizza Burger… it’s not bad. Tastes kinda like pizza, but also like a burger,” the blogger said. It has been dubbed the “fat bomb” because, for $13 (£8.40), customers can bite into 2,520 calories – the recommended daily intake is 2,500 calories for men and 2,000 for women.
One Pizza Burger contains 144g of fat – 59g of which is saturated. It also has 3,780mg of salt, which is more than double the daily limit for adults. John Schaufelberger, Burger King’s vice president of global marketing, insisted the Pizza Burger is “intended to be shared”. But he also admitted that it “demonstrates the type of menu offerings our guests can expect”. According to Mr Schaufelberger, the Pizza Burger is a homage to New York, the home of Burger King.”
Read more at Sky News (Thanks Liam R)
Micro Frog Discovered Inside Bornean Pitcher Plants
Scientists have discovered the Old World’s smallest species of frog living inside pitcher plants in the jungles of Southeast Asia’s Borneo.
The micro frogs, named Microhyla nepenthicola, grow to only 0.4 to 0.5 inches long — about the size of a pea. It was discovered living along the edge of a road in Kubah National Park in Borneo by a team of scientists searching for the world’s lost amphibians, species considered to be extinct that may still have remnant populations.
“I saw some specimens in museum collections that are over 100 years old,” biologist Indraneil Das, one of frog discovers, said in a press release. “Scientists presumably thought they were juveniles of other species, but it turns out they are adults of this newly-discovered micro species.”
Read more at Wired (Thanks @UKgnome and @XxLadyClaireXx)
Recycled Chewing Gum Turned Into Chewing Gum Bins
“Tired of gum-plastered streets, Anna Bullus decided to design and install chewing gum receptacles made, naturally, from recycled chewing gum. Her pink “Gumdrops” now appear in five UK locations and Six Flags Theme Park in New Jersey.
Though she won’t reveal the gum rubber’s exact contents, Bullus told The Guardian that eight months in a lab allowed her to perfect her technique, making gum first into a foam and then a used-gum pellet, before extracting a polymer modestly called BRGP (Bullus Recycled Gum Polymer). Perhaps it’s not surprising that you could turn gum into plastic, since the “nonnutritive masticatory substance” that gives gum its chewiness can include butyl rubber, used in inner tubes.
If her Gumdrops can keep gum off the streets, such bins might save British taxpayers an estimated £150 ($300) million per year–that’s what the government spends now on steam hoses, freezing machines, and corrosive chemical street cleanings. Plus Bullus says the Gumdrops, once full, can provide fodder for more Gumdrops and other plastic products. She told The Guardian: “The amazing thing is you can use it for any plastic product…. I’d love to do some Wellington boots, for example. Gum boots, in fact.””
Read more at Discover Magazine
Mafia using football show to send messages to jailed bosses
The Telegraph is making the claim that Italian gangsters are using a TV’s shows text ticker to send coded messages to their jailed bosses.
The Italian programme, which is hosted by a former showgirl, allows football fans to send SMS text messages which then run along a ticker tape at the bottom of the screen when the show is being broadcast.
Anti-mafia prosecutors believe that members of organised crime gangs have caught onto the interactive feature, sending seemingly innocuous comments and remarks which in fact contain important messages for imprisoned mafia godfathers, many of whom continue to run their criminal empires despite being behind bars. One of the messages, allegedly of significance for a jailed criminal mastermind, simply read: “All is well, Paolo”. Full article here.
This is not the first case of an incident like this – in the past there have been multiple claims about hidden codes displayed in public such as the very recent FBI accusations about Russian spies using US newspapers to hide messages in newspapers. This was also a main theme of the film A Beautiful Mind based on the life of John Nash, the inventor of Game Theory. So whilst it may seem inventive for some, the idea stetches back to the 1930′s.
The moon is shrinking, say scientists
“Astronomers have declared that the moon is shrinking after spotting wrinkles all over the lunar surface. The tell-tale contraction marks were discovered by US scientists who examined thousands of photographs of the moon’s surface taken by a Nasa orbiter.
Some of the wrinkles are several miles long and rise tens of metres above the dusty terrain. Researchers believe they arise from the moon decreasing in size by around 200 metres across its diameter. The moon’s mean diameter is generally calculated to be 2,159 miles.
The prospect of a shrinking moon is not new to planetary experts. When the moon formed it had a hot core, much like that of the Earth, which caused it first to expand and then contract as it cooled down.
The latest findings suggest the moon could still be cooling, a process that causes the surface to compress and form the wrinkle-like features, known as lobate scarps.
A team led by Thomas Watters at the Smithsonian Institution in Washington DC studied high-resolution images of the moon taken over the past year by Nasa’s latest moon probe, the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter. The spacecraft cameras provide the most detailed images of the moon ever taken from orbit.
Fourteen lobate scarps were identified, at sites as far apart as the lunar equator and near the poles. The features are so pristine scientists think they could be no more than a billion years old.
“Not only could they be indicating recent contraction of the moon, they may be indicating that the moon is still contracting,” said Watters. “Until now, we really had no evidence of cooling and the contraction of the moon that would go along with it. This isn’t anything to worry about. The moon may be shrinking, but not by much. It’s not going anywhere.”"
Read more at The Guardian (Thanks elke and UKgnome)
The secrets of the ads that ‘stalk’ you
Imagine walking into a shoe shop in the high street, picking up and looking at a few pairs of shoes, before putting them down and leaving the store. Then imagine checking out a few other shops before popping into a newsagent, where you start flicking through a newspaper. As you do this, a display appears with the exact same shoes that you were interested in half an hour earlier, along with a deal attempting to lure you back to make a purchase.
That experience is pretty much analogous to personalised retargeting in the online advertising world and might explain why you might sometimes feel like those shoes or those bikes are stalking you across the web.
Brands such as Office and Halfords are amongst the first in the UK to employ this sort of retargeting technology, provided by companies such as Criteo and Struq. Take a visit to one of their websites, browse a few items and then check out thesun.co.uk and you are pretty likely to be greeted by your selected items in an ad on the side of the site. See below:
Read more at Wired (Thanks @XxLadyClaireXx)
The Mystery of the missing plastic
We’re referring to the great patch of plastic in the North Atlantic Gyre. You might have read the stories in DISCOVER and elsewhere about the more famous Great Pacific Garbage Patch, a Texas-sized soup of tiny plastic pieces in the middle of that ocean. Circulating ocean currents create these gyres in several places around the world, and ocean-borne plastic gets trapped. The Woods Hole paper is the result of a two-decade study of the Atlantic patch that produced a surprising result: The amount in total plastic appears to have leveled off—at least according to the data.
Humans haven’t stopped putting plastic into the ocean, so what gives?
“We know that global production of plastics has increased substantially over the time period” and disposal also has increased, said Kara Lavender Law of the Sea Education Association in Woods Hole, Mass. “If there is more plastic trash it’s hard to believe more is not making it into the ocean. There is missing plastic out there,” she said
Full story by AP and Discover 80 Beats
Fossil Reveals 48-Million-Year History of Zombie Ants
“A 48-million-year-old fossilised leaf has revealed the oldest known evidence of a macabre part of nature — parasites taking control of their hosts to turn them into zombies. The discovery has been made by a research team led by Dr David P Hughes, from the University of Exeter, who studies parasites that can take over the minds of their hosts.
All manner of animals are susceptible to the often deadly body invasion, but scientists have been trying to track down when and where such parasites evolved.
Dr Hughes, from the University’s School of Biosciences, said: “There are various techniques, called a molecular clock approach, which we can use to estimate where and when they developed and fossils are an important source of information to calibrate such clocks. “This leaf shows clear signs of one well documented form of zombie-parasite, a fungus which infects ants and then manipulates their behaviour.”
The fungus, called Ophiocordyceps unilateralis, causes ants to leave their colonies and head for a leaf which provides the ideal conditions for the host to reproduce.
When it gets there the ant goes into a ‘death grip’- biting down very hard on the major vein of a leaf. This means that when the ant dies, its body stays put so the fungus has time to grow and release its spores to infect other ants.”
Read more at Science Daily (Thanks @XxLadyClaireXx)
Drug firms hiding negative research are unfit to experiment on people
“This week the drug company AstraZeneca paid out £125m to settle a class action. More than 17,500 patients claim the company withheld information showing that schizophrenia drug quetiapine (tradename Seroquel) can cause diabetes. So why do companies pay out money before cases get to court?
An interesting feature of litigation is that various documents enter the public domain. This is how we know about the tobacco industry’s evil plans to target children, the fake academic journal that Elsevier created for Merck’s marketing department, and so on.
One of the most revealing documents ever to come out of a drug company emerged from an earlier quetiapine case: an email from John Tumas, publications manager at AstraZeneca. In it, he helpfully admits that they do everything I say drug companies do.
“Please allow me to join the fray,” Tumas begins, in response to a colleague. “There has been a precedent set regarding ‘cherry picking’ of data.” Cherry picking is where you report only flattering data, and ignore or bury data you don’t like. The ears of lawyers prick up at any use of the word “bury” in relation to drug company data, as it implies something deliberate, and luckily John uses this word himself. The precedent, he explains, is “the recent … presentations of cognitive function data from trial 15 (one of the buried trials)”.
In trial 15, commissioned by AstraZeneca, patients with schizophrenia who were in remission were randomly assigned to receive either AstraZeneca’s quetiapine, or a cheap, old-fashioned drug called haloperidol. After a year, the patients on Seroquel were doing worse: they had more relapses and worse ratings on various symptom scales. These negative findings were left unpublished: to use Tumas’s word, they were “buried”.
But in among all these important negative findings, on a few measures of “cognitive functioning” – an attention task, a verbal memory test – Seroquel did better. This finding alone was published in a research paper in 2002. AstraZeneca kept quiet about the fact that patients on Seroquel had worse outcomes for schizophrenia. The research paper went on to become a highly influential piece of work, cited by more than 100 academic research papers. Many researchers can only dream of publishing such a well cited piece of work.
Trial 15 also found that patients on Seroquel gained, on average, 5kg in weight over a year. This put them at increased risk of diabetes, which is what AstraZeneca is now paying to settle on (and in any case, a 5kg weight gain is a serious side-effect in itself).”
Read more at The Guardian (Thanks @nettmac)
