November 2010 Archives

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When Danish and Czech scientists exhumed the remains of the astronomer Tycho Brahe in Prague this month, they dug up much more than some bones and hairs. They found something that has eluded astronomers for thousands of years: a story with major box-office potential.

It's "Amadeus" meets "Da Vinci Code" meets "Hamlet," featuring a deadly struggle for the secret of the universe between Tycho, the swashbuckling Danish nobleman with a gold-and-silver prosthetic nose, and the not-yet-famous Johannes Kepler, his frail, jealous German assistant. The story also includes an international hit man, hired after a Danish prince becomes king and suspects Brahe of sleeping with his mother (and maybe being his father!).

For comic relief, there's a beer-drinking pet elk wandering around Tycho's castle, as well as a jester named Jepp, a dwarf who sits under Tycho's table and is believed to be clairvoyant.

That's definitely a film I would see. You can read more here.

Image by Mike Licht, NotionsCapital.com via Flickr

Long before the Pilgrims sailed in 1620, another group of dissident Christians sought a haven in which to worship freely. These French Calvinists, or Huguenots, hoped to escape the sectarian fighting between Catholics and Protestants that had bloodied France since 1560.

Landing in balmy Florida in June of 1564, at what a French explorer had earlier named the River of May (now the St. Johns River near Jacksonville), the French émigrés promptly held a service of "thanksgiving." Carrying the seeds of a new colony, they also brought cannons to fortify the small, wooden enclosure they named Fort Caroline, in honor of their king, Charles IX.

• Apparently, squid can fly
• Wi-fi radiation may be killing trees, a study finds
• Scientists have successfully trapped antimatter. The next step? Interstellar warp drives.
  

This is one of the most surprising and awesome tales ever told in the history of medicine. These twins are Tatiana and Krista Hogan. Their brains and sensory systems are networked together, but they have separate personalities. Their story defies belief.

So much, in fact, that Tatiana and Krista Hogan shouldn't be alive at all. Their chances of surviving the pregnancy, birth and first months of life were almost zero. Surprisingly, they turned four on October 25, and they are still healthy and happy, as you can see in the photo above.

They play Nintendo Wii games against each other, they fight for toys and they share food and physiological functions. But they also share their senses. For example, one can pick an object out of her field of view, while the twin looks at the object.

Most importantly, however, they can share thoughts.

Image by michaelhenley via Flickr

Though dead humans can't come back to life, certain viruses can induce such aggressive, zombie-like behavior, scientists say in the new National Geographic Channel documentary The Truth Behind Zombies.

For instance, rabies--a viral disease that infects the central nervous system--can drive people to be violently mad, according to Samita Andreansky, a virologist at the University of Miami's Miller School of Medicine in Florida who also appears in the documentary.

Combine rabies with the ability of a flu virus to spread quickly through the air, and you might have the makings of a zombie apocalypse.

In a development whose importance it would be difficult to exaggerate, scientists have produced research answering one of the great questions facing humanity in the 21st century: what happens if you get snails hopped up on crystal meth and poke them with sticks?

The drug-pushing scientists in question are Barbara Sorg of Washington State Uni and Ken Lukowiak of the University of Calgary. The mollusc they chose for their experiments was the pond snail Lymnaea stagnalis.

You can find these scientists' dramatic conclusions here (spoiler: apparently, memories formed under the influence of meth are harder to forget).

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One end of a cylinder or cone of waxed cloth is lit, and the other placed into the subject's ear. The flame is cut back occasionally with scissors and extinguished between two and four inches from the subject.

The subject is lying on one side with the treated ear uppermost and the candle vertical. The candle can be stuck through a paper plate or aluminum pie tin to protect against any hot wax or ash falling onto the subject. Another way to perform ear candling involves the subject lying face up with the ear candle extending out to the side with a 45 degree upward slant. A dish of water is placed next to the subject under the ear candle.

Proponents claim that the flame creates negative pressure, drawing wax and debris out of the ear canal^[4], which appears as a dark residue.

In October 2007, the United States Food and Drug Administration issued an alert identifying ear candles (also known as ear cones or auricular candles) as "dangerous to health when used in the dosage or manner, or with the frequency or duration, prescribed, recommended, or suggested in the labeling thereof" ... "since the use of a lit candle in the proximity of a person's face would carry a high risk of causing potentially severe skin/hair burns and middle ear damage."^[9]

On screen, Dick Van Dyke has been rescued from untimely death by flying cars and magical nannies. Off screen, the veteran star of Chitty Chitty Bang Bang and Mary Poppins had to rely on the help of a pod of porpoises after apparently dozing off aboard his surfboard. "I'm not kidding," he said afterwards.

Van Dyke's ordeal began during an ill-fated trip to his local beach. "I woke up out of sight of land," the 84-year-old actor told reporters. "I started paddling with the swells and I started seeing fins swimming around me and I thought 'I'm dead!'"

Van Dyke was wrong. "They turned out to be porpoises," he said. "And they pushed me all the way to shore." The porpoises were unavailable for comment.

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A Fannett Township [PA] man was recently found with about 80 of one of the world's rarest wild dogs, and experts from around the country are now looking to find them suitable homes.

The man has been cited for operating an unlicensed kennel and several other related violations. In a statement issued Thursday, the Pennsylvania Department of Agriculture characterized him as an animal hoarder.

Prior to the discovery of Hammond's dogs, there were about 150 members of the breed known to exist in captivity worldwide, many of them in zoos, according to Tom Wendt of New Guinea Singing Dog International.

Named for their unique howling vocalizations, "singers" are primitive dogs from the upper highlands of New Guinea, Wendt said. There have been few actual sightings of the animal in its habitat in recent years, and some believe it to be extinct in the wild.

"We can take objects from one location and show them in another location in 3-D in near real time," said optical scientist Nasser Peyghambarian, and project leader from the University of Arizona in a press conference Nov. 1. "It is no longer something that is science fiction, it is actually something that you can do today."

A Democratic state senator who died last month was easily re-elected in California, denying the GOP the seat and probably forcing the governor to call a special election.

Sen. Jenny Oropeza was leading Republican challenger John Stammreich 58.4 percent to 35.7 percent, according to the latest vote count, The Sacramento Bee reported.

If the results hold up, Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger will call a special election.

Oropeza, who represented a district in Southern California's Long Beach area, died Oct. 20 at age 53 of complications from a blot clot in her abdomen. Because she died so close to the election, her name stayed on the ballot.

A simple statistical formula successfully estimated the number of tanks the enemy was producing, at a time when this could not be directly observed by the allied spy network.

By 1941-42, the allies knew that US and even British tanks had been technically superior to German Panzer tanks in combat, but they were worried about the capabilities of the new marks IV and V. More troubling, they had really very little idea of how many tanks the enemy was capable of producing in a year. Without this information, they were unsure whether any invasion of the continent on the western front could succeed.

One solution was to ask intelligence to guess the number by secretly observing the output of German factories, or by trying to count tanks on the battlefield. Both the British and the Americans tried this, but they found that the estimates returned by intelligence were contradictory and unreliable. Therefore they asked statistical intelligence to see whether the accuracy of the estimates could be improved.

The statisticians had one key piece of information, which was the serial numbers on captured mark V tanks. The statisticians believed that the Germans, being Germans, had logically numbered their tanks in the order in which they were produced. And this deduction turned out to be right. It was enough to enable them to make an estimate of the total number of tanks that had been produced up to any given moment.

A female boa constrictor snake has given birth to two litters of extraordinary offspring.

Evidence suggests the mother snake has had multiple virgin births, producing 22 baby snakes that have no father.

More than that, the genetic make-up of the baby snakes is unlike any previously recorded among vertebrates, the group which includes almost all animals with a backbone.

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In a new finding that could have game-changing effects if borne out, two astrophysicists think they've finally tracked down the elusive signature of dark matter.

This invisible substance is thought to make up much of the universe but scientists have little idea what it is. They can only infer the existence of dark matter by measuring its gravitational tug on the normal matter that they can see.

Now, after sifting through observations of the center of our Milky Way galaxy, two researchers think they've found evidence of the annihilation of dark matter particles in powerful explosions.