Check this out:

Predictions and forecasts of this kind always kill me – that’s why I try to shy away from making them myself (unless I’m feeling confident; I allowed myself to predict a landslide victory for Obama in 2008, for example). These technology-related predictions, though, are downright amusing. A couple examples:

5. “Do not bother to sell your gas shares. The electric
light has no future.” –Professor John Henry Pepper, Victorian-era
celebrity scientist, sometime in the 1870s

6. “Television won’t be able to hold on to any market it
captures after the first six months. People will soon get tired of
staring at a plywood box every night,” Darryl Zanuck, 20th Century Fox,
1946.

You can check out the rest here.

A strange thing happened in Strasbourg, France, during the summer of 1518. A woman began to dance – uncontrollably, incessantly. Thus began the Dancing Plague of 1518.

She was still dancing several days later. Within a week about 100
people had been consumed by the same irresistible urge to dance. The
authorities were convinced that the afflicted would only recover if they
danced day and night.

So guildhalls were set aside for them to dance in, musicians were
hired to play pipes and drums to keep them moving, and professional
dancers were paid to keep them on their feet. Within days those with
weak hearts started to die.

By the end of August 1518 about 400 people had experienced the madness.
Finally they were loaded aboard wagons and taken to a healing shrine.
Not until early September did the epidemic recede.

Theories abound as to the epidemic’s source. Some point to ergot, the hallucinogenic fungus common to wheat crops during the Middle Ages, as the culprit. Others, such as historian John Wallis (who notes “that the event took place is undisputed”), suggest mass hysteria – specifically, “‘mass psychogenic illness,’ a form of mass hysteria usually preceded by
intolerable levels of psychological distress, caused the dancing
epidemic.” Whatever the cause, this well-documented incident remains bizarre. And it wasn’t isolated, either: “At least seven other outbreaks of the dancing epidemic occurred in medieval Europe, mostly in the areas surrounding Strasbourg.”

You can read more here and here.

Check this out:

Cool stuff. Seen on the streets of New York. (via Laughing Squid)

This is incredible. Scientists at the Walter and Eliza Hall Institute of Medical Research in Melbourne, Australia have managed to capture a malaria parasite on film – in the process of infecting a human red blood cell. Check it out:

Following up on our Dec. 6 article (“‘Dark Jupiter’ may haunt the edge of the solar system“), we bring you word from University of Louisiana-Lafayette astrophysicists John Matese and Daniel Whitmire. From io9.com:

Far away in the frozen outermost depths of our solar system, there
might be a hidden planet four times the size of Jupiter. This secret
companion to the Sun could be responsible for sending comets into the
inner solar system.

This idea is an intriguing variation on the
old Nemesis theory, which holds the Sun has a smaller companion star
orbiting the outer reaches of the solar system. The Nemesis star was
thought to be either a pint-sized red dwarf of a failed brown dwarf, and
either way its movements through the Oort Cloud at the furthest edge of
our solar system would cause comets to hurtle out of their obits. Some
of these would hit Earth, leading to mass extinction events. The
presence of Nemesis would explain why these extinctions occur in an
apparently cyclical fashion.

That’s the old theory, which fell apart because (among other things)
it turns out Nemesis could not have a stable enough orbit to account for
the regular mass extinctions, which is the main reason such an object
was hypothesized in the first place. But now University of
Louisiana-Lafayette astrophysicists John Matese and Daniel Whitmire have
a new theory that holds a rather different kind of companion object is
out in the Oort Cloud. Fittingly, they’ve named it Tyche, who in
mythology is the good sister of the evil Nemesis.

You can read more here.

… is located in Sweden.

The sun is represented by the Ericsson Globe in Stockholm,
the largest hemispherical building in the world. The inner planets can
also be found in Stockholm but the outer planets are situated northward
in other cities along the Baltic Sea. It was started by Nils Brenning and Gösta Gahm. It is in the scale of 1:20 million.

More at Wikipedia. On another note, we return triumphantly from our holiday hiatus!

This is something I’ve always wondered. The answer may surprise you.

The new year is off to a strange start. From Reuters:

State wildlife
officials were going door-to-door on Sunday in the town of Beebe,
Arkansas, to collect dead birds after thousands of mostly blackbirds
mysteriously fell from the sky.

Workers were searching Beebe, a
town of about 4,500 people located 30 miles northeast of the state
capital, to collect what officials estimated as between 4,000 and 5,000
birds which began falling from the sky late on New Year’s Eve and
continued into the next day.

Officials are at a loss to explain this. You can read more here. (Credit to our friend Donna for linking us to this story!)

This video made me chuckle. Polar bears are cute and surprisingly hard to fool. (The footage is from a BBC One documentary.)

“A skyscraper could fit too. And the end is out of sight.”

Check out National Geographic’s amazing gallery here.