The quietest place on Earth

Richard

… is a specially-designed room in Minnesota at Orfield Laboratories Inc. Intriquietestplaceonearth.jpggued? Read on:

How does one achieve The Quietest Place on Earth? Start with a room
within a room, within a room: the Orfield Labs six sided anechoic
chamber is a small room floating in a pit on I-beams that are on top of
springs. A five sided chamber of identical construction surrounds it on
the edge of the pit. Both chambers are made of double wall
steel-insulation-steel. The anechoic chamber was manufactured by Eckel, the largest anechoic chamber builder in the country.

Both
steel chambers are held within a larger room that was built with solid
one foot thick concrete walls and ceiling panels. The smaller room is
filled with 3.3 feet thick fiberglass acoustic wedges. This approach led
to the anechoic chamber found at Orfield Labs being measured by
engineers on January 21st of 2004 at negative 9.4 dB (with A-weighting),
thus earning it the title of Quietest Place on Earth. By comparison,
the low threshold for human hearing is considered to be 0 dB.

The room is, in fact, the Guinness World Record holder for the quietest place on Earth. You can read the original article here. But please remember, silence is golden.

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Children under four and children with autism don’t yawn contagiously

Richard

Researchers at the University of Connecticut have conducted a study which may yield new clues about that ever-mysterious phenomenon, yawning. From ScienceDaily:

If someone near you yawns, do you yawn, too? About half of adults yawn
after someone else does in a phenomenon called contagious yawning. Now a
new study has found that most children aren’t susceptible to contagious
yawning until they’re about 4 years old — and that children with
autism are less likely to yawn contagiously than others.

“Given that contagious yawning may be a sign of empathy, this study
suggests that empathy — and the mimicry that may underlie it —
develops slowly over the first few years of life, and that children with
ASD may miss subtle cues that tie them emotionally to others,”
according to the researchers. This study may provide guidance for
approaches to working with children with ASD so that they focus more on
such cues.

There seems to be something to this argument. Many animals yawn, but most don’t yawn contagiously – those that do tend to be social mammals like chimpanzees.

You can read more here.

(Did reading this make you yawn? If not, you’ll probably yawn now.)

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Ancient nuclear reactors?

Richard
Uranium2

Image via Wikipedia

It sounds incredible, but apparently it’s true – in the 1970s, scientists discovered evidence of two billion year old nuclear reactors in Africa.

These reactors weren’t built by aliens or now-lost Atlanteans, of course – they occurred naturally. It turns out that billions of years ago, uranium was present in the earth’s crust in sufficient quantities to spontaneously undergo fission, given certain other prerequisites. From Scientific American:

Paul K. Kuroda, a chemist from the University of Arkansas,
calculated what it would take for a uraniumore body
spontaneously to undergo selfsustained fission. Amazingly, the actual conditions that prevailed two billion years
ago in what researchers eventually determined to be 16 separate
areas within the Oklo and adjacent Okelobondo uranium mines were
very close to what Kuroda outlined. These zones were all identified
decades ago.

You can read the full article here. It concludes, interestingly, that there may have been yet other naturally-occurring nuclear reactors in our planet’s past. Go figure.

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Staring badger holds family hostage

Richard

Straight from the Beeb:
badgerscary.jpg

A family in
Worcestershire were trapped inside their house for two hours after a
scary, staring badger left them too frightened to leave.

Dad Michael Youngs tried to scare the badger away by banging a spade on the ground, but it didn’t move.

Mr Youngs told a newspaper: “The badger was very spooky.

“It was the stare that really gave me the creeps,” he added.

This sounds a bit silly, but I think it’s understandable. Badgers are well known for their intimidating stares; this is related, in part, to the etymology of the term “badger” (as in, “to harass or urge persistently; pester; nag”). Note, of course, that common synonyms for “badger” include “vex,” “bedevil,” “plague,” “worry,” “disturb,” and “bait,” all words that this story brings to mind.

You can read the original article in its entirety here. 

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Apparently the eye scanners from Minority Report are now a reality.

Richard
Iris Scanner

Image by jterning via Flickr

From USA Today:

The Homeland Security Department plans to test futuristic iris scan
technology that stores digital images of people’s eyes in a database and
is considered a quicker alternative to fingerprints.

Iris scanners are little used, but a new generation of cameras that
capture images from 6 feet away instead of a few inches has sparked
interest from government agencies and financial firms, said Patrick
Grother, a National Institute of Standards and Technology computer
scientist.

This could be interesting. As long as the technology isn’t abused or overused, it certainly seems like it could have valid applications – but who knows how it’ll actually turn out. I’m not looking forward to personalized holographic advertisements that track you by your irises, though.

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The world’s most unusual dining experience

Richard

If you’re interested in a unique dining experience, look no farther than DinnerInTheSky.com, dinnerinthesky.jpgwhich is more or less exactly what it sounds like: patrons dine on a platform suspended 50 meters (that’s 164 feet, for those of you unfamiliar with the metric system) in the air. For comparison, that’s almost equal to the height of the Leaning Tower of Pisa or Niagara Falls (.91 Pisas and .98 Niagaras, too be exact; also, incidentally, the exact length of an Olympic-sized swimming pool).

According to the website,

Dinner in the Sky is available for a session of 8 hours. It can be divided or personalised according to the client’s wishes.

Dinner in the Sky accomodates 22 people
around the table at every session with three staff in the middle (chef,
waiter, entertainer…). Just to give you an example: this means that, at a
rate of 2 sessions per hour, more than 350 people could have access to
this exceptional platform, or only 22 if you want an exclusive VIP
event.

Dinner in the Sky is an event that can be
held anywhere (golf course, public place, race track, castle, vineyard,
historical site…) as long as there is a surface of approximately 500 m²
that can be secured. Of course, authorisation by the owner is required.

Of course, it’s pricey – $289.00 per person in the United States. Other services offered include “Meeting in the Sky,” “Showbiz in the Sky,” and – my favorite – “Wedding in the Sky.”

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The Top 10 Zombie Parasites

Richard

It seems like this always happens – as soon as I post an entry (or while I do), some other blog posts something similar. Neatorama, for example, posted about the very same zombie ants I mentioned not 4 hours after I did. This same sort of thing has happened several times before. Conspiracy? Doubtful – unquestionably a coincidence, as this is a pretty small blog. Maybe it’s the collective unconscious. Or maybe a few people read or hear about the same thing, and it makes them think of this other thing. Who knows.

Anyway, more to the point, an intrepid soul has compiled a list of the top ten zombie parasites. You can find the list here. Many of these are disturbing, but I find number eight particularly unnerving:

Once known as “horse hair” worms because they would appear mysteriously
in horse troughs, Gordian worms spend their parasitic larval stage
within the bodies of insects, especially crickets, but spend their
non-parasitic adult stage in water. Crickets aren’t known for their
swimming ability, but try telling that to a parasitic nematode (really,
try it. They don’t even comprehend English, it’s ridiculous.) When it’s
time for adulthood, the worm compels its cricket to seek out the nearest
body of water and dive right in. The confused cricket usually drowns, while the worm wriggles free to find itself a mate.

I think it’s the Gordian worm’s appearance that really does it for me. Check out this uncomfortably-creepy video of a worm emerging from a cricket:

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Link submitter up

Richard

Dear loyal friends and readers,

Adverbly.net now boasts a submission form. If you’ve got suggestions for stories or links you’d like us to post – if you’ve come across anything strange, creepy, or uncanny on the internet that you feel is worth sharing – you can use the suggest a link form to let us know about it (see also the menu on the right).

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“Zombie” ants possessed by parasitic fungus

Richard
double fungus ant

Image by myriorama via Flickr

If you’ve ever seen the movie Alien, you know what a parasitoid is. Parasitoids are quite similar to parasites, except instead of coexisting with their hosts, they ultimately kill them (like the chest-bursting creature of the aforementioned film).

Parasitoids aren’t merely figments of science fiction, though. They exist in nature all around us. One example is the fungus Ophiocordyceps unilateralis, an organism that infects carpenter ants and alters their behavior. According to Wikipedia,

The fungus’s spores enter the body of the insect through its respiratory spiracles, where they begin to consume the non-vital soft tissues. When the fungus is ready to spore, its mycelia enter the ant’s brain and change how it perceives pheromones, causing the insect to climb up the stem of a plant and use its mandibles to secure itself to the plant. Infected ants bite the leaf veins with abnormal force, leaving telltale dumbbell-shaped marks.

This creeps me out, to be honest. According to Harvard scientist David Hughes, “This can happen en masse. You can find whole graveyards with 20 or 30 ants in a square metre.
Each time, they are on leaves that are a particular height off the
ground and they have bitten into the main vein before dying.”

It turns out, interestingly, that this fungus has been extant for nearly 50 million years, if not longer. Researchers recently discovered fossilized evidence of the fungus’s influence:

The gruesome hallmark of the fungus’s handiwork was found on the
leaves of plants that grew in Messel, near Darmstadt in Germany, 48m
years ago.

The finding shows that parasitic fungi evolved the
ability to control the creatures they infect in the distant past, even
before the rise of the Himalayas.

You can read more here.

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Robot to explore mysterious tunnels inside the Great Pyramid

Richard
Coupe et distribution interne de la grande pyr...

Image via Wikipedia

Egypt has always fascinated me, and I can’t really say why. Corollary to that fascination, though, is a sort of Lovecraftian nameless fear – there’s something chilling, I think, about the still-standing ruins, the stones erected thousands of years before the birth of Christ, the bizarre forms of the desert gods, the imperious pharaohs. So naturally, the headline above sent a shiver down my spine.

It’s strange enough that the Great Pyramid has interior shafts. Two of them, rising from the King’s Chamber, are “believed to be a passageway designed to fire the king’s spirit into the firmament so that he can take his place among the stars.” But there are other tunnels inside the pyramid. Tunnels that don’t lead to the exterior. Tiny, inaccessible tunnels, with creepy and inexplicably lilliputian doors:

In the Queen’s Chamber, there are two further
shafts, discovered in 1872. Unlike those in the King’s Chamber, these do
not lead to the outer face of the pyramid.

No
one knows what the shafts are for. In 1992, a camera sent up the shaft
leading from the south wall of the Queen’s Chamber discovered it was
blocked after 60 metres by a limestone door with two copper handles. In
2002, a further expedition drilled through this door and revealed, 20
centimetres behind it, a second door.

Driven by morbid curiosity (and no doubt more than a little dread), researchers have designed remote-controlled robots to explore the shafts and drill through the doors:

Now technicians at Leeds University are putting the finishing touches to
a robot which, they hope, will follow the shaft to its end. Known as
the Djedi project, after the magician whom Khufu consulted when planning
the pyramid, the robot will be able to drill through the second set of
doors to see what lies beyond.

You can read more here. I shiver to think of what, if anything, may lie on the other side.

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The billion-bug highway

Richard

Have you ever wondered how many bugs are floating around in the atmosphere above you? I have, but maybe I’m just weird. Either way, there’s finally an answer to this question: around 3 billion bugs per month (bpm). NPR reports:

When British scientist Jason Chapman told us (listen to the radio piece
or watch our video) there are 3 billion insects passing over your head
in a summer month, he was talking about his survey in Great Britain.
Closer to the equator, he says, the numbers should rise. He wouldn’t be
surprised, for example, that in the sky over Houston or New Orleans
there could be 6 billion critters passing overhead in a month.

Why are they up there? The article goes on:

Sometimes insects and spiders need to leave where they are and go
someplace else for food, for sex, for space. For a variety of reasons
bugs disperse.

Bugs have been found over the Atlantic “at 2,460 to 5,410 feet and over Greenland at 7,870 to 12,135 feet”; the record-holder is a single termite that was captured at 19,000 feet.

You can read more here.

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