Category: Uncategorized

This was another bizarre headline that I just couldn’t pass up. Nursultan Nazarbayev, the aging ex-Soviet oil oligarch president of Kazakhstan, has made some interesting requests of his scientists. From The Guardian:

Not satisfied with 19 years in charge of the gas-rich central Asian
state, Nazarbayev urged scientists today to unlock the secret to
immortality.

The 70-year-old leader stressed in a speech that a
new scientific research institute in the capital Astana should study
“rejuvenation of the organism,” as well as “the human genome, production
of human tissue and creation of gene-based medicines”.

In an
aside to students, Nazarbayev added: “As for the medicine of the future,
people of my age are really hoping all of this will happen as soon as
possible.”

Read more here.

… is located in Atlanta, Georgia, and is quite impressive. Check it out:

the world’s largest aquarium // ATL.GA from stillmotion on Vimeo.

Perhaps the hypothetical Planet X – a theoretical gas giant beyond Neptune suggested by astronomer Percival Lowell – is real after all. In fact, “a century of comet data suggests a dark, Jupiter-sized object is lurking
at the solar system’s outer edge and hurling chunks of ice and dust
toward Earth.” From Wired Science:

In 1999, Matese and colleague Daniel Whitmire suggested the sun has a hidden companion that boots icy bodies from the Oort Cloud, a spherical haze of comets at the solar system’s fringes, into the inner solar system where we can see them.

In a new analysis of observations dating back to 1898, Matese and
Whitmire confirm their original idea: About 20 percent of the comets
visible from Earth were sent by a dark, distant planet.

Read more here.

Fewer Christmas traditions are stranger than that of Krampus. Krampus, as you may or may not be aware, is St. Nicholas’s sinister (and lesser-known) demonic sidekick. If old St. Nick is the good cop who rewards well-behaved children with gifts of toys, then Krampus is the bad cop by far: he punishes naughty children by beating them with birch switches (and by terrifying them with his demonic visage). The tradition likely has its origins in the old trope of saints vanquishing demons through the power of God and forcing them into their thrall.

While most Americans remain unfamiliar with Krampus (despite his frequent examination on blogs such as this one), he is widely celebrated in Austria, Hungary, and the alpine regions of Europe. According to Wikipedia, young men in those parts will traditionally “dress up as the Krampus in the first two weeks of December, particularly
on the evening of 5 December, and roam the streets frightening children
with rusty chains and bells.” So grab your mask, hit the streets, and get in the Krampus spirit! Just be prepared for some weird looks, if you’re outside Europe.

Check out this amusing blog dedicated to photos of the North Korean leader looking at various things. E.g.:

(Via Laughing Squid)

It’s not extraterrestrial life, unfortunately – but this is still a hugely important discovery. They’re gonna have to rewrite – or at least amend – the biology textbooks. From Gizmodo:

NASA has discovered a completely new life form that doesn’t share the biological building blocks of anything currently living in planet Earth, using arsenic to build its DNA, RNA, proteins, and cell membranes. This changes everything.

All life on Earth is made of six components: carbon, hydrogen,
nitrogen, oxygen, phosphorus and sulfur. Every being, from the smallest
amoeba to the largest whale, share the same life stream. Our DNA
blocks are all the same. NASA scientist Felisa Wolfe Simon and her team
have found a bacteria whose DNA is completely alien to what we know
today. Instead of using phosphorus, the newly discovered
microorganism–called GFAJ-1–uses arsenic for all its building blocks.

This certainly seems to suggest that life might have a broader range – and take stranger forms – than we’ve previously predicted. Read more here.

Ah, Black Friday. The day-after-Thanksgiving shopping spree that draws millions of deal-stealers into long, cold lines at 4 AM (or earlier) while I remain blissfully asleep in my warm bed.

Picture Black Friday, in its own words, is “a photojournalism project that aims to revisit
and analyze a combination of forces- a worsening economy, financial
desperation, excitement, fear, and a distinctly American cultural
tradition- that culminate the morning after Thanksgiving.” Check out last year’s winner:

Tycho Brahe, in the words of Wikipedia, was a “Danish nobleman known for his accurate and comprehensive astronomical and planetary observations.” In fact, this pioneering gentleman-scientist made the most accurate astronomical observations and calculations of his time – and served as a mentor to the better-known astronomer Johannes Kepler. All told, Brahe made many important contributions to the fledgling science of astronomy. His life, however, was far stranger and more fascinating than a cursory glance at his biography might have you think. From the New York Times:

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.

Thanksgiving is a time of traditions – traditions and myths. By now, after sundry articles and Thanksgiving specials, you’ve probably seen a few of these myths busted – like the false claim that turkey causes sleepiness due to tryptophan, for example. But did you know that the first Thanksgiving feast in America was actually celebrated by the French? From the New York Times:

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.

Read more here. And happy Thanksgiving!

I’ve always wondered if such a thing was possible. Apparently, it is. From Gizmodo:

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.

Check out the fascinating full article, replete with video and photographs, here.

It’s a question every horror fan has asked at some point: what if zombies were real? Indeed, since recent adaptations of the zombie genre have attempted more realistic portrayals of zombie plagues (e.g., the disease-based zombies of 28 Day Later versus the radioactively-contaminated zombies of George Romero’s 1968 Night of the Living Dead), this question is being asked with increasing frequency.

Many zombie aficionados, furthermore, have observed the similarities between the zombie viruses of the silver screen and real-world afflictions like rabies. National Geographic examines these similarities, and like many others, asks, “what if?”:

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.

Read on here.

Within every scientist is the childlike desire to do strange, dangerous, and/or crazy things and observe the result. That said, I’ll let this article speak for itself:

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).