Whale Poop Cleans The Environment
“Sperm whale waste isn’t much to look at — a diarrhea-like substance with a few squid beaks floating around — but new research has found it removes carbon from the atmosphere, helping to offset greenhouse gases that have been tied to global warming.
Sperm whales in the Southern Ocean release 220,462 tons of carbon when they exhale carbon dioxide at the water’s surface, but their poo stimulates the drawdown of 440,925 tons of carbon, according to the research, published in the latest Proceedings of the Royal Society B.
These ocean giants and certain other marine mammals may therefore be among the most environmentally beneficial animals on the planet.
“If Southern Ocean sperm whales were at their historic levels, meaning their population size before whaling, we would have an extra 2 million tonnes (2,204,623 tons) of carbon being removed from our atmosphere each and every year,” lead author Trisha Lavery Told Discovery News.”
Read more at Discovery News
230,000 Facebook Users Pranked
What do creative people do when they’re bored?
If you’re David Thorne, creator of the hilarious website 27b/6, and you’ve got a long weekend in front of you, you might try to see how many people you can get to RSVP to an imaginary woman‘s birthday party.
After selecting a photo of an “attractive, approachable” young woman, Thorne set up a prank Facebook page inviting her friends to “Kate’s Party,” pretended to accidentally leave it open to public viewing instead of setting it to private, then twittered his 27,000 followers.
Thorne’s followers (slashers?) swung into high gear and began RSVPing for the event, which prompted a “response” from “Kate” — who was allegedly horrified that her apartment was to be set upon by thousands of Aussie boozehounds.
“WTF?????????? WHO ARE YOU PEOPLE? WHY ARE THERE 10000 PEOPLE WHO HAVE BEEN INVITED??????? THIS IS A PRIVATE PARTY AT OUR APARTMENT,” she/he/someone wrote. When it got to 60,000 attendees, the event was canceled, with 170,000 more awaiting confirmation.
Continue reading at Zug
LA Dodgers owners paid Russian scientist for psychic baseball boost
“As a sport that arouses almost religious fervour it is unsurprising that baseball has its fair share of superstitions. It’s said that you will be jinxed if you lend your bat to another hitter, while some players stick chewing gum on their caps to bring good luck. But rarely in the history of America’s national game has there been anything quite like this. Frank and Jamie McCourt, the multi-millionaire owners of the LA Dodgers, have been revealed to have employed a Russian scientist to beam thought waves to boost the team’s chances.
According to Bill Shaikin of the LA Times, the McCourts paid Vladimir Shpunt several hundred thousand dollars over five years to apply his “V energy” and help the Dodgers to victory. Between 2004, the first season under the McCourts’ ownership, and 2009, Shpunt was retained for Dodgers matches, despite the fact that he knew little about baseball.
He would channel positive vibes towards the players as he sat in Boston, some 3,000 miles from LA. By watching the game on television, he could get instant feedback on how his energy was affecting performance. “It’s very big work. I like this team to win,” Shpunt told Shaikin. Shpunt began his professional life as a physicist in St Petersburg but says he discovered he had healing powers in the 1980s.”
Read more at The Guardian
Large Hadron Collider Pop-Up Book
“Pop-up books have always been the exhibitionists of the literary world—all those creases and protrusions. In Voyage to the Heart of Matter, Emma Sanders applies the in-your-face form to science: the Large Hadron Collider. It took CERN 12 years to build the subatomic smasher, and it took Sanders two years to re-create the folded-paper mini-me. She enlisted pop-up genius Anton Radevsky to painstakingly transform the LHC’s many elements into pulp sculpture, but they needed a lot of technical assistance—nearly 40 physicists provided scientific guidance, photos, and sketches of various parts of the $9 billion science experiment.
The scale of the paper particle detector is exact, and you put it together as you read through the book. The process mimics construction of the real collider (except you won’t need an enormous crane). “I nearly created a political incident, because I almost missed one of the magnets,” Sanders says. In the underground version, this magnet is made up of 5.5 miles of wire, but on paper it’s practically imperceptible. “It’s very skinny, but it’s there.”
Why go to all this trouble? Well, before the collider opened, tens of thousands of visitors packed in to see it. Now that it’s up and running, however, the facility is generally off-limits. “To a lot of people, the experiments at the LHC might as well be a black box,” Sanders says. “They’re very excited about it, but they don’t have a clue how it works.” This book makes the science accessible. Dark matter—visible at last!”
Read more at Wired
From Bat Bombs to Goo Guns: Crazy Military Experiments
“Military researchers have poured blood, sweat, tears and taxpayer dollars into all sorts of wacky experiments. There are plenty of reasons that they are willing to take a take a chance on just about anything. Some may feel that we need to invest in risky projects to keep an edge over our adversaries. Others may view unusual projects as a way of raising money for their own personal crusades.
Bat Bombs
Toward the end of World War II, the Air Force was looking for a better way to burn Japanese cities to the ground. A dental surgeon contacted the White House, and suggested strapping small incendiary devices to bats, loading them into cages shaped like bombshells and dropping them over a wide area.
According to the plan, millions of bats would escape from the bombshells as they parachuted toward earth, and the flying mammals would find their way into the attics of barns and factories, where they would rest until the charges they were carrying exploded. In the early 1940s, a test with some armed bats went awry, and they set fire to a small Air Force base in Carlsbad, New Mexico.
After that accident, the project was turned over to the Navy, which continued it for more than a year. During that time, the Marines conducted a successful proof of concept at Dugway Proving Grounds in Utah, where they released bats over a mock-up of a Japanese city. The critters were able to start quite a few fires.”
Head over to Wired to read more on 11 crazy military experiments.
The Umbilical Brothers
The Umbilical Brothers’ crazy act. Enjoy!
Parrots the Universe and Everything – Douglas Adams
As you all know (or should do) Derren is a patron of The National Parrot Sanctuary of the Parrot Zoo and we’re always looking for a shameless reason to plug the wonderful work they do. We found this talk by Douglas Adams and it’s a brilliant example of what a great story teller he is. So have a watch then head over to the Parrot Sanctuary website and tell them we said “Hiiii”.
Finnish Police Probe Theft Of Virtual Furniture
“A virtual thieving spree could have real life consequences for culprits in Finland, where police are investigating the theft of virtual furniture on a social networking site popular with teenagers.
‘Significant amounts of virtual property’ were stolen from around 400 users of the Habbo Hotel virtual hotel, where visitors can create a character for themselves to hang out with friends, take care of virtual pets and furnish their own rooms for a fee, Finnish police said Tuesday.
The cyber thieves used hoax web pages to steal user names and passwords, which they then used to sign in to Habbo profiles and shift property away from its rightful owners, the police said in a statement.
As part of the investigation, the police have searched homes in five Finnish cities, confiscated computers and interrogated several people, they said, adding that while the value of damages could not yet be defined, for some users the cost could be ‘significant’.”
Read more at Yahoo News (thanks, GadgetFreakk)
Researcher claims alien abduction of Voyager 2 probe
German researcher Hartwig Hausdorf has claimed that information coming back from the Voyager 2 probe, is coming back in a completely different format from what should be expected and could be due to extraterrestrial life. Hausdorf stated, “It seems almost as if someone had reprogrammed or hijacked the probe – thus perhaps we do not yet know the whole truth…”
Sent out on a 4 year mission with it’s sister probe Voyager 1 in 1977 the probe is currently around 92 Astronomical Units from the sun – 1 AU is equal to 149,597,871 kilometers and has visited more planets than any other spacecraft.
NASA said that Voyager 2 suddenly began transmitting data back in a different format. Scientists have had trouble interpreting the data but have put it down to a glitch in the onboard systems. Apart from this incident, the on-board computer is said to be working completely fine.
Project scientist Ed Stone said the most likely cause of the hiccup is a “bit flip”, where parts of a stream of data are improperly formatted.
Hausdorf is a prominent science fiction writer.
Voyager 2 – Wikipedia (Thanks @UKgnome)
Species Avoids Extinction By Abstaining from Sex for 30 Million Years
“They haven’t had sex in some 30 million years, but some very small invertebrates named bdelloid rotifers should have gone extinct long ago. Cornell researchers have discovered the secret to their evolutionary longevity: they are microscopic escape artists.
“These animals have evolved a way to avoid parasites and pathogens by drying up and blowing away,” said Paul Sherman, Cornell professor of neurobiology and behavior.
“These animals are essentially playing an evolutionary game of hide and seek,” said Sherman. “They can drift on the wind to colonize parasite-free habitat patches where they reproduce rapidly and depart again before their enemies catch up. This effectively enables them to evade biotic enemies without sex, using mechanisms that no other known animals can duplicate.”
After drying up, bdelloids come back to life when re-exposed to fresh water. The Cornell study is featured on the cover of the Jan. 29 issue of Science.
Bdelloid rotifers (pronounced DELL — oyd ROW-tiff-ers) are tiny, freshwater invertebrates that have long puzzled scientists because, as completely asexual animals, they should have been extinguished by parasites and pathogens long ago in evolutionary time. Instead, the bdelloids have proliferated into more than 450 species. Asexual animals like rotifers reproduce by cloning and this makes for a fixed gene pool.
Many scientists believe that the function of sex itself is to shuffle genes around. They theorize that the fresh genetic combinations that which sex provides allow sexual animals to fend off relentlessly evolving parasites and pathogens.
The discovery that bdelloids can desiccate and wisp away with the wind helps resolve the mystery of their ancient asexuality and success. “It also helps answer one of the deepest puzzles in evolutionary biology — why sex is nearly ubiquitous,” said Chris Wilson, a Cornell doctoral candidate in Sherman’s lab..”
Read more at Daily Galaxy
