Author: Richard

Giant bacteria colony “the size of Greece” found in ocean

Richard

Apparently the Census of Marine Life, the Herculean scientific effort to identify, categorize, and describe all ocean life, has discovered a “vast carpet” of bacteria on the ocean floor off the coast of South America.

I don’t think words can convey how huge this bacterial mass is, but journalists have tried. From ABC News:

 The census estimated there were a mind-boggling “nonillion” — or
1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 (30 zeroes) — individual
microbial cells in the oceans, weighing as much as 240 billion African
elephants, the biggest land animal.
[…]The census said they carpeted an area the size of Greece — about
130,000 sq km (50,000 sq miles) or the size of the U.S. state of Alabama. Toxic to humans, the bacteria are food for shrimp or worms and so underpin rich Pacific fish stocks.

Certainly creepy. And Ann Bucklin, head of the Census of Marine Zooplankton, points out that “seventy percent of the oceans are deeper than 1,000 meters [and] the deep layer is the source of the hidden diversity.” Who knows what else is down there – we only just now discovered this Greece-sized mass.

You can read more here, and here and here.
See also our somewhat-related earlier article on mucilages (free-floating blobs of ocean bacteria).

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Americans tired of political incivility

Richard

This isn’t exactly bizarre, but it is nonetheless interesting. American political discourse, over the past several years, seems to have escalated out of control. Negative ads? Puh. These days we have congressmen being spit on, racial slurs hurled at African American congressmen (who also happen to be heroes of the civil rights movement), and death threats (including cut gas lines and a coffin left in a congressman’s yard), among other things. What’s interesting to me, though, is that not only are Americans tired of this incivility, they want compromise on a number of issues.

USA Today’s top story reports:

More than two-thirds in a nationwide poll taken for the
study said Americans “should be ashamed of the way elected officials
acted” during the recent health care debate. Half said the tone of
politics has declined since President Obama was elected; just 10% said
it has improved.

Those surveyed were split over whether it was
more important for a politician to be willing to stand firm in support
of principles or be able to compromise to get things done.

When asked about seven specific issues, however,
solid majorities said elected officials should find compromise solutions
on all but one of them, abortion. About two-thirds thought compromises
should be found on immigration and climate change legislation, two of
the most contentious issues now being debated.

There were significant differences by ideology,
however. Liberals by 59%-36% favored the ability to compromise. Conservatives‘ views
were a reverse of that: By 60%-34%, they preferred a willingness to
stand firm.

The telephone survey of 1,000 people, taken by
Zogby International March 24-29, has a margin of error of +/– 3.2
percentage points.

I find it particularly striking that liberals are significantly more likely to seek compromise than conservatives. You can read more here.

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Iceland’s fiery volcano

Richard

… resembles something out of Mordor. Take a look at this absolutely stunning photograph of the Eyjafjallajokull volcano taken by photographer Ragnar Th. Sigurdsson:
volcano2.PNG

You can see more here. In the meantime, planes are still grounded across Europe, and the British Royal Navy is contemplating a reenactment of Dunkirk to “rescue” the hundreds of thousands of Britons stranded on the continent.

Additional photographs from a different source can be found here. They are equally stunning. These photographs bring to mind words like “apocalyptic.” For example:

ejafjalla16apr2010-mfulle4136j.jpg

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Detect earthquakes with your laptop

Richard

NPR reports:

By downloading a free program, you and your laptop
could help researchers pinpoint earthquakes and even sound an early
warning to surrounding areas.


Newer models of laptops manufactured by companies
like Apple and Lenovo contain accelerometers — motion sensors meant to
detect whether the computer has been dropped. If the computer falls, the
hard drive will automatically switch off to protect the user’s data.


“As soon as I knew there were these low-cost
sensors inside these accelerometers, I thought it would be perfect to
use them to network together and actually record earthquakes,”
geoscientist Elizabeth Cochran of the University of California at
Riverside says.

So if you’ve got one of those newer laptops, download the program here. Given the increased seismic activity lately, it could come in handy.

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Strange signs: the unruly night

Richard 1 Comment

Weird things have been going on lately. Ask anyone – they’ll tell you that it seems like there have been more inexplicable natural disasters (earthquakes in northern Illinois? ominous rumblings beneath Yellowstone, a dormant supervolcano?) than usual lately. While I haven’t seen any hard data on this subject (maybe it’s just another case of media exaggeration – most people, thanks to the media, perceive an increase in violent crime, while in actuality violent crime has decreased over the past decade), it is certainly possible. And the massive quakes in Haiti and Chile weren’t cooked up by media exaggeration.

At any rate, add two more occurrences to the already long list of strange things going on lately. I hate to admit it, but the past few months have left even me with suspicions and whispering doubts in the back of my mind. I typically scoff at doomsday prophets, Seventh Day Adventists, and survivalists… but what if they’re right? I mean, they’ve been saying the world is ending for thousands of years… but if you keep saying something long enough, eventually you’re bound to be right. Right?

So in the meantime, we have a volcanic eruption in Iceland that has led Europe to ground all flights – the largest peacetime grounding of aircraft ever.

Add, on top of that, this bizarre meteor that recently streaked over Wisconsin:

I’m reminded of a foreboding passage from Macbeth:

The night has been unruly: where we lay,
Our chimneys were blown down: and, as they say,
Lamentings heard i’ the air, strange screams of death;
And prophesying, with accents terrible,
Of dire combustion and confus’d events,
New hatch’d to the woeful time: the obscure bird
Clamour’d the live-long night; some say the earth
Was feverous, and did shake.

Let’s hope that the earth’s recent fevers and shakes are not similarly prophetic.

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A dearth of updates.

Richard

Hello friends. I apologize for the desperate lack of updates – I’ve been totally wrapped up in my senior thesis for the last few weeks. The good news, though, is that I turned it in yesterday – so expect the usually steady stream of internet weirdness, bizarre facts, and strange news to resume soon.

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Life under the ice

Richard

More Antarctic news:

In a surprising discovery about where higher
life can thrive, scientists found a shrimplike creature and a jellyfish
frolicking beneath an Antarctic ice sheet.
lyssianasid-amphipod.jpg

Six hundred feet below the ice where no light
shines, they had figured nothing much more than a few microbes could
exist. That’s why a NASA team was surprised when it lowered a video
camera to get the first long look at the underbelly of the ice sheet in
Antarctica, and a 3-inch shrimp-like creature went swimming by and then
parked itself on the camera’s cable. Scientists also pulled up a
tentacle they believe came from a foot-long jellyfish.

“We were operating on the presumption that
nothing’s there,” said NASA scientist Robert Bindschadler, who will
present the initial findings and a video at an American Geophysical
Union meeting tomorrow.

Read more here.

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Dining with Hitler, in Asia.

Richard

This is certainly a strange trend. Apparently, Hitler-themed bars and restaurants are a thing in parts of Asia. See: the following article (which was helpfully found by Pamela and forwarded to me by Olivia).

Adolf Hitler? In most western countries he is viewed as history’s
most evil man, and almost all are aware of the horrific genocide he was
responsible for, with many having had family fight and/or die in the war
against Nazi Germany.

However, in Asia, Hitler is a far more distant figure. This distance
might be an explanation for the bizarre case of Hitler restaurants and
bars that can be found throughout Asia.

Here are some photos of these strange Hitler-themed
establishments:

hitl2.jpghitl1.jpg

You can view more here.

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The disappearing Lake Peigneur

Richard 2 Comments

Lake Peigneur was once a shallow freshwater lake in Louisiana. Today, it is a deep saltwater lake. What happened? It’s difficult to believe. From Wikipedia:

An unusual man-made disaster on November 20, 1980 changed the structure
of the lake and surrounding land.

In 1980, when the disaster took place, the Diamond
Crystal Salt Company operated the Jefferson Island salt
mine under the lake, while a Texaco oil
rig drilled down from the surface of the lake searching for petroleum.
Due to a miscalculation, the 14-inch (36 cm) drill bit entered the
mine, starting a remarkable chain of events which at the time turned an
almost 10-foot (3.0 m) deep freshwater lake into a salt water lake with a
deep hole.

It is difficult to determine exactly what occurred, as all of the
evidence was destroyed or washed away in the ensuing maelstrom.
The now generally accepted explanation is that a miscalculation by
Texaco regarding their location resulted in the drill puncturing the
roof of the third level of the mine. This created an opening in the
bottom of the lake, similar to removing the drain plug from a bathtub.
The lake then drained into the hole, expanding the size of that hole as
the soil and salt were washed into the mine by the rushing water,
filling the enormous caverns left by the removal of salt over the years.
The resultant whirlpool sucked in the drilling platform, eleven
barges, many trees and 65 acres (260,000 m2) of the
surrounding terrain. So much water drained into those caverns that the
flow of the Delcambre Canal that usually empties the
lake into Vermilion Bay was reversed, making the canal a
temporary inlet. This backflow created, for a few days, the tallest
waterfall ever in the state of Louisiana, at 164 feet (50 m), as the
lake refilled with salt water from the Delcambre Canal and Vermilion
Bay. The water downflowing into the mine caverns displaced air
which erupted as compressed air and then later as 400-foot (120 m) geysers up
through the mineshafts.


Fortunately, all the miners and bystanders escaped this harrowing incident unscathed. Even this description, though, doesn’t do the event justice. Watch this brief clip from the History Channel:

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Orange dwarf star on a collision course with… Earth.

Richard 2 Comments

MIT’s Technology Review recently published this relatively unnerving finding (it would be more unnerving if the hypothetical event wasn’t 1.5 million years in the future):

An orange dwarf star called Gliese 710 is heading our way and will
arrive sometime within the next 1.5 million years.

Of course, trajectories are difficult to calculate when the data is
poor so nobody has really been sure about what’s going to happen.

What the new data has allowed Bobylev to do is calculate the
probability of Gliese 710 smashing into the Solar System. What he’s
found is a shock.

He says there is 86 percent chance that Gliese 710 will plough
through the Oort Cloud of frozen stuff that extends some 0.5 parsecs
into space.

That may sound like a graze but it is likely to have serious
consequences. Such an approach would send an almighty shower of comets
into the Solar System which will force us to keep our heads down for a
while. And a probability of 86 percent is about as close to certainty as
this kind of data can get.

The article is a bit sparse on details, but you can read the rest here.

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British grandmother takes the European nightclub scene by storm

Richard

This just came in over the Atlantic wires via ABC News (and was helpfully spotted by Olivia):

Ruth Flowers is certainly not your typical grandmother. At 69, Flowers is a real phenomenon and the latest sensation on the European nightclub scene.

69-year-old Ruth Flowers is a big deal on the European nightclub scene.


Wearing large black sunglasses (a fashion statement, there is nothing
wrong with her eyesight), flashy clothes, bling jewelry, fake
diamond-incrusted DJ headphones on her white hair, the British granny
makes crowds go wild, spinning records behind the decks of the most prestigious nightclubs in Paris, Cannes and other European cities.

DJ Ruth Flowers, a.k.a Mamy Rock, began her new career when, four years ago, she attended her grandson’s birthday party. “Kids don’t play games anymore. They have discos after they eat,” she told ABC News.

You can see some YouTube clips of her below. She does indeed rock.

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