According to the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission, Leon was driving in a rural area of Miami-Dade County with a passenger when they spotted just three feet of the snake sticking out alongside the road. While many would have kept driving upon seeing the massive python, Leon stopped, grabbed it behind the head and began dragging it out of the brush. Leon had previously owned Burmese pythons, which are not venomous, and had some experience handling them.

Jason Leon after capturing the record-setting python. (Photo via Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission/Facebook)

That’s when FWC reported Leon saying the snake began to wrap itself around his leg. Others came to help Leon who then killed the snake with a knife.

Watch this report with footage of Leon’s struggle with the python:

“Jason Leon’s nighttime sighting and capture of a Burmese python of more than 18 feet in length is a notable accomplishment that set a Florida record,” said Kristen Sommers, who heads exotic species coordination for FWC. The previous record-setting python was 17 feet, 7 inches.

“The FWC is grateful to him both for safely removing such a large Burmese python and for reporting its capture.”

The Burmese python is considered an invasive species in Florida that has in recent years had a negative impact on the Everglades and native wildlife.

“This event highlights how the Exotic Species hotline allows the public to help us obtain more information about Burmese pythons, so we can improve management of this invasive species,” Sommers said of the aptly named hotline 888-IveGot1. ”It also reflects the cooperative efforts of the FWC and its partners to address python sightings by the public.”

University students demonstrate just how long the snake was. (Photo via Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission/Facebook)

The python was given to the University of Florida where researchers evaluated it. They found the female was not carrying eggs.

(H/T: Grind TV)

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Croatian researchers are training sugar-craving honeybees to find unexploded mines littering their country and the rest of the Balkans.

When Croatia joins the European Union on July 1, in addition to the beauty of its aquamarine Adriatic sea, deep blue mountain lakes and lush green forests, it will also bring numerous un-cleared minefields to the bloc’s territory. About 750 square kilometers (466 square miles) are still suspected to be filled with mines from the Balkan wars in the 1990s.

Nikola Kezic, an expert on the behavior of honeybees, sat quietly together with a group of young researchers on a recent day in a large net tent filled with the buzzing insects on a grass field lined with acacia trees. The professor at Zagreb University outlined the idea for the experiment: Bees have a perfect sense of smell that can quickly detect the scent of the explosives. They are being trained to identify their food with the scent of TNT.

Ante Ivanda, a de-miner, searches for land mines in Petrinja, central Croatia, Friday, May 17, 2013. Croatian researches, working on a unique method to find unexploded mines that are littering their country and the rest of the Balkans, are confident they can use bees for detecting land mines. (Photo: AP/Darko Bandic)

“Our basic conclusion is that the bees can clearly detect this target, and we are very satisfied,” said Kezic, who leads a part of a larger multimillion-euro program, called “Tiramisu,” sponsored by the EU to detect land mines on the continent.

Several feeding points were set up on the ground around the tent, but only a few have TNT particles in them. The method of training the bees by authenticating the scent of explosives with the food they eat appears to work: bees gather mainly at the pots containing a sugar solution mixed with TNT, and not the ones that have a different smell.

Kezic said the feeding points containing the TNT traces offer “a sugar solution as a reward, so they can find the food in the middle.”

“It is not a problem for a bee to learn the smell of an explosive, which it can then search,” Kezic said. “You can train a bee, but training their colony of thousands becomes a problem.”

Watch researchers explain how the honeybees could help find indicators of the mines:

Sandia National Laboratories and the University of Montana too have conducted research using honeybees to locate  hidden land mines.

Croatian officials estimate that since the beginning of the Balkan wars in 1991, about 2,500 people have died from land mine explosions. During the four-year war, around 90,000 land mines were placed across the entire country, mostly at random and without any plan or existing maps.

Dijana Plestina, the head of the Croatian government’s de-mining bureau, said the suspected devices represent a large obstacle for the country’s population and industry, including agriculture and tourism. In the nearly two decades since the end of the war, land mines have taken the lives of 316 people, including 66 de-miners, she said.

“While this exists, we are living in a kind of terror, at least for the people who are living in areas suspected to have mines,” she said. “And of course, that is unacceptable. We will not be a country in peace until this problem is solved.”

In 2004, Filipovic and her boyfriend were on a fishing trip that took them to a river between Croatia and Bosnia.

Ante Ivanda, a de-miner, searches for land mines in Petrinja, central Croatia, Friday, May 17, 2013. Croatian researches, working on a unique method to find unexploded mines that are littering their country and the rest of the Balkans, are confident they can use bees for detecting land mines. (Photo: AP/Darko Bandic)

“As we were returning hand-in-hand, my boyfriend stepped on a mine,” the 41-year-old Filipovic said. “It was an awful, deafening explosion … thousands of shrapnel parts went flying, hundreds ending up in my body. He was found dead several meters away, while I remained in a pool of blood sitting on the ground.”

She sued the Croatian government, saying the area wasn’t clearly marked as a former minefield.

“At first I thought I was asleep,” she recalled. “Then I heard the voice of my father. I opened my eyes, and saw nothing. I thought I lost my eyes.”

The government admitted guilt in the case for failing to keep the minefield sign, but the court has yet to determine financial compensation.

It may be a while before the honeybees hit real minefields, Kezic said. First, they will conduct controlled tests, with real mines but which are marked.

Kezic said American researchers have in the past experimented with mine-searching bees, but TNT – the most common explosive used in the Balkan wars – wasn’t part of their experiment because its smell evaporates quickly, and only small traces remain after time. Rats and dogs are also used to detect explosives worldwide, but unlike bees, they could set off blasts on the minefields because of their weight.

Even after the de-miners have done their job in an area, some land mines are missed and remain in the soil, and they are most often the cause of deadly explosions. Once the experiment with bees proves scientifically reliable, the idea is to use them in the areas that have already been de-mined, where their movement would be followed with heat-seeking cameras, Kezic said.

“We are not saying that we will discover all the mines on a minefield, but the fact is that it should be checked if a minefield is really de-mined,” he said. “It has been scientifically proven that there are never zero mines on a de-mined field, and that’s where bees could come in.”

Featured image via Shutterstock.com.

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Officials at the LEO Zoological Conservation Center in Connecticut tell the Greenwich Time they had removed the only male anteater from the enclosure in August, long before the six-month gestation period for baby Archie would have begun.

Baby on the back of the mother anteater. (Photo: LEO Zoological Conservation Center Facebook)

They feared that male, Alf, would kill another baby in the pen. That left the mother Armani, and the young female, Alice, in the enclosure.

But little Archie was born in April anyway.

Marcella Leone, founder and director of the conservation center, suspects this might be a rare case of delayed implantation, when fertilized eggs remain dormant in the uterus for a period of time.

The Greenwich Time reported that the same phenomenon has been seen in sloths and armadillos, which belong to the same suborder as anteaters.

Stacy Belhumeur with Reid Park Zoo, who is a survival coordinator for giant anteaters, said delayed implantation is unlikely in this case, thinking it is more likely the male and female somehow found a way to mate.

“My guess is they thought they had him separated,” Belhumeur told Greenwich Time. “We’ve seen incredible feats of breeding success. We’ve had animals breed through fences.”

Huh.

Leone acknowledged that there is a place where the fence is shared but at the time conception would have had to take place, that fence line would not have been shared.

“It is a bit of a mystery,” Leone said.

See more pictures of the baby anteater and its mom here.

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The Associated press contributed to this report. 

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“It exploded in a flash nearly 10 times as bright as anything we’ve ever seen before,” said Bill Cooke with NASA’s Meteoroid Environment Office of the explosion that took place March 17, according to NASA’s website.

The explosion was so large, in fact, that it could have been seen from Earth with the naked eye.

NASA scientists speculate the meteoroid weighed 40 kg (about 88 pounds) and was less than 0.5 meters (about 1.6 feet) wide. But moving at 56,000 miles per hour, they compare its resulting explosion to the detonation of five tons of TNT.

(Image: NASA/YouTube screenshot)

Here’s a look at video showing just the explosion:

“We’ll be keeping an eye out for signs of a repeat performance next year when the Earth-Moon system passes through the same region of space,” Cooke said. “Meanwhile, our analysis of the March 17event continues.”

Here’s NASA’s full ScienceCast on the event:

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(H/T: Business Insider). Featured image via Shutterstock.com.

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Huh. Maybe it’s just us.

Anyway, the following video comes courtesy of biologist Brad Josephs who “recently planted a GoPro camera out in the Alaskan wilderness,” Deadspin explains, “hoping to capture some up-close footage of bears for a BBC nature show.”

But rather than catching bears (i.e. “nature’s Shermans”) acting all cute and nature-y, Josephs’ GoPro camera answers our opening question, that is, this is what it’d look like to have your face taken off by a bear:

“Amazingly there was no damage to the camera!” Josephs writes on the video’s YouTube page, apparently undisturbed by images of the bear’s cavernous, gaping jaws of death.

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Featured image Getty Images.

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Secretary of Energy nominee Ernest Moniz is sworn in before the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee April 9, 2013 in Washington, DC. Moniz, a nuclear physicist, testified before a full committee hearing on his pending nomination. Moniz was officially confirmed in a unanimous vote by the Senate May 16. (Photo: Win McNamee/Getty Images)

• Physicist Ernest Moniz was officially confirmed by the Senate as the Energy Secretary, replacing Steven Chu since his resignation. 
• Moniz is said to be sympathetic to the natural gas industry. A natural gas industry group considers him  ”informed, engaged and forthcoming.”
• He is described as “solution oriented” and “smart as a whip.”

WASHINGTON (TheBlaze/AP) — Physicist Ernest Moniz won unanimous Senate confirmation Thursday to be the nation’s new energy secretary.

Moniz, 68, a professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, replaces Steven Chu, who served as Energy secretary in President Barack Obama’s first term. Moniz served as an energy undersecretary in the Clinton administration.

Sen. Ron Wyden, D-Ore., chairman of the Senate Energy Committee, called Moniz “solution-oriented” and said he is “smart about energy policy and savvy about Energy Department operations.”

The 97-0 vote for Moniz came as Senate committees endorsed two other Cabinet nominees along party lines. The Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee voted 12-10 to confirm Justice Department official Thomas Perez as labor secretary, and the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee voted 10-8 to advance assistant administrator Gina McCarthy to take over the Environmental Protection Agency.

Meanwhile, Senate Republicans said Thursday they would not support five Obama nominees to the National Labor Relations Board, raising the possibility that the troubled agency could be rendered mostly inoperable later this year.

The Senate vote on Moniz was delayed for more than three weeks after Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., objected to Obama’s plan to cut about $200 million from a home-state project to turn weapons-grade plutonium into nuclear fuel. Graham and other Republicans said the president’s budget proposal jeopardized a plant being built at South Carolina’s Savannah River nuclear site.

Graham made clear Thursday he had nothing against Moniz, calling him a “fine fellow.” Graham said he has other “leverage points” to continue putting pressure on the Obama administration to fully fund the Savannah River project.

Former Energy Secretary Steven Chu was also confirmed unanimously by the Senate. Chu, you may recall, is responsible for Obama administration’s numerous “green” energy boondoggles, including Solyndra and Abound Solar.

Sen. Thomas Carper., D-Del., called Moniz “smart as a whip,” with a knack for explaining things “so even I understand.”

As energy secretary, Moniz will face an array of challenges, as the administration continues to promote renewable sources of energy such as wind and solar power in place of traditional fossil fuels.

In particular, Moniz will soon decide whether to approve a major expansion of U.S. natural gas exports that could create thousands of jobs, spur economic growth, and help offset the nation’s enormous trade deficit.

Moniz speaks in April prior to his officially being named Energy Secretary after Steven Chu. (Photo: AP/Manuel Balce Ceneta

Increased exports also could lead to further increases in hydraulic fracturing, a drilling technique also known as fracking that has allowed companies to gain access to huge stores of natural gas but raised widespread concerns about alleged groundwater “contamination” and even earthquakes.

Federal law requires the Energy Department to determine that natural gas exports are in the public interest before granting permits to countries that do not have free-trade agreements with the United States.

Moniz, who heads an energy initiative at MIT, is widely seen as sympathetic to the natural gas industry. At a Senate hearing last month, he called the “stunning increase” in natural gas production a “revolution” that has led to reduced emissions of carbon dioxide and other gases that cause global climate change (née “global warming,” née “global cooling”).

A recent study commissioned by the department concluded that exporting natural gas would benefit the U.S. economy even if it leads to higher domestic prices for the fuel.

Here’s a breakdown of Moniz’s confirmation vote:

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NEW YORK (TheBlaze/AP) — Scientists announced Wednesday recovering stem cells from cloned human embryos, a longstanding goal that could lead to new treatments for such illnesses as Parkinson’s disease and diabetes. But even with some of the potential health benefits, many are condemning the research as unethical, as it has been deemed by some in the past.

Stem cells can turn into any cell of the body, so scientists are interested in using them to create tissue for treating disease. Transplanting brain tissue might treat Parkinson’s disorder, for example, and pancreatic tissue might be used for diabetes.

But transplants run the risk of rejection, so more than a decade ago, researchers proposed a way around that: Create tissue from stem cells that bear the patient’s own DNA, obtained with a process called therapeutic cloning.

If DNA from a patient is put into a human egg, which is then grown into an early embryo, the stem cells from that embryo would provide a virtual genetic match. So in theory, tissues created from them would not be rejected by the patient.

That idea was met with some ethical objections because harvesting the stem cells involved destroying human embryos.

“It’s a grave concern that some scientists are still pursuing human cloning, a technology that will open the door to human engineering and a brave – but highly dangerous – new world. Human cloning by this technique requires the specific creation of a new individual, albeit cloned, at the embryo stage, using human eggs and human tissue cells,” Life News wrote. “Modern science has passed this by, especially in regards to stem cells. Creating and destroying cloned human embryos to extract their embryonic stem cells is unethical, and the entire faulty concept of using the cloning technique has been superseded by uncontroversial techniques.”

“Creating new human lives in the laboratory solely to destroy them is an abuse denounced even by many who do not share the Catholic Church’s convictions on human life,” Cardinal Seán O’Malley, OFM Cap., of Boston said in a statement. ”Also, this means of making embryos for research will be taken up by those who want to produce cloned children as ‘copies’ of other people. Whether used for one purpose or the other, human cloning treats human beings as products, manufactured to order to suit other people’s wishes. It is inconsistent with our moral responsibility to treat each member of the human family as a unique gift of God, as a person with his or her own inherent dignity. A technical advance in human cloning is not progress for humanity but its opposite.”

The Rev. Tad Pacholczyk, director of education for National Catholic Bioethics Center, an independent think tank in Philadelphia, reiterated his opposition to embryo cloning, calling the approach unethical.

“It involves the decision to utilize early human beings as repositories for obtaining desired cells,” he said. “You’re creating them only to destroy them.”

Scientists have tried to get stem cells from cloned human embryos for about a decade, but they’ve failed. Generally, that’s because the embryos stopped developing before producing the cells. In 2004, a South Korean scientist claimed to have gotten stem cells from cloned human embryos, but that turned out to be a fraud.

In Wednesday’s edition of the journal Cell, however, scientists in Oregon report harvesting stem cells from six embryos created from donated eggs. Two embryos had been given DNA from skin cells of a child with a genetic disorder, and the others had DNA from fetal skin cells.

Shoukhrat Mitalipov of the Oregon Health & Science University, who led the research, said the success came not from a single technical innovation, but from revising a series of steps in the process. He noted it had taken six years to reach the goal after doing it with monkey embryos.

Mitalipov also said that based on monkey work, he believes human embryos made with the technique could not develop into cloned babies, and he has no interest in trying to do that. Scientists have cloned more than a dozen kinds of mammals, starting with Dolly the sheep.

The new work was financed by the university and the Leducq Foundation in Paris.

Dr. George Daley, a stem cell expert at Children’s Hospital Boston who didn’t participate in the work, called the new results “one landmark step in a very long journey” toward creating DNA-matched transplant tissue.

Now, Daley said, scientists must compare the embryo-cloning approach with another technology that reprograms blood or skin cells directly into substitutes for embryonic stem cells. This reprogramming approach is technically simpler and doesn’t involve embryos or require the donation of human eggs, and it was widely acclaimed when it was reported in 2007. Its Japanese developer shared a Nobel Prize last year.

But these substitute cells show some molecular differences compared to embryonic ones, which has led to questions about whether they can safely be used for treating patients. So it’s essential to compare the cells from the two methods, Daley said.

The new results mean “we have another tool,” he said. “We have to learn more about this tool.”

Daley said he believed scientists will prefer using the reprogramming approach unless it can be proven “beyond a shadow of a doubt” that embryo cloning produces better cells for treating patients.

Mitalipov said he believed his technique would present a particular advantage for treating patients with a certain type of rare diseases. These are caused by mutations in genes of the mitochondria, the power plants of cells. He noted his technique, unlike the cell-reprogramming approach, would supply tissue with new mitochondrial genes that could replace defective ones. Those new genes would come from the egg.

Marcy Darnovsky, executive director of the Center for Genetics and Society in Berkeley, Calif., said she was glad that Mitalipov doubted the embryos could be used to clone babies. She said the report still provides a good opportunity for the federal government to ban the use of cloning for reproduction.

Featured image via Oregon Health & Science University.

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There might be benefits if parents “clean” baby’s pacifier with their own mouth instead of water, according to a new study. (Photo: Shutterstock.com)

For a parent, putting a pacifier into one’s own mouth before popping it into baby’s mouth next might not be the most appetizing thought, but this one action that a recent study says might help prevent allergies in the child. 

The study led by Swedish researchers published in the journal Pediatrics states that the oral microbes transferred from the parent to the child via pacifiers seem to protect against some allergy development. 

“Early establishment of a complex oral microflora might promote healthy maturation of the immune system, thereby counteracting allergy development,” University of Gothenburg professor Agnes Wold, who led the study, said in a statement.

Watch KSWB’s report on the study:

The study comes just as the U.S. Center for Disease Control and Prevention released a report revealing that the prevalence of food and skin allergies among those under 18 years of age increased from 1997 to 2011. 

(Image: CDC/NCHS, Health Data Interactive, National Health Interview Survey)

Nearly 200 infants were examined for allergies and sensitivities at 18 months and 36 months in the study, with parents recording whether or not they used a pacifier and whether or not they cleaned it. One of these “cleaning” was methods the use of the parents own saliva. 

The allergies this practice was found to potentially help protect against were eczema and asthma. They also found white blood cells associated with allergies to be lower in infants whose parents sucked on their pacifiers.

The study couldn’t prove that sucking on the pacifier was the actual mode through which these children became more protected from allergies or not, and did note that children born naturally, as opposed to through a cesarean section, were less likely to see allergies as well. 

The study found that the prevalence of eczema in children born naturally and whose parents sucked pacifiers was 2.5 times lower than those who were delivered by c-section and whose parents did not practice pacifier sucking. 

The study includes that children delivered by c-section might stand the most to gain from parents practicing pacifier sucking as they had some of the benefits of microbe exposure from the birthing experience. 

Some parents might be concerned about passing a respiratory infection onto children, but the study authors found that there was no higher rate of infection in children of parents who sucked on their pacifiers. 

In fact, the study authors believe that transferring of more complex microbial life though the practice might actually serve to “build up resistance to colonization” of more pathogenic bacteria. 

Some of the study’s findings are completely contrary to what is suggested by others regarding child care. The New York Times noted a campaign by the New York City Health Department in February which advised parents not to share “utensils or bites of food with your baby,” and expressly said to “use water, not your mouth, to clean off a pacifier.”

But the Times reported Dr. Joel Berg, president of the American Academy of Pediatric Dentistry, saying ultimately “saliva is your friend.”

“I think, like any new study, this is going to be challenged and questioned,” Berg told the Times. “But what it points out pretty clearly is that we are yet to fully discover the many and varied benefits of saliva.”

HealthDay News reported Dr. Ron Ferdman, a pediatric allergist at Children’s Hospital Los Angeles, cautioning that the study did have a relatively small sample size and that it focused only on Swedish babies. This is why the study authors too suggest the need for future studies to seek to establish whether this practice pacifier sucking is a safe and effective for protecting against some allergies, as their study seems to suggest. 

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“Ata” (Image: YouTube screenshot)

Featured in a crowd-funded documentary about extraterrestrials and the advanced energy technology they supposedly possess is a 6-inch humanoid skeleton with what many would describe as alien-like features. People were surprised when Garry Nolan with Stanford University said, after “Sirius” aired in April, that the skeleton was likely human based on its DNA.

Now, Science Magazine is featuring a more detailed analysis from the director of stem cell biology at Stanford University’s School of Medicine in California. The ultimate conclusion from Nolan is that the skeleton “is human, there’s no doubt about it.”

“Sirius,” the documentary led by Steven Greer, dubbed the skeleton Ata because it was found in Chile’s Atacama desert. Nolan heard about the skeleton and offered to filmmakers to give it his scientific look.

Here’s more from Science Magazine regarding the skeleton’s abnormalities and hypothesized age (emphasis added):

Among the apparent abnormalities, Ata sports 10 ribs instead of the usual 12 and a severely misshapen skull. “I asked our neonatal care unit how you would go about analyzing it. Had they seen this kind of syndrome before?” Nolan says. He was directed to pediatric radiologist Ralph Lachman, co-director of the International Skeletal Dysplasia Registry at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles, California. “He literally wrote the book on pediatric bone disorders,” Nolan says. Lachman was blown away, Nolan recalls: “He said, ‘Wow, this is like nothing I’ve ever seen before.’ “

To study the specimen, Nolan sought clues in Ata’s genome. He initially presumed the specimen was tens or hundreds of thousands of years old—the Atacama Desert may be the driest spot on the planet, so Ata could have been preserved for eons. He consulted experts who had extracted DNA from bones of the Denisovans, an Asian relative of European Stone Age Neandertals. It turned out that their protocols weren’t necessary. “The DNA was modern, abundant, and high quality,” he says, indicating that the specimen is probably a few decades old.

(Image: YouTube screenshot)

Looking at Ata’s mitochondrial DNA, scientists confirmed its heritage as likely being from Chile as its mother was from the west coast of South America.

So, if Ata is of human origin and is only a few decades old, what caused it to have such an alien-like appearance?

(Image: YouTube screenshot)

Looking at the development of the skeleton, Lachman believes Ata’s age was between 6 to 8 years old. This gives them two options about Ata’s bizarre deformities, Nolan said. Either Ata had a severe form of dwarfism or it was really a 22-week-old fetus that had a disease causing it to age rapidly, like progeria, and died before reaching a full-term birth. Looking into both of these possibilities, Nolan didn’t find the genes for either condition.

Science Magazine reported Nolan saying he is researching other genetic mutations and toxins that could have led to such a skeleton.

Getting another opinion, Science reported William Jungers, a paleoanthropologist and anatomist at Stony Brook University Medical Center, saying he thinks Ata was a mummified human fetus or premature stillbirth. Nolan said this explanation wouldn’t account for the unusual rib number and other features.

Still think Ata might be a hoax? Nolan too said that based on his analysis “you just couldn’t fake it … unless you were an alien.”

If you haven’t seen the trailer for the “Sirius” documentary that spurred the story of Ata to go viral, check it out:

(H/T: NeatORama)

–

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• Documentary Trailer Claims to Show ‘Humanoid of Unknown Classification’ That’s Just a Few Inches Tall

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But it is of course possible, which is why BBC’s Earth Unplugged focused its Slow Mo special on the human body and what sets us apart from other primates.

(Image: BBC Earth Unplugged/YouTube screenshot)

“With limited time, and a new camera to play with, can they capture the lightning fast moves of the world’s most successful animal?” the video description asks, referring to the warriors and Earth Unplugged hosts’ high-speed camera.

(Image: BBC Earth Unplugged/YouTube screenshot)

(Image: BBC Earth Unplugged/YouTube screenshot)

Check it out (Note: be sure to tune in to 5:13 to see the Shaolin warrior smash the object on his head):

Shaolin Kung Fu is a type of martial arts that originated at the Shaolin Monastery in China.

Columbia Arts Management, which hosts a Shaolin Warrior show, describes its Kung Fu masters as having trained from a young age for the physical and mental demands of the practice.

(H/T: Gizmodo)

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RoboBee (Photo: Kevin Ma and Pakpong Chirarattananon)

Developed by Harvard School of Engineering and Applied Sciences (SEAS) and the Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering at Harvard, the robot weighing just 80mg with a 3cm-wide wingspan recently took its first controlled flight, according to a study published in the journal Science. It was found able to flap its wings a stunning 120 beats per second — yes, per second.

Try to see its wings flap in this demonstration:

Not only that but it is reported to be the first controlled flight of an insect robot ever.

Graduate student Pakpong Chirarattananon was so excited after capturing the first video of the robot’s flight, he immediately fired it off in an email to his colleagues and adviser at 3 a.m., documenting the “Flight of the RoboBee,” Harvard’s press release stated.

“I was so excited, I couldn’t sleep,” Chirarattananon said in a statement.

And with more than a decade of work leading up to this accomplishment, Chiararattananon’s glee and that of the team was merited.

“This is what I have been trying to do for literally the last 12 years,” Robert Wood, engineering and applied sciences professor at SEAS and principal investigator of the RoboBee project, said. “It’s really only because of this lab’s recent breakthroughs in manufacturing, materials, and design that we have even been able to try this. And it just worked, spectacularly well.”

(Photo: Kevin Ma and Pakpong Chirarattananon)

Due to the robots size, Wood explained that each component was a “moving target.”

“We would get one component working, but when we moved onto the next, five new problems would arise,” he said in a statement.

Unlike some robotic prototypes that are very carefully tested due to their difficulty to build, Wood’s team used a pop-up technique demonstrated last year that allows them to quickly and more economically produce the insect robots.

The researchers believe the RoboBee concept could someday be used for search-and-rescue, environmental monitoring or even crop pollination.

(H/T: io9)

–

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Kiera Wilmot (Photo: WTSP screenshot)

A Florida high school student has been expelled, arrested and charged for possession of a weapon at school after she mixed chemicals in a bottle, causing an explosion Monday.

WTSP reported classmates of Kiera Wilmot, 16, saying it was a “science project gone bad.” They said Wilmot “just wanted to see what happened” when one mixed household chemicals in an 8-ounce water bottle. The result, which occurred around 7 a.m. April 29, caused the cap to pop along with smoke and a small explosion.

Wilmot was arrested and charged as an adult for possession/discharge of a weapon on school property and discharging a destructive device, according to WTSP.

But students at Bartow High School don’t think Wilmot ever had malicious intent.

“I don’t think she’s that type of person. She wouldn’t hurt anyone,” student Chelsey Turner said.

Principal Ron Pritchard too said Wilmot “is a good kid” who had “never been in trouble before. Ever.” Pritchard also said that he believes Wilmot was shocked by the result the mixed chemicals had.

Watch WTSP’s report:

The Polk County School District released a statement regarding the incident:

Anytime a student makes a bad choice it is disappointing to us. Unfortunately, the incident that occurred at Bartow High School yesterday was a serious breach of conduct. In order to maintain a safe and orderly learning environment, we simply must uphold our code of conduct rules. We urge our parents to join us in conveying the message that there are consequences to actions. We will not compromise the safety and security of our students and staff.

Since being expelled, WTSP reported that Wilmot will complete the year through an expulsion program.

WTSP tried to contact the Wilmot family at their home but when they approached the door it reported hearing the voice of a teen girl yell, ”You’ve blown everything out of proportion!” Wilmot’s twin sister reportedly cried and fled a classroom when another student brought up her sister’s arrest.

(H/T: Gawker)

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Carmen Blandin Tarleton of Thetford had face transplant surgery at Boston’s Brigham and Women’s Hospital in February and spoke publicly for the first time at a news conference at the hospital Wednesday.

“I’m now in a better place, mentally and emotionally, than I ever could have imagined six years ago,” Tarleton said. “I want to share my experience with others, so they may find that strength inside themselves to escape their own pain.”

In 2007, the 44-year-old mother of two was attacked by her now ex-husband Herbert Rodgers, who believed she was seeing another man. Police say he went to the house looking for that man, then went into a fury directed toward Tarleton, striking her with a bat and pouring lye from a squeeze bottle onto her face.

When police arrived, Tarleton was trying to crawl to a shower to wash away the chemical. It had already distorted her face.

In 2009, Rodgers pleaded guilty to maiming Tarleton in exchange for a prison sentence of at least 30 years.

The hospital said that during the face transplant surgery, more than 30 surgeons, anesthesiologists and nurses worked for more than 15 hours to replace her skin, muscles, tendons and nerves.

The face donor was a Williamstown, Mass., woman, Cheryl Denelli Righter, who died of a sudden stroke, a hospital spokeswoman said.

Righter’s daughter, Marinda, told Tarleton on Wednesday that she looked beautiful, adding she was certain her mother had somehow picked Tarleton. “They are both mothers, they are both survivors, they are both beacons of light,” she said.

Righter said that after meeting Tarleton for the first time Tuesday, she felt overjoyed for the first time in a long time.

“I get to feel my mother’s skin again, I get to see my mother’s freckles, and through you, I get to see my mother live on,” she said. “This is truly a blessing.”

Tarleton is legally blind and read her remarks from a tablet. She thanked Righter’s family for what she called “a tremendous gift” that’s greatly alleviated the physical pain she’d felt daily.

Tarleton referred to the victims of the Boston Marathon bombing and said the city is “facing the challenges of pain and forgiveness.”

“There is a lot to learn and take from horrific events that happen,” Tarleton said. “I want others to know that they need not give up on feeling (like) themselves when tragedy strikes, but instead they can make a choice to find the good and allow that to help them heal.”

Watch the doctor, daughter of the face donor’s mother and Tarleton speak in a press conference about the transplant:

—

Associated Press writer Jay Lindsay contributed to this report.

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The spheres found in a chamber off the tunnel seen on the ground. (Photo: DMC, INAH/M. MARAT via Discovery News)

According an article on Mexico’s National Institute of Archaeology and History’s website, the unexcavated portion of the tunnel under the temple in Teotihuacan was traversed by an infrared camera-equipped robot – Tlaloc II-TC — that also had the ability to scan the area to generate a 3D picture.

Getting through the tunnel was a challenge with the robot because of its weight and the presence of mud, according to archaeologist Sergio Gómez Chávez. He said the wet conditions were to create a scene like that the Teotihuacanos believed to be similar to the underworld.

With information from the robot, archaeologists were able to find that they need to remove 30 more meters of debris in the tunnel to reach the three chambers.

One of the chambers in an already excavated portion of tunnel under the temple. (Photo: DMC, INAH/M. MARAT via Discovery News)

Two additional chambers that are within the already excavated portion of the tunnel is where archaeologists found the spheres, which they believe were placed inside at the last closing of the tunnel about 1,800 years ago.

“We can not yet establish its role because it is an unprecedented discovery. They should have a sphere, ranging from 4 to 12 inches and have a core of clay with organic matter, then covered them with pyrite, a mineral that underwent a process of oxidation and became jarosite, hence have a tone yellow,” archaeologist Jorge Zavala said, according to the National Institute of Archaeology and History.

Spheres found in this chamber are on the ground. Archaeologists say in their original state, they would have shone as a golden color. (Photo: DMC, INAH/M. MARAT via Discovery News)

Discovery News reported George Cowgill, professor emeritus at Arizona State University who has authored publications on Teotihuacan, saying the spheres in their original condition “would have shown brilliantly.” Still, he said he had no idea what they could mean.

Gómez Chávez said the orbs would have appeared “metallic” at the time due to their properties.

The researchers hope the tunnels and chambers will offer clues about rituals, like burials of important figures, that were conducted in Teotihuacan.

“We believe that high-ranking people, priests or even rulers, went down to the tunnel to perform rituals,” Gómez Chávez to Discovery News. ”Maybe in this place, we will find the remains of those who ruled Teotihuacan.”

See more pictures of the excavation in Discovery News here.

(H/T: Gizmodo)

–

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I was incredulous, but he proceeded to methodically lay out his case, not for the horrors of his uncle’s regime, which he readily acknowledged, but for an understanding of the qualitative difference between the Chilean experience and that of the many of her neighbors.

Today, Chile is the bright light of South America. While many countries have labored under leftist (and dubiously democratic) regimes, Chile continues to hum towards becoming the continent’s only “first-world nation.”  What has set this skinny sliver of land on such a dramatically different path?  While not comfortable to admit, it has a lot to do with Augusto Pinochet’s otherwise profoundly evil reign.

As your heads explode and you prepare to pen angry email denunciations of me, permit me to draw some important distinctions between supporting ANY anti-democratic regime and understanding why economic freedom is the great hope of EVERY person who lives under such governments; as well as the lesson that we can all take from their experience.

One of the most fundamental tenets of international economic development is that the economic system of a country must encourage the development and growth of a middle class. The relative economic health and civil rights respect of a nation tends to roughly correlate to the health and wealth of its middle class. Countries with robust middle class populations usually have more democracy, fewer human rights abuses and tend towards a more liberal approach (in the classical sense) to balancing the interests of the State and the interests of the individual.

The tenet holds that in order to have a modicum of respect for human rights; nations need that middle class to not only exist, but to have sufficient free time and capital to generate “pushback” against government overreach. Absent a middle class and the non-governmental institutions that develop around it, there is simply no counter-balance to the unchecked power of the State. This result is an unchallengeable government monopoly on power and…witnesses 20^th century communism or most of Latin America today.

Given this, we begin to see the distinction made by Miguel Pinochet start to make logical sense.  The effect of unchecked leftist power is as predictable as it is sad.  The first order of all leftist regimes, whether out of a genuine desire to help the poor and remake society for the better (Morales, Mujica, Chinchilla) or a Machiavellian need to destroy their opposition as a function of maintaining power (Chavez/Maduro, Correa, Ortega), is to curtail and eventually destroy the purchasing power of the middle class. By eliminating the free time and resources of the people and their private institutions, the State consumes and co-opts the mechanisms of wealth creation and thus the power to oppose them.

By contrast, right wing regimes, even brutal ones such as Pinochet’s, maintain the private ownership of property and resources and thus the people’s ability to push back and even, as was the case with Chile, to resume normal democratic order in time without a great deal of social upheaval.

In case after case, nation after nation, we see a similar dynamic. Economic liberty is, indeed, a necessary condition for civil rights because without it, civil rights cannot stand against the raw, unchecked power of the State.

So it is that when I am asked why I am a Republican despite being critical of my own party and deferential to many of the civil liberties arguments of the left, the answer is simple: the GOP is more likely to support and maintain some degree of private property and economic liberty. Without that, there are no Democrats and there are no Republicans, there is just the State and the serfs who labor under its yoke.

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Hannah Warren has been unable to breathe, eat, drink or swallow on her own since she was born in South Korea in 2010. Until the operation at a central Illinois hospital, she had spent her entire life in a hospital in Seoul. Doctors there told her parents there was no hope and they expected her to die.

The stem cells came from Hannah’s bone marrow, extracted with a special needle inserted into her hip bone. They were seeded in a lab onto a plastic scaffold, where it took less than a week for them to multiply and create a new windpipe.

About the size of a 3-inch tube of penne pasta, it was implanted April 9 in a nine-hour procedure.

Early signs indicate the windpipe is working, Hannah’s doctors announced Tuesday, although she is still on a ventilator. They believe she will eventually be able to live at home and lead a normal life.

Here is a look at pictures of Hannah throughout the procedure:

“We feel like she’s reborn,” said Hannah’s father, Darryl Warren.

“They hope that she can do everything that a normal child can do but it’s going to take time. This is a brand new road that all of us are on,” he said in a telephone interview. “This is her only chance but she’s got a fantastic one and an unbelievable one.”

She breathes with help from a ventilator but no longer has a tube in her mouth that she’d lived with since shortly after birth, Dr. Mark Holterman said. She’s not yet able to eat normally, but doctors let her have her first taste ever of food – a few licks on a lollipop. Her father said she already has discriminating taste and prefers chocolate Korean lollipops to the American kind.

“I asked her, ‘Is it good?’” he said, “and she immediately nodded her head.”

Warren choked up and his wife, Lee Young-mi, was teary-eyed at a hospital news conference Tuesday. Hannah did not attend because she is still recovering from the surgery. She developed an infection after the operation but now is acting like a healthy 2-year-old, her doctors said.

Warren said he hopes the family can bring Hannah home for the first time in a month or so. Hannah turns 3 in August.

“It’s going to be amazing for us to finally be together as a family of four,” he said. The couple has an older daughter.

Only about one in 50,000 children worldwide are born with the windpipe defect. The stem-cell technique has been used to make other body parts besides windpipes and holds promise for treating other birth defects and childhood diseases, her doctors said.

The operation brought together an Italian surgeon based in Sweden who pioneered the technique, a pediatric surgeon at Children’s Hospital of Illinois in Peoria who met Hannah’s family while on a business trip to South Korea, and Hannah – born to a Newfoundland man and Korean woman who married after he moved to that country to teach English.

Hannah’s parents had read about Dr. Paolo Macchiarini’s success using stem-cell based tracheas but couldn’t afford to pay for the operation at his center, the Karolinska Institute in Stockholm. So Holterman helped the family arrange to have the procedure at his Peoria hospital, bringing in Macchiarini to lead the operation. Children’s Hospital waived the cost, likely hundreds of thousands of dollars, Holterman said.

Part of OSF Saint Francis Medical Center, the Roman Catholic hospital considers the operation part of their mission to provide charity care, but also views it as a way to champion a type of stem-cell therapy that doesn’t involve human embryos, the surgeons said. The Catholic church opposes using stem cells derived from human embryos in research or treatment.

Macchiarini has been involved in 14 previous windpipe operations using patients’ own stem cells – five using man-made scaffolds like Hannah’s but in adults; and nine using scaffolds made from cadaver windpipes, including one in a 10-year-old British boy.

He said only one patient died, a 30-year-old man from Abingdon, Md., who had the operation in November 2011 to treat late-stage cancer of the windpipe. He died about four months later of uncertain causes, Macchiarini said.

Similar methods have been used to grow bladders, urethras and last year a girl in Sweden got a lab-made vein using her own stem cells and a cadaver vein.

Scientists hope to eventually use the method to create solid organs, including kidneys and livers, said Dr. Anthony Atala, director of Wake Forest University’s Institute for Regenerative Medicine. He said the operation on Hannah Warren “is really showing that the technique is workable.”

Watch this video from CBS in 2011 about a similar technique to grow body parts:

Hannah had breathing difficulties at birth and Korean doctors soon discovered the missing windpipe. They reconfigured her esophagus so that a breathing tube could go down it from her mouth to her lungs. The esophagus normally runs behind the windpipe and carries food to the stomach.

Korean doctors said she couldn’t live long with the tube and told her parents there was nothing more they could do.

Hannah outlived their expectations and has thrived despite the grim prognosis and other abnormalities including an undeveloped voice box that prevented her from speaking. Now that she has a windpipe and can breathe more normally, doctors expect the larynx to grow and function normally. She will work with speech therapists to help her learn to talk.

Holterman said Hannah will likely need a new windpipe in about five years, as she grows.

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(Photo: IRAUy / J. Calvelo via SlashGear)

According to Nature World News, the sheep exhibiting such a trait were born at the Animal Reproduction Institute of Uruguay last fall and have been developing normally — aside from their hue — ever since. 

“We did not use a protein of medical interest or to help with a particular medicine because we wanted to fine-tune the technique. We used the green protein because the color is easily identifiable in the sheep’s tissues,” Alejo Menchaca, who led the research team, said according to Nature World News. 

Green Florescent Protein is isolated from a specific species of jellyfish and can then be cloned and inserted into the genes of other animals. GFP is useful in that it can be used as a tag to monitor development or the movement of something, like how a virus spreads. 

Watch this report about the glowing sheep:

(H/T: SlashGear)

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Tim Yarrow, a scuba diver, was featured in a recent episode of the Science Channel’s “Outrageous Acts of Science” about human guinea pigs after he spent 240 hours submerged — a world record.

Tim Yarrow in a tank. (Image: Outrageous Acts of Science/YouTube screenshot)

Yarrow completed the feat in 2002 in a tank situated in a Johannesburg, South Africa, mall where he was observed in his experiment for a week and a half.

Yarrow was fed through a tube and went to the bathroom through a catheter. Breathing was performed using scuba equipment.

But after he got out of the tank, the effects of being under water for that long were not over.

(Image: Outrageous Acts of Science/YouTube screenshot)

“That’s gross, did you see his hands,” one of the show’s hosts said.

(Image: Outrageous Acts of Science/YouTube screenshot)

“It looks like he’s turning into some kind of fish person,” another host said.

Biologists on the show explained what was happening to his fingers.

“Skin on our hands and on our feet tends to get coarse. We have extra layers of dead skin because our hands and our feet are so well used,” Carin Bondair said.

These dead cells absorb water and become puffy.

They wrinkle because “there’s no where else for them to go,” another biologist said.

In 2011, TheBlaze reported on research that speculated pruneyness occurred to help primates better grip items in a wet environment. Ten days in water creates more than just a potentially functional level of wrinkly fingers though. Yarrow’s skin actually began to disintegrate, but in time it did recover.

Watch the clip:

(H/T: io9)

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(Photo: Femare Green Hill)

Over the weekend animal rights activists entered a laboratory conducting animal studies, set loose some of the animals and switched cages, ruining years worth of research, according to lab officials.

Nature reported that the unauthorized entering of the laboratory in the pharmacology department at the University of Milan was part of a protest staged by people with the group Fermare Green Hill (or Stop Green Hill).

Pharmacologist Francesca Guidobono-Cavalchini, who works in the building, said, according to Nature, that they believe five activists obtained a keycard to enter the building illegally. Once inside, the activists set free some animals and mixed up cages and labels. Two even put chains around their necks, attaching the other end to the main double doors of the facility, which could cause bodily harm if the opened by authorities.

(Photo: Fermare Green Hill)

“These animals did not choose to be there and have no chance to leave,” the activists stated on their website (translated via Google Translate). “With this unprecedented action we want to document the conditions in which animals live and experiments that are conducted, showing them to the whole society with photographs and films; give visibility to the problem of vivisection and the places where it is practiced, thus giving a name also those who practice it, to start a siege peaceful inside and in front of the laboratory with the request that the animals are released and that the Ministry and the Palaces of an end to the false promises and really started to take steps towards the abolition of animal testing.”

Nature reported Paola Viani, the deputy director with the pharmacology department, saying he had to work with police to reach a compromise with the activists. They ended up taking less than 100 animals with them and were supposedly told they could take more from the facility later.

“It will take three people at least a year to build up the colonies we had of mouse models of different psychiatric diseases,” neurobiologist Michela Matteoli said.

Guidobono-Cavalchini told Nature the university intends to press charges for the damage done.

On Sunday, scientists issued a letter (translated by Google) stating that the activists damage “goes far beyond the loss of animals illegally removed,” but extends to a loss of scientific discovery and hundreds of thousands of euros.

Acknowledging that there is a controversial component to animal research, the scientists continue in the letter stating that it can be of service to humanity and thus ask that the activists be brought to justice for “the agencies, individuals and families of patients who fund our research.”

“We also hope that what has happened can help to clarify the difference between ‘vivisection’ and basic research aimed at discovery of therapies for diseases that are incurable and severely disabling that plague our society,” the letter stated.

(H/T: Huffington Post)

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Well, the DNA test results are in. As it turns out, the 6-inch humanoid is, in fact, likely human.

“I can say with absolute certainty that it is not a monkey. It is human — closer to human than chimpanzees. It lived to the age of six to eight. Obviously, it was breathing, it was eating, it was metabolizing. It calls into question how big the thing might have been when it was born,”said Garry Nolan, director of stem cell biology at Stanford University’s School of Medicine in California.

(Image: YouTube screenshot)

(Image: YouTube screenshot)

“The DNA tells the story and we have the computational techniques that allows us to determine, in very short order, whether, in fact, this is human,” Nolan explains in the film.

“‘Sirius’ focuses on the remains of the small humanoid, nicknamed Ata, that was discovered in Chile’s Atacama Desert 10 years ago and has, literally, gone through different hands and ownership since then,” The Huffington Post notes.

HuffPost has more background on the documentary:

The film also explores an ongoing grassroots movement to get the U.S. government to reveal what it reportedly knows about UFOs, extraterrestrials and the availability of advanced alternative energy technologies that could greatly benefit everyone on Earth.

The primary force behind “Sirius” is Steven Greer, a former emergency room doctor who founded the Center for the Study of Extraterrestrial Intelligence (CSETI) and The Disclosure Project.

One odd thing about the Ata controversy is how it came to the recent attention of the American public.

Early in the documentary, Greer refers to Ata as an extraterrestrial being, explaining how it was found in the Atacama Desert and “we don’t know how it came about.” That seems strange because HuffPost recently reported on the well known history of little Ata since its discovery 10 years ago and subsequent moving from hand to hand, ending up in Spain.

Watch the theatrical trailer for “Sirius,” which now has nearly 1 million views:

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The folk music band Los Tekis played at an outdoor venue, according to the Associated Press, and raw footage taken originally of the performers was able to capture what has not yet officially been confirmed as a meteor on camera.

(Image: AP video screenshot)

(Image: AP video screenshot)

(Image: AP video screenshot)

Watch the footage:

The Lyrid meteor shower peaked over the weekend, but it is unknown if what was seen in the Argentinian sky was related. According to NASA, the meteor shower is composed of particles of dust shed from the tail of the periodic Comet C/1861 G1 Thatcher.

Here are a few other videos from activity that was related to the meteor shower:

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This latest one is not so much a how-to but a what does it look like. What does wringing out a washcloth in zero gravity look like? Answer: so much cooler than here on Earth.

First, you start off with a washcloth that has been packed down into what Hadfield calls a “hockey puck,” a design to help it save space on the confined space station.

(Image: YouTube screenshot)

Next, Hadfield uses a bag of water to soak the washcloth and wrings away.

(Image: YouTube screenshot)

(Image: YouTube screenshot)

(Image: YouTube screenshot)

(Image: YouTube screenshot)

“So the answer is the water squeezes out of the cloth. Then because of the surface tension of the water, it actually runs along the surface of the cloth and then up into my hand,” Hadfield explains. “Almost like you had Jell-O on your hands or gel on your hands, and it will just stay there.”

The screenshots are cool, but watching it is even better:

(H/T: io9)

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The putty, like the type dubbed Super Magnetic Thinking Putty® from Putty World, is designed to “attract one magnetic pole and repel from the other.”

Shanks, in coordination with PBS Digital Studio, showed off the mesmerizing properties of the material in a recent video.

(Image: Joey Shanks/Vimeo screenshot)

(Image: Joey Shanks/Vimeo screenshot)

(Image: Joey Shanks/Vimeo screenshot)

Steve Spangler, an author, science teacher and speaker, explained how the substance works on his website:

Magnetic Attractor Putty is a non-Newtonian solid. This means that while the putty is technically a solid, it exhibits qualities of a liquid as well. Just let your putty sit on a flat surface for a while and you’ll see it spread out like a liquid. The magnetic properties of the Magnetic Attractor Putty come from a magnetic material being mixed in with the putty itself.  There are millions of tiny micron-sized magnets embedded in the putty to ensure that it will respond to any large magnet.

Watch the putty envelop metal objects like “the blob” in Shank’s video:

The material retails from Putty World for about $15.

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Then U.S. Rep. Lynn Woolsey (D-CA) (2nd L) and representatives of women’s groups hold a rally to mark the 40th anniversary of congressional passage of the Equal Rights Ammendment (ERA) outside the U.S. Capitol March 22, 2012 in Washington, DC. (Photo: Getty Images)

If you thought members of Congress waste time when they’re in office, just wait til you hear what they get up to when they leave.

Former Rep. Lynn Woolsey (D-CA), who retired after last year’s election, has evidently found a new issue to crusade on now that her 20 year stint as one of the more liberal members of Congress is over: the idea that extraterrestrial life (i.e. aliens) not only exist but have been living among humans here on earth. Woolsey, along with other former legislators including former Senator (and longshot presidential candidate) Mike Gravel and a bipartisan group of four other lawmakers, is set to preside over a mock “hearing” on the idea of extraterrestrials living among us on April 29 at Washington’s National Press Club. The guests are each being paid $20,000 plus expenses for their time.

What do the sponsors of this odd event hope to get out of it? The Santa Rosa Press Democrat reports:

The $600,000 event, put on by the Bethesda, Md.-based Paradigm Research Group, will offer — and film for a future documentary — 30 hours of congressional-style hearings devoted to the premise of an ET-like presence “engaging the human race.”

“This event is a milestone; this has never been done before,” said Stephen Bassett, executive director of Paradigm, a lobbying organization formed in 1996.

More than 30 witnesses will testify over five days during the Citizen Hearing on Disclosure, focusing on what Bassett’s group calls “the most important issue of this or any other time.”

The event’s international spokesman is Edgar Mitchell, a former Apollo astronaut and moonwalker who asserts that alien visits to Earth include the 1947 crash at Roswell, N.M.

One of the witnesses, Chinese scientist Sun Shili, believes that extraterrestrials live on Earth and could hold keys to research on high-speed travel, renewable energy and fast-growing crops, according to the hearing’s website.[...]

Bassett said the six-figure cost of the event is being covered by a backer who will be identified later. The backer is “someone who wants to see this issue resolved,” Bassett said.[...]

The hearing and Bassett’s group are intent on exposing what he calls the “Truth Embargo,” a decades-long government campaign to not only deny the existence of extraterrestrials but to discredit believers.

“It’s no longer about lights in the sky; it’s about lies on the ground,” Paradigm Research Group’s website says.

Along with this odd mock “hearing,” the Paradigm Research Group is also behind a number of other interesting ventures. For instance, they have posted several petitions at petitions.whitehouse.gov. These petitions, which have acquired a combined total of over 17,000 signatures, ask the Obama administration to acknowledge extraterrestrial life as currently having made contact with human beings.

What is even stranger? The administration has responded:

Thank you for signing the petition asking the Obama Administration to acknowledge an extraterrestrial presence here on Earth.

The U.S. government has no evidence that any life exists outside our planet, or that an extraterrestrial presence has contacted or engaged any member of the human race. In addition, there is no credible information to suggest that any evidence is being hidden from the public’s eye.

However, that doesn’t mean the subject of life outside our planet isn’t being discussed or explored. In fact, there are a number of projects working toward the goal of understanding if life can or does exist off Earth. Here are a few examples:

• SETI—the Search for ExtraTerrestrial Intelligence—was originally stood up with help from NASA, but has since been moved to other sources of private funding. SETI’s main purpose is to act as a giant ear on behalf of the human race, pointing an array of ground-based telescopes towards space to listen for any signal from another world.
• Kepler is a NASA spacecraft in orbit that’s main goal is to search for Earth-like planets. Such a planet would be located in the “Goldilocks” zone of a distant solar system—not too hot and not too cold—and could potentially be habitable by life as we know it. The Kepler mission is specifically designed to survey our region of the Milky Way galaxy to discover Earth-sized, rocky planets in or near the habitable zone of the star (sun) they orbit.
• The Mars Science Laboratory, Curiosity, is an automobile-sized rover that NASA is launching soon. The rover’s onboard laboratory will study rocks, soils, and other geology in an effort to detect the chemical building blocks of life (e.g., forms of carbon) on Mars and will assess what the Martian environment was like in the past to see if it could have harbored life.

A last point: Many scientists and mathematicians have looked with a statistical mindset at the question of whether life likely exists beyond Earth and have come to the conclusion that the odds are pretty high that somewhere among the trillions and trillions of stars in the universe there is a planet other than ours that is home to life.

Many have also noted, however, that the odds of us making contact with any of them—especially any intelligent ones—are extremely small, given the distances involved.

But that’s all statistics and speculation. The fact is we have no credible evidence of extraterrestrial presence here on Earth.

So even if one might find it tempting to snigger at the efforts of the Paradigm Research Group, the White House itself appears not to be laughing, at least not openly, and nor are former members of Congress. Whether investigating evidence of extraterrestrial life is a good use of those members of Congress’ time, however, is another story entirely.

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(Image: Yahoo video screenshot)

ThinkSpain reported that the home in the town of San Sebastián de La Gomera has now been blocked off due to the infestation. The nest itself was measured to be 21’9″ long.

(Image: Yahoo video screenshot)

(Image: Yahoo video screenshot)

Officials said they don’t believe native wasps would build a nest so large, leading them to speculate it is an invasive species from Africa.

Watch Yahoo’s Odd News video report about the infestation (via Daily News 24):

(H/T: Gizmodo)

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Science classes like biology would include other real-world applications for the knowledge according to the Next Generation Science Standards. (Image: Shutterstock.com)

For the past two years, 26 states collaborated to develop a new set of voluntary educational standards for science in schools, updating what some consider horribly out of date previous guidelines from 1996.

“The [Next Generation Science Standards] aim to prepare students to be better decision makers about scientific and technical issues and to apply science to their daily lives,” Matt Krehbeil, science education program consultant, of Kansas, said in a statement. “By blending core science knowledge with scientific practices, students are engaged in a more relevant context that deepens their understanding and helps them to build what they need to move forward with their education – whether that’s moving on to a four-year college or moving into post-secondary training.”

Drafting of the Next Generation Science Standards was coordinated by Achieve, a bipartisan non-profit seeking to help states raise education standards. Achieve also helped developed the Common Core State Standards Initiative.  The National Research Council, the National Science Teachers Association and American Association for the Advancement of Science were involved in phases of the standard’s development process as well.

The K-12 standards have already been getting buzz from those who believe global warming education was missing from schools for years  and “climate deniers” who call it a “victory for progressives and liberals” that “doesn’t reflect correct science.”

Mark McCaffrey, the programs and policy director with the National Science Teachers Association, told TheBlaze their hope is that the standards aren’t “painted as [only] climate change standards” just because climate science and information involving man-made global warming is included.

“[It] cover a wide range of topics,” McCaffrey said. “The new standards are designed to provide young people with scientific understanding and skills.”

A look at the press release about the standards released earlier this week doesn’t even mention climate science being an addition to the standards that was missing from the 1996 recommendations.

Climate science though, MCaffrey said, is one that has “continued to fall through the cracks.”

“Because climate change was not included in national science standards, we’ve lost almost 20 years,” he said. “Now we need to have informed citizens.”

McCaffrey said if climate change education was included earlier, we would be in a “different situation” instead of “paying the price right now.”

When asked about teaching “both sides” of climate change — teaching that there are those who believe the data does not confirm anthropogenic activity is causing global warming — McCaffrey said it is a practice that “shows a false balance.”

NGSS establishes a set of Disciplinary Core Ideas the framers believe students should know by high school graduation. Some of these ideas will include “societal or personal concerns that require scientific or technological knowledge.”

When it comes to climate change and the core idea progression, students learn about weather in younger grades eventually leading up to learning about historical weather patterns and how patterns compose climate. As early as third grade, students would begin learning about how a warming temperature would impact life on Earth.

Once the student is in high school, the NGSS would have them learning about “the role of radiation from the sun and [how] its interactions with the atmosphere, ocean, and land are the foundation for the global climate system.” At this age, information about global climate models predicting future changes in climate, “including changes influenced by human behavior and natural factors,” would be taught as well.

Students will also learn about human impacts on earth systems. Those in grades K-2 will learn about how human actions affect the environment and how “they can make choices to reduce their impacts.” High school students in this category will learn about “sustainability of human societies and [how] the biodiversity that supports them requires responsible management of natural resources, including the development of technologies and regulations.”

The core ideas also include everything from human biology, chemistry and physics to environmental science, evolution and information systems.

Watch this promotional video about the standards:

The framework of the standards want these topics to draw connections between the “interdependence of science, engineering and technology” and how they influence society and the natural world.

“The Next Generation of Science Standards promise to help students understand why is it that we have to know science and help them use scientific learning to develop critical thinking skills-which may be applied throughout their lives, no matter the topic,” Joseph S. Krajcik, professor of science education in the college of education at Michigan State University and a member of the writing team, said in a statement. “Unlike previous standards, where you have separation of inquiry and ideas that students should know, in the NGSS they are now together.”

In the promotional video, Rodger Bybee, executive director of the Center for Science, Mathematics and Engineering Education, said “the standards …have the power to influence all of the components of the education system.”

McCaffrey told TheBlaze their hope with the NGSS is that it will also help uniform science standards among the states. He called science education across the nation a ” complete hodgepodge” at the moment.

The standards, which were developed with funding from the Carnegie Corporation, now will be considered by states for adoption. They are completely voluntary and states are not obligated to adopt them.

Check out this infographic about the NGSS:

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Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. (Getty Images).

An Iranian scientist says he has invented technology that will allow users to look at least eight years into the future, The Telegraph reports.

Ali Razeghi, 27, registered “The Aryayek Time Traveling Machine” with the state-run Centre for Strategic Inventions, the report adds.

The Tehran scientist told the Fars state news agency that his device can “predict the future in a print out after taking readings from the touch of a user,” adding that it uses a set of complex algorithms to “predict five to eight years of the future life of any individual, with 98 percent accuracy.”

Razeghi, the managing director of Iran’s Centre for Strategic Inventions, has about 179 other inventions listed in his name.

“I have been working on this project for the last 10 years,” he said. “My invention easily fits into the size of a personal computer case and can predict details of the next 5-8 years of the life of its users. It will not take you into the future, it will bring the future to you.”

The scientist says Iran’s leaders can use his device to predict future military confrontations or fluctuations in global currencies and oil prices.

“Naturally a government that can see five years into the future would be able to prepare itself for challenges that might destabilize it,” he said. “As such we expect to market this invention among states as well as individuals once we reach a mass production stage.”

Razeghi claims friends and family have given him a hard time for “trying to play God” with his time device.

“This project is not against our religious values at all. The Americans are trying to make this invention by spending millions of dollars on it where I have already achieved it by a fraction of the cost,” he said. “The reason that we are not launching our prototype at this stage is that the Chinese will steal the idea and produce it in millions overnight.”

Those darn Chinese.

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Front page photo courtesy screen grab.

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Climate science advocates are hailing new federal education guidelines as a major victory in the battle to “squash…climate denialist” approaches in schools.

The  Next Generation Science Standards call for sweeping changes in America’s science classrooms. For the first time middle schoolers would be required to learn about man-made climate change, and high schoolers to understand that “human activities, such as the release of greenhouse gases from burning fossil fuels, are major factors in the current rise in Earth’s mean surface temperature.”

The standards are a “once-in-a-generation opportunity” to shape science education, said Matt Lappé, Director of Education at the  Alliance for Climate Education. “I would agree” that it’s a big win for climate science advocates, he told Politix. “I am very happy with the way the standards include climate change.”

The last guidelines, released in 1996, contained no language on climate change, he said.

“The hope is that standards with rigor like this, with support within states, will squash those denialist approaches to climate science teaching. We’ve seen a number of [bills promoting climate skepticism in schools] proposed and shut down, and we’re now in a position where we expect that to be the norm,” said Lappé.

Climate change skeptics called the new standards biased.

“It’s a victory for progressives and liberals. For us conservatives it’s a very bad set of standards” said Robert Lattimer, President of COPE (Citizens for Objective Public Education).  It is “a very politically correct document put together by elite scientists. It doesn’t reflect correct science at all.”

“I would say the standards are very strong on human-caused global warming…From the point of view of conservatives it’s not a good document at all and it shouldn’t be adopted,” Lattimer added.

Other climate skeptic groups are similarly despondent. “The Next Generation Science Standards convey an anti-human message…that is not scientifically justified,” said James M. Taylor, Senior fellow for Environmental Policy at the Heartland Institute, in a statement. “They certainly convey an environmental activist bias.”

But there’s a silver lining for climate skeptics, claims Patrick J. Michaels, director of the Center for the Study of Science at the Cato Institute. Climate activists have gone too far with the standards and shot themselves in the foot, he said.

The standards are based on a “very alarmist point of view on global warming,” says Michaels. “There will be tremendous resistance” among young people.

“Kids will become even more skeptical than they are now” when they go online and see scientific papers about how warming isn’t really happening. “They will rebel against it in the long run,” he said.

“Are we going to create a generation of young folks who are going to be alarmed by climate change?” Michaels said. “We are not. It’s not going to wash. I am all for education on climate change as long as people tell the whole story, not just one side.”

The guidelines have a long way to go before they hit the classrooms. Teachers need retraining, class materials need to be developed, and funding needs to be found. “Teachers will still need a lot of support, training, and feedback. It won’t be enough to just hand [the guidelines] to a teacher,” says Lappe.

Teachers need additional training in part to dispel the “climate of confusion, if you will, that has been manufactured by vested interests that like to perpetuate doubt and denial that climate change is happening and humans are responsible,” says Mark McCaffrey, Programs and Policy Director,

“The overall political environment does influence teachers…who may have been influenced to teach [climate change] as a phony controversy.”

The standards were drawn up by 26 state governments, including Arizona, Arkansas, California, Iowa, Kansas, and New York, plus other groups. In total 40 states have indicated they are considering them.

Some drafters of the standards deny they’re a political “win” or loss, saying the changes simply reflect good science. They were supported by eighty percent of teachers surveyed by the National Science Teachers Association, one of the groups that drafted the guide, said executive director David Evans.   

“The standards aren’t about squashing controversy,” he said. “They’re about helping students to understand the process of science.”

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The seven-page, handwritten letter to Michael Crick about the Nobel-Prize winning discovery sold at a New York City auction Wednesday to an anonymous buyer for $5.3 million. This beats a Christie’s auction house record for Abraham Lincoln’s letter that sold in 2008 for $3.4 million.

Francis Crick’s letter to his son, Michael, about the discovery of DNA’s structure. (Photo: Christie’s)

“My Dear Michael,” the letter begins. “Jim Watson and I have probably made a most important discovery. We have built a model for the structure of des-oxy-ribose-nucleic-acid (read it carefully) called D.N.A. for short.”

“Our structure is very beautiful,” the letter continued later. “D.N.A. can be thought of roughly as a very big chain with flat bits sticking out. The flat bits are called the “bases.”

(Photo: Christie’s)

Christie’s states later in the letter Crick wrote, ”In other words we think we have found the basic copying mechanism by which life comes from life…”

“You can understand that we are very excited. We have to have a letter off to Nature in a day or so,” Crick wrote.

(Photo: Christie’s)

The letter concludes, ”Read this carefully so that you will understand it. When you come home we will show you the model. Lots of love, Daddy.”

Michael Crick’s daughter Kindra said the family decided to sell the medal and other items because they had been in storage for 50 years, first locked up in a room of her grandfather’s La Jolla, Calif., home and later in a safe deposit box.

Kendra Crick pose with her father Michael Crick as he holds the 1962 Nobel Prize for Medicine awarded to his father Dr. Francis Harry Compton Crick, Wednesday, April 10, 2013 in New York. On Thursday, the molecular biologist’s 1962 Nobel Prize medal in physiology or medicine and diploma will be sold by Heritage Auctions, which estimates it could fetch at least $500,000. (Photo: AP/Bebeto Matthews)

They chose to sell them now because it “coincides with the 60th anniversary of the historic discovery and 50 years since he received the award,” she said.

Half the proceeds from the Christie’s sale will benefit the Salk Institute for Biological Studies in La Jolla, the granddaughter said. Twenty percent of the proceeds from the Heritage Auctions sale will go to the new Francis Crick Institute in London, a medical research institute slated to open in 2015.

Michael Crick, who was in New York to attend the auctions with his daughter, told The Associated Press that the family hoped the prospective buyers “will give people the opportunity to look at them and that they will be an inspiration for future scientists.”

The Associated Press contributed to this report. 

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Sonar spotted the structure first in 2003. (Image: Shmuel Marco via International Journal of Nautical Archaeology)

Publishing of their findings in the latest issue of the International Journal of Nautical Archaeology, the researchers from several Israeli universities describe the “submerged monumental structure” as not resembling any natural feature, leading them to believe it is man-made. If this is the case, the boulders composing the entire structure — 70 meters (about 229 feet) total in diameter — would have to have been moved and the nearest natural outcrop of similar rock is a few hundred meters away.

Here’s how the paper describes the pile:

The highest is a circular stone pile,c.7 m in diameter and 2 m high. It is located at the saddle connecting the topographic ‘peninsula’ to the beach. Its base has an elevation ofc.-212 m. The second, a rectangular, elongated stone structure measuring about 20×10 m, lies in an axis parallel to the beach and almost 100 m to the east of the round structure. It has a base elevation of c.-214 m and stands about 0.6–0.8 m in height. To the south of these there was a disturbed semi-circle of large basalt stones at c.-213 m, which may be the remains of a small quay. None of these have been excavated, thus it can only tentatively be suggested that they were constructed during the Hellenistic/Roman/Byzantine period, through similarities with other remains found around the lake

An illustration showing a reconstruction of what the structure under the sea looks like. (Image: Shmuel Marco via International Journal of Nautical Archaeology)

What could such a structure be used for? The researchers speculate that it could have attracted fish and might have been used as a fish nursery. Similar nurseries in the Sea of Galilee were considerably smaller than this structure though, the research notes.

If the structure was built out of the sea, the researchers write, it could have later become submerged under water due to natural occurrences like movement of tectonic plates relatively close by or rising of sea levels due to change in climate.

A photo of the boulders taken by scuba divers. Basalt boulders were measured to be up to 1 meter long. (Photo: Shmuel Marco via International Journal of Nautical Archaeology)

Given the sheer estimated weight of the structure — 60,000 tons — the researchers inference the society that built it up to 4,000 years ago was “well organized” and with “economic ability.”

“The more logical possibility is that it belongs to the third millennium B.C., because there are other megalithic phenomena [from that time] that are found close by,” Yitzhak Paz with the Israel Antiquities Authority and Ben-Gurion University told LiveScience.

If this dating is correct, a nearby city at the time would have been ”Bet Yerah” or “Khirbet Kerak,” which LiveScience reported Paz saying was a “powerful and fortified town” in the region and in all of Israel.

Further research needed to learn more about the site includes underwater evaluation of its foundation and a search for artifacts, as well as dating to provide a more concrete time of when it could have been built.

Read more details about the structure in the Sea of Galilee in the journal article here.

(H/T: Yahoo!)

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(Image: YouTube screenshot)

The supposed humanoid said to have been found in Chile’s Atacama desert is shown in the trailer for “Sirius,” a documentary led by Steven Greer, a former medical physician. The press release for the film states that the being has even had its DNA sequenced.

(Image: Sirius via PR Web)

The Huffington Post pointed out that it is unclear at this time whether the documentary will label the “humanoid” featured in the trailer as from another planet, a previously undiscovered earthly being or “simply a hoax.”

The documentary, according to its recent press release, not only focuses on extraterrestrials but UFOs and technology that produces a clean energy that has supposedly been kept secret for decades.

“This really is the greatest story never told,” Greer, who founded The Disclosure Project, The Center for the Study of Extraterrestrial Intelligence (CSETI) and The Orion Project, said in a statement. “Once people understand that classified projects have figured out how UFO’s operate, they will realize we no longer need oil, coal and nuclear power. This is the truth that has driven the secrecy.”

Those keeping extraterrestrial life secret to maintain a dependence on oil, coal and other well-known forms of power are called “misanthropic sociopaths” who are “running the planet into the ground” in the trailer.

(Image: YouTube screenshot)

Watch the theatrical trailer:

According to the documentary’s website, the participants in the film claim to have learned about energy propulsion from extraterrestrials, which allows these beings to travel through other dimensions. The website for “Sirus” identifies these ETs as “not malicious” and as being concerned about the future of humanity.

The film will first discuss evidence confirming the existence of extra terrestrials. It then will go into this other form of energy, including what Nikola Tesla supposedly knew that led the government to confiscate some of his research. And then it will delve into “CE-5 principles and how to build a bridge to a trans-dimensional universe.”

The press release stated that all the proceeds collected for the documentary will go toward making a free energy lab.

“The Sirius documentary is a powerful and important film that I encourage everyone to watch with an open mind, as it truly speaks to the heart of the people who like me, are probably okay with the government keeping secrets from its people in the name of national security, but are not okay with a secret government,” the narrator for the documentary actor Thomas Jane said.

Here’s the full trailer for “Sirius,” which was directed by Amardeep Kaleka:

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Higgs, who, as the Telegraph notes, drafted the theory of a subatomic particle — one that would explain how items have mass —  isn’t hiding his disdain for theological terms being applied to scientific notions. According to the Daily Record, the 83-year-old said that the name “God particle” started as a joke, but it has now translated into contemporary labels of what he and other scientists continue to explore.

British theoretical physicist Professor Peter Higgs before a press conference at Heriot-Watt University in Edinburgh, Scotland, Thursday Aug. 30, 2012. Credit: AP 

It was apparently a phase coined in physicist Leon Lederman’s 1993 book, “God Particle,” in which he wrote, “Why God particle? The publisher wouldn’t let us call it the goddamn particle.”

Higgs is now speaking out against the joke, claiming that labeling Higgs boson with the term is misleading.

“First of all, I’m an atheist. The second thing is I know that name was a kind of joke and not a very good one,” he said in an interview with BBC Scotland. “I think he shouldn’t have done that as it’s so misleading.”

Professor Peter Higgs, poses for photographs after receiving an honorary degree of doctor of science, from Heriot-Watt University on November 16, 2012 in Edinburgh, Scotland. Professor Peter Higgs, the scientist who postulated and gave his name to the recently discovered Higgs boson, the so called god particle, received the degree in recognition of his pioneering and greatly influential contribution to physics. Credit: Getty Images 

The Telegraph provides more background information on Huggs and his theoretical constructs:

Prof Higgs has become a global celebrity over the past year since the discovery of an elementary particle consistent with the Higgs boson, which he predicted in 1964. Last year he was recognised in the New Year Honours.

In the 1960s, Prof Higgs and other physicists proposed a mechanism to explain why the most basic building blocks of the Universe have mass.

The mechanism predicts the existence of a Higgs particle, the discovery of which was claimed last year at the Large Hadron Collider.

TheBlaze last reported about the so-called “God particle” in March, when scientists, again, claimed that they had located Higgs boson.

As both the AP and TheBlaze reported at the time, the Large Hardon Collider (an atom smasher) that lies beneath the Swiss-French border, has been creating high-energy collisions of protons to investigate how the universe came to be the way it is.

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The “scientist who went rouge and became a bioartist” grows the images out of bacteria.

Einstein (Photo: Zachary Copfen via Kickstarter)

“Ultimately, I strive to create art that allows me to share my wonderment of the process of scientific study and my sense of awe of the discoveries that have been made using this process with others,” Copfer wrote on his Kickstarter page.

The bioartist, who created the unique process, started a page on the crowd-funding website to gain resources to continue his work and launch an exhibition. He plans to showcase his work in September at ArtPrize, a city-wide art show in Grand Rapids, Mich., which has been gaining popularity in recent years.

“Having just finished graduate school some of the resources that are required to make bacteriographs are no longer at my disposal,” the man with a masters in fine arts who left a pharmaceutical company to follow his passion wrote.

Darwin (Photo: Zachary Copfen via Kickstarter)

Watch one of Copfer’s bacteriographs grow in this time-lapsed video, a process he wrote on Kickstarter that could take about  a month:

You might be wondering how the bacteriographs would be maintained for a longer period of time — safely. He said on the site that he also developed a method to preserve his work as well.

Albasaurus: The world’s First DayGlo Veleocirabbit (Photo: Zachary Copfen via Kickstarter)

Watch this short video about Copfer’s bacteriographs:

With 18 days left to reach his $8,000 goal to continue producing such works of art, Copfer currently has more than 100 backers for a total of more than $2,300.

Check out more of Copfer’s art on his Kickstarter site here or his website here.

(H/T: SlashGear)

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Researchers think they’ve discovered a new species of tarantula. (Photo: Ranil Nanayakkara via Wired)

Wired reported the new arachnid was discovered in northern Sri Lanka in not-so-surprising areas like trees but also in some more eye brow-raising locations like an old hospital.

“They are quite rare,” discoverer Ranil Nanayakkara said, according to Wired. “They prefer well-established old trees, but due to deforestation the number have dwindled and due to lack of suitable habitat they enter old buildings.”

Poecilotheria rajaei, related to the Goliath bird-eating spider, has distinct markings researchers believe differentiate it from other species.

Here’s more from Wired on the new spider:

The spider’s unique leg markings include geometric patterns with daffodil-yellow and grey inlays on the first and fourth legs. It was first seen during a Sri Lankan arachnid survey led by Ranil Nanayakkara, co-founder of Sri Lanka’s Biodiversity Education and Research. In October 2009, a local villager presented Nanayakkara and his team with a dead male specimen that didn’t resemble knownPoecilotheria in the area. Before the team could begin describing the presumptive new species, they needed more individuals. Scouring the semi-evergreen, forested area for females and juveniles required the help of police inspector Michael Rajakumar Purajah, who accompanied the team through areas just beginning to recover from a civil war. Eventually, the team found enough spiders — including the ones hiding in a hospital — to assemble a detailed description of the new arachnids.

Check out this video of the tarantula:

Some are wary of calling it a new species just yet though, hoping for DNA sequencing someday could confirm beyond just physical differences that it is in fact a distinct species in the genus.

In other tarantula news, a slightly smaller species was recently rescued from a home in Amittyville, New York.

The Suffolk County SPCA was called when a homeowner found a rose-haired tarantula in a container on their front porch. This species, CBS New York reported, is more “docile” than others but still venomous.

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President Barack Obama speaks in the East Room at the White House in Washington, DC, on April 2, 2013 to announce his Administration’s BRAIN, Brain Research through Advancing Innovative Neurotechnologies, Initiative. (Photo: JEWEL SAMAD/AFP/Getty Images)

WASHINGTON (TheBlaze/AP) — President Barack Obama on Tuesday asked Congress to spend $100 million next year on a new project to map the human brain in hopes of eventually finding cures for disorders like Alzheimer’s, epilepsy and traumatic injuries.

Obama, who jokingly labeled himself “Scientist-in-Chief,” said the so-called BRAIN Initiative could create jobs and eventually lead to answers to ailments including Parkinson’s and autism and help reverse the effect of a stroke. The president told scientists gathered in the White House’s East Room that the research has the potential to improve the lives of billions of people worldwide.

“I’m glad I’ve been promoted Scientist-in-Chief,” Obama said, according to the Weekly Standard. “Given my grades in physics, I’m not sure it’s deserving. But I hold science in proper esteem, so maybe that gives me a little credit.”

“As humans we can identify galaxies light-years away,” Obama said. “We can study particles smaller than an atom, but we still haven’t unlocked the mystery of the three pounds of matter that sits between our ears.”

The $100 million requested is an initial investment that would support research at the National Institutes of Health, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency and the National Science Foundation. Obama also wants private companies, universities and philanthropists to partner with the federal agencies in support of the research.

(Image: White House Infographic screenshot)

In February when rumors about the project were beginning to emerge, sources said they thought the initiative could total up to $3 billion over a decade. For perspective, in the New York Times’ article in February, it was pointed out that the human genome project cost $3.8 billion but returned $800 billion.

Obama also said he wants a study of the ethical, legal and societal implications of the research.

BRAIN stands for Brain Research through Advancing Innovative Neurotechnologies. The idea, which Obama first proposed in his State of the Union address, would require the development of new technology that can record the electrical activity of individual cells and complex neural circuits in the brain “at the speed of thought,” the White House said.

Watch this brief video about the initiative:

The goals of the work are unclear at this point. A working group at NIH, co-chaired by Cornelia “Cori” Bargmann of The Rockefeller University and William Newsome of Stanford University, would work on defining the goals and develop a multi-year plan to achieve them that included cost estimates.

Featured Image: ShutterStock.com

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Illustration of DNA (Image: Shutterstock.com)

Stanford University bioengineers made a transistor – the “transcriptor” – out of genetic material (DNA and RNA).

“Biological computers can be used to study and reprogram living systems, monitor environments and improve cellular therapeutics,” Drew Endy, assistant professor of bioengineering and senior author of the paper published in the journal Science with the lead author Jerome Bonnet, said in a statement.

As the San Jose Mercury News explained further, it could detect things like diseases and toxins and be programmed to kill cells that are multiplying out of control.

While in electronics a transistor would control electrons, the “transcriptor” controls the protein RNA polymerase along a strand of DNA.

Endy explained that the researchers “repurposed” proteins called integrases that could control the flow of RNA polymerase as it moved along DNA. This then allowed the team to create “amplifying genetic logic.”

Here’s more from the press release on how the biological computer was developed:

Using transcriptors, the team has created what are known in electrical engineering as logic gates that can derive true-false answers to virtually any biochemical question that might be posed within a cell.

They refer to their transcriptor-based logic gates as “Boolean Integrase Logic,” or “BIL gates” for short.

Transcriptor-based gates alone do not constitute a computer, but they are the third and final component of a biological computer that could operate within individual living cells.

Despite their outward differences, all modern computers, from ENIAC to Apple, share three basic functions: storing, transmitting and performing logical operations on information.

Last year, Endy and his team made news in delivering the other two core components of a fully functional genetic computer. The first was a type of rewritable digital data storage within DNA. They also developed a mechanism for transmitting genetic information from cell to cell, a sort of biological Internet.

It all adds up to creating a computer inside a living cell.

Here’s more of a visual explanation from Endy:

Endy told the Mercury News that someday such computers will be able to go inside any living cell.

“Any place you want a little bit of logic, a little bit of computation, a little bit of memory — we’re going to be able to do that,” Endy said.

The university press released included study co-author Monica Ortiz saying “the potential applications are limited only by the imagination of the researcher.”

The biological computer described in the journal funded by the National Science Foundation and the Townshend Lamarre Foundation finalizes 10 years of research, the Mercury News pointed out.

Here’s a comic created by the university to help explain the idea as well:
synthbinder

Read more details about the study on Stanford’s website here. 

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President John F. Kennedy did not have the vision that his predecessor Dwight D. Eisenhower had, who saw the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) working as a military/civilian partnership striving for a longer vision of space exploration.

The space program, as it stands now, is a cul de sac, as “Real News” the narrator puts it.

Watch a clip from the documentary on “Real News” below:

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Virginia Tech College of Engineering researchers are changing that with their reveal of a 5-foot 7-inch robotic jellyfish that has spy capabilities.

(Image: Vimeo screenshot)

Currently only a prototype, “Cyro” is powered by a rechargeable nickel metal hydride battery.

Student researchers swim with “Cyro” during a test run. (Photo: Amanda Loman/Virginia Tech)

“Cyro showed its ability to swim autonomously while maintaining a similar physical appearance and kinematics as the natural species,” lead researcher Shashank Priya said in a statement. “This autonomous operation in shallow water conditions is already a big step towards demonstrating the use of these creatures.”

Watch this recently released video showing the robot in action:

Cyro, whose biological inspiration is Cyanea capillata, can collect, store, analyze and communicate sensory data all at the same time.

Cyanea capillata “lion’s mane” jellyfish (Photo: Wikimedia, Flickr/Dan Hershman)

The $5 million research product, which also produced a smaller prototype prior to Cyro, was funded by the U.S. Naval Undersea Warfare Center and the Office of Naval Research, which hopes to have a self-powering, autonomous machines in the sea, capable of surveillance and environment monitoring. It could also be used for studying aquatic life, mapping the ocean’s topography and measuring currents, the press release stated.

When compared to the smaller robotic jelly called RoboJelly, unveiled by the Virginia Tech engineers in 2012, they found the larger design of Cyro was actually more beneficial.

“A larger vehicle will allow for more payload, longer duration and longer range of operation,” Alex Villanueva, a doctoral student in mechanical engineering working under Priya, said in a statement. “Biological and engineering results show that larger vehicles have a lower cost of transport, which is a metric used to determine how much energy is spent for traveling.”

Cyro, whose name is a combination of “Cyanea” and “robot,” swims in a jellyfish-like motion by using mechanical arms that are controlled by motors to create “hydrodynamic movement.” The artificial “mesoglea,” the jellyfish-like body, on Cyro is made of silicone to mimic a jellyfish’s skin.

(From left) Alex Villanueva, a doctoral student, Kenneth Marut and Tyler Michael, both masters students, helped create Cyro in the mechanical engineering program at Virginia Tech. (Photo: Amanda Loman/Virginia Tech)

Other universities partnering in the research included Providence College in Rhode Island, the University of California Los Angeles, the University of Texas at Dallas, and Stanford University.

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That’s right, Hope has laid claim to the moon. How? The 65-year-old from Nevada wrote the United Nations a letter in the 1980s saying the moon was his and challenging them to establish a legal reason as to why not. Hope says he never got a response. The loophole Hope believes he found in the 1967 U.N. Outer Space Treaty that says no country can claim ownership of the moon is that he’s not a country — he’s an individual.

Dennis Hope (Image: YouTube screenshot)

Hope is no stranger to media attention, but earlier this month he was featured in the New York Times Op-Docs, which has begun circulating his story again.

“Owning the moon is very interesting. It’s a tremendous burden, in some respects, to keep everybody happy,” Hope said in the interview. “I know I have detractors. I know I have people who’ve said ‘you can’t do this.’”

“I’ve always looked at myself as a pioneer,” he continued later in the video. “I’ve always thought differently. I think outside the box, actually now I’m thinking outside the planet.”

Watch the New York Times Op-Doc:

Hope established a company — the Lunar Embassy — to sell plots of extraterrestrial land. His celebrity clients, according to Business Insider, include Barbara Walters, Tom Cruise, John Travolta, Nicole Kidman, George H.W. Bush, Jimmy Carter and Ronald Reagan. The cost per acre on the moon — and other planets the company claims to be able to sell — is $19.99 (total $24 with the added fees). So far, he has sold 600 million acres on the moon.

Although this might sound like a joke, the Lunar Embassy website assures you that it’s not. Purchases of the plots are described as “novelty idea,” but there’s an explanation for that too:

 The first as defined in the American Heritage Dictionary; The quality of being novel: 1) something new and unusual and 2) a small mass-produced article. Well, a property on the Moon definitely falls into all of those categories. The second context is totally out of the Lunar Embassies own, personal paranoia, as our lawyers explained to us years ago when this all started, that this can help avoid any frivolous lawsuits from a foreign country. You should know that this does not diminish the value of the property that you purchase in any way, as every deed is recorded and registered in the Lunar Embassy’s registration database and every owners information is listed with that registration. You own this property.

Ram Jakhu, a member of the International Institute for Space Law board of directors, told to Discover Magazine in 2007 the 1967 U.N. treaty is being misinterpreted and that “no one owns the moon” or any other property in space.

In his interview with the Times, Hope said he has plans for earthly governments to have embassies on the moon, but also other non-earth-based governments he has been in contact with that he can’t speak about will have embassies as well.

Featured image via Shutterstock.com. 

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What could this creature be? (Photo: Patrick Rice, Shark Defense/Florida Keys Community College via MSU)

On Monday researchers announced the first ever documented discovery of a two-headed bull shark.

The study led by Michigan State University researchers was published in the Journal of Fish Biology, confirming the animal is a single shark with two heads, not conjoined twins as could have been the case.

“This is certainly one of those interesting and rarely detected phenomena,” MSU assistant professor of fisheries and wildlife Michael Wagner said in the university’s press release. “It’s good that we have this documented as part of the world’s natural history, but we’d certainly have to find many more before we could draw any conclusions about what caused this.”

But finding more examples of animals expressing these anomalies often poses a problem because they rarely live to adulthood. This two-headed bull shark was only found because it was a fetus inside another shark that was cut open by fishermen who netted it.

X-ray of the two-headed fetal shark. (Photo: Michael Wagner/MSU)

Shows like “The Simpsons” have popularized the idea pollution inducing mutant fish, but Wagner said it is “unwarranted” to assumed pollution played a factor in this shark’s abnormality.

This is what an adult bull shark looks like. (Photo: Wikimedia)

According to MSU, there have been other species of sharks born with two heads, but this is the first account of a bull shark. This shark was found in the Gulf of Mexico in April 2011 and brought to Florida Keys Community College. It was then brought to MSU for further analysis.

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A Prince Rupert drop is a phenomenon that occurs when molten glass is dropped into a cold water. It forms a ball with a thin tail. As Smarter Everyday describes it, it looks sort of a like a tadpole.

Price Rupert drop (Image: YouTube screenshot)

Amazingly though, the glass cannot be broken. That is, it can’t be smashed — even with a hammer — if it’s hit on the more bulbous part of the glass. A mere tap on the thinner tail portion though will explode the glass.

(Image: YouTube screenshot)

(Image: YouTube screenshot)

(Image: YouTube screenshot)

(Image: YouTube screenshot)

Watch the amazing properties at work and learn about its composition from Smarter Everyday, but as they suggest “goggle up,” at least virtually, first:

(H/T: Gizmodo)

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In this image taken from video provided by Tom Hopkins of Hopkins Automotive Group, a bright flash of light, top center, streaks across the early-evening sky in what experts say was almost certainly a meteor coming down, Friday, March 22, 2013 in Seaford, Del. Bill Cooke of NASA’s Meteoroid Environmental Office said the flash appears to be “a single meteor event. (AP)

East Coasters were treated to a dazzling display after a likely meteor streaked across the sky Friday night.

The flash was brief but bright and was spotted from New England to Florida, USA Today reported.

Chip Guy was driving in eastern Maryland with his family and described “a thin streak of blue-greenish-white.”

“It didn’t last more than eight or nine seconds, then it disappeared,” Guy told CNN.

Bill Cooke of NASA’s Meteoroid Environmental Office told the Associated Press that it appeared to be “a single meteor event.” He said it “looks to be a fireball that moved roughly toward the southeast, going on visual reports.”

“Judging from the brightness, we’re dealing with something as bright as the full moon,” Cooke told the AP. “The thing is probably a yard across. We basically have (had) a boulder enter the atmosphere over the northeast.”

Here’s dashcam footage from a WUSA-TV news vehicle in the Washington, D.C. area:

The meteor was widely seen, Cooke said — the American Meteor Society received more than 350 reports on its website alone.

“If you have something this bright carry over that heavily populated area, a lot of people are going to see it,” he said. “It occurred around 8 tonight, there were a lot of people out, and you’ve got all those big cities out there.”

Here’s security camera footage from an auto dealership in Salisbury, Md.:

And here’s video taken from a home security camera in Thurmont, Md.:

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The study published in Nature Geoscience describes how gold deposits can be derived from seismic activity, like earthquakes.

Gold in granite and quartz. (Photo: Shutterstock.com)

Most of the world’s gold stores, the study abstract states, came from quartz veins that opened during mountain building events. For such an event to catalyze the precipitation of gold challenges the previously held thought that its formation was slower. The study’s evidence suggests the process of gold precipitation actually happens rather quickly.

“While geochemical and geological evidence has long alluded to a connection between earthquakes and the deposition of gold, there has been much debate through the decades as to whether the precipitation of gold was a slow, equilibrium process or whether, as Professor Henley was proposing, it was a rapid and far from equilibrium process,” study co-author Dr. Dion Weatherley said, according to the University of Queensland in Australia.

Weatherley went on to say that even seismic activity of a small magnitude can generate enough of a pressure reduction in a fault to start “flash precipitation of gold and quartz.” The amount of gold deposited by one earthquake is relatively small, but Wealtherley said when you consider the tens or hundreds of thousands of small magnitude earthquakes that occur each year, “over time, large gold deposits may result.”

Scientific American explained more in detail about how this process occurs:

For example, a magnitude-4 earthquake at a depth of 11 kilometers would cause the pressure in a suddenly opening fault jog to drop from 290 megapascals (MPa) to 0.2 MPa. (By comparison, air pressure at sea level is 0.1 MPa.) “So you’re looking at a 1,000-fold reduction in pressure,” Weatherley says.

When mineral-laden water at around 390 °C is subjected to that kind of pressure drop, Weatherley says, the liquid rapidly vaporizes and the minerals in the now-supersaturated water crystallize almost instantly  — a process that engineers call flash vaporization or flash deposition. The effect, he says, “is sufficiently large that quartz and any of its associated minerals and metals will fall out of solution”.

Eventually, more fluid percolates out of the surrounding rocks into the gap, restoring the initial pressure. But that doesn’t occur immediately, and so in the interim a single earthquake can produce an instant (albeit tiny) gold vein.

Weatherley said the research could be used to find new mineable gold deposits.

“Most of the world’s ore deposits that are exposed at the earth’s surface have either been found or already mined. Our research paper aims to reveal new findings and knowledge about the physical processes that will assist exploration geologists to discover blind ore deposits that are deeper within the earth,” he told the university website.

–

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• Gold Diggers: Prospecting on the Rise Across America

(H/T: GeekOSystem)

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So he thought:

What if I consumed only the raw ingredients the body uses for energy? Would I be healthier or do we need all the other stuff that’s in traditional food? If it does work, what would it feel like to have a perfectly balanced diet? I just want to be in good health and spend as little time and money on food as possible.

What Rhinehart proceeded to do was research all the nutrients the body needed, whipped it all into one drink mix and lived off of only that for 30 days. He wrote that nothing in the mix, which he calls Soylent, except for olive oil and table salt for sodium and chloride is like food as we know it.

Rob Rhinehart holding a glass of Soylent. (Photo via Vice)

He continued on in the post writing that he felt like he had more energy, a better complexion and could push himself further in exercise. He said that when he was hungry, he drank more of his mix. When he had food cravings, he added more of that supplement to the drink (like a craving for red meat indicated he needed more iron).

“All I crave is Soylent,” he wrote of his cravings now.

Rhinehart thinks Soylent, which he described more in detail in this post, has everything the body needs for carbohydrates, protein, fat, fiber, vitamins, minerals and other essential nutrients.

Vice reached out to Rhinehart to learn more about him and his mission. Turns out he’s a 24-year-old software engineer living in Atlanta. One of the more interesting questions Vice asked Rhinehart was what the pros and cons of living a food-free lifestyle were. Here’s what he said:

Not having to worry about food is fantastic. No groceries or dishes, no deciding what to eat, no endless conversations weighing the relative merits of gluten-free, keto, paleo, or vegan. Power and water bills are lower. I save hours a day and hundreds of dollars a month. I feel liberated from a crushing amount of repetitive drudgery. Soylent might also be good for people having trouble managing their weight. I find it very easy to lose and gain precise amounts of weight by varying the proportions in my drink.

There are drawbacks: It doesn’t keep long after mixing with water, so I still have to make it every day. If I make a mistake with the amount of an ingredient, it can make me sick, but that hasn’t happened in a while. Also, some people really enjoy food a lot more than I do, so they may not like the idea.

Rhinehart also described to Vice how such an idea can make healthy nutrients more accessible to people who couldn’t otherwise afford it. This applies to both sides of the coin too: those who battle with weight due to the availability of cheap, not so nutritious food and those who can’t get enough food in developing countries.

But for those who want to try it themselves, he offers caution.

“We’re not making pie here. It’s a lot easier to overdose or underdose with the raw elemental form than it is with food. It took me a while to arrange sources for all of these substances, as well,” he wrote.

The Washington Post’s Dylan Matthews spoke with medical experts who said the substance described on Rhinehart’s blog looked relatively safe:

Surprisingly, the answer from nutrition experts seems to be, “Yeah, probably.” Jay Mirtallo is a professor of pharmacy at Ohio State and the immediate past president of American Society for Parental Enteral Nutrition, which focuses on the science and practice of providing food to patients through both intravenous injections and feeding tubes. His main concern with Rhinehart’s plan is that he’s making the concoction himself, rather than buying it from reputable suppliers.

“He basically made medical food,” Mirtallo says. “If he wanted to switch to a liquid diet, those are already available.”

[...]

I asked Mirtallo if I could live a healthy life just drinking medical food from here on out. “You can completely,” he says. “But I don’t know why you’d want to. There are so many social aspects to food in what we do.”

Is Rhinehart still going food-free? He told Vice he continues to drink his “bachelor chow” but does have one or two normal meals a week.

Read more about Rhinehart’s personal experiment on his blog here. Get more insights behind the project and where he thinks such an idea could go in the future in Vice’s article here.

Featured image via Shutterstock.com.

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ASAP Science tackles the issue in its latest episode.

Hair loss has been determined to be primarily a sex-linked trait, meaning it is passed down on either the X or Y chromosome. The gene for hair loss does in fact reside on the X chromosome. For males, this means if your mother had the gene for genetic hair loss on both of her X chromosomes (females are XX, males are XY) and if you were a male, then you would be guaranteed to get it. If, on the other hand, only one of her X chromosomes had this gene, a son would have a 50/50 chance.

(Image: ASAP Science/YouTube screenshot)

But why is looking at your mother’s father (your grandfather) often part of the saying as well? ASAP Science explains that if he exhibits baldness that it would indicate your mother has at least one copy of the X chromosome with this trait.

(Image: ASAP Science/YouTube screenshot)

This sex-linked gene, although studies have found it highly influential as it relates to hair loss, is not the only factor. ASAP Science discusses briefly other studies that have found related genes on other chromosomes and how factors like diet and exercise impact hair loss as well.

(Image: ASAP Science/YouTube screenshot)

Watch the video:

As we’re going down this road, how about aging in general? What is it that causes people to feel old in the first place? Last week, ASAP Science discussed what happens to the body scientifically as it ages:

NPR’s Linton Weeks is asking a question about aging too: when exactly does someone become elderly?

“A recent New York Times story calls a 69-year-old woman elderly. Philadelphia Metro considers 70 to be elderly. When NPR ran a story recently about a 71-year-old midwife, some readers objected to the word “elderly” in the original headline,” Weeks wrote.

Elderly, Weeks said, is becoming like many other words “politically incorrect.” He continues on detailing the historical definitions of the word, how other cultures and religions view it as a title to be respected, and why, perhaps, it has a negative connotation today.

All-in-all though, Weeks concludes “‘elderly’ may be more a state of being — or feeling — than a certain age. And the question may not be whether someone else thinks of you as elderly, but whether you think of yourself as elderly.”

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Featured image via Shutterstock.com.

(H/T: GeekOSystem)

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The YouTube channel brusspup previously showed us a trick that suspends, bends and even makes it look like water is flowing upward against gravity. Now Brusspup ups its game in this latest demonstration.

It’s the same idea — but better.

(Image: YouTube/brusspup screenshot)

Brusspup explained on YouTube that it uses more water and has better lighting, which results in even better footage. The video posted Monday has more than 1.6 million views so far.

“This is a really fun project and when you first see the results, chances are your jaw will drop,” brusspup wrote.

(Image: YouTube/brusspup screenshot)

(Image: YouTube/brusspup screenshot)

(Image: YouTube/brusspup screenshot)

See trick for yourself:

Here’s how it’s done:

Run the rubber hose down past the speaker so that the hose touches the speaker. Leave about 1 or 2 inches of the hose hanging past the bottom of the speaker. Secure the hose to the speaker with tape or whatever works best for you. The goal is to make sure the hose is touching the actual speaker so that when the speaker produces sound (vibrates) it will vibrate the hose.

[...]

Run an audio cable from your computer to the speaker. Set your tone generating software to 24hz and hit play.

But this isn’t all. The trick cannot be seen with the naked eye, unless you’re using a strobe light. A camera set to shoot 24 frames per second though will pick it up.

“The higher the shutter speed the better the results. But also keep in the mind that the higher your shutter speed, the more light you need,” brusspup wrote.

As brusspup has demonstrated before, if you want the water to appear as if it were running backwards, set the frequency to 23hz or 25hz for it to look like it’s going forward in slow motion.

Watch brusspup’s original demonstration of the trick:

–

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(H/T: Gizmodo)

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(Image: Shutterstock.com)

A study recently published in a psychological journal analyzing political affiliations and the difference between being “spiritual” or “religious” found practicing spiritual exercises, like meditation, might cause political ideals to shift.

The study by researchers at the University of Toronto was teased last year but more recently published in the January edition of the journal Social Psychological and Personality Science.

Among many of the observations, the most striking in the study was that immediately after practicing a spiritual exercise participants were found to be more politically liberal.

“There’s great overlap between religious beliefs and political orientations,” study author Jordan Peterson with the university’s department of psychology, said in the press release. “We found that religious individuals tend to be more conservative and spiritual people tend to be more liberal. Inducing a spiritual experience through a guided meditation exercise led both liberals and conservatives to endorse more liberal political attitudes.”

Lead author Jacob Hirsh and his colleagues at the university in three studies analyzed participants political views with relation to whether they were religious or spiritual. According to the university’s press release, the authors found those identifying as religious were more politically conservative, while those who were spiritual aligned as more politically liberal.

The study associated conservatism and religiousness with an importance placed on tradition and liberalism and spirituality with an emphasis on equality and social harmony.

“While religiousness is characterized by devotion to a specific tradition, set of principles, or code of conduct, spirituality is associated with the direct experience of self-transcendence and the feeling that we’re all connected,” Hirsh said in a statement.

As for the study that covered a spiritual exercise, the researchers had some participants watch a meditation video while others did not. All were then asked about their political orientation and to rate their feelings of spirituality. Those who watched the video, compared to those who didn’t, expressed feeling more spiritual. They also favored more liberal political candidates and agreed with what would traditionally be considered more left-leaning ideas, like reduced support for “tough on crime” policies.

“The conservative part of religious belief has played an important role in holding cultures together and establishing common rules. The spiritual part, on the other hand, helps cultures renew themselves by adapting to changing circumstances,” Peterson said in a statement. “Both right and left are necessary; it’s not that either is correct, it’s that the dialogue between them produces the best chance we have at getting the balance right. If people could understand that both sides have an important role to play in society, some of the unnecessary tension might be eliminated.”

–

Related:

• Is the Tea Party a ‘Spiritual’ Movement?
• Are Jesus Christ’s Views Liberal or Conservative?
• Are Conservatives Happier Than Liberals? Why?
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Featured image via Shutterstock.com.

(H/T: Alltop, Science Daily)

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This 2011 image provide by CERN, shows a real CMS proton-proton collision in which four high energy electrons (green lines and red towers) are observed in a 2011 event. The event shows characteristics expected from the decay of a Higgs boson but is also consistent with background Standard Model physics processes. Physicists in Italy said Wednesday, March 6, 2013 they are closer to concluding that what they found last year was the elusive “God particle.” The long theorized subatomic particle would explain why matter has mass and has been called a missing cornerstone of physics. (Photo: AP/CERN)

GENEVA (TheBlaze/AP) — If anything shows how careful scientists are with their words and confirming something to be as true as possible, it’s the hunt for the infamous Higgs boson, often referred to as the “God Particle.” Over the last few years in particular, scientists have been using words like “hint” and “preliminary,” among others, to describe what they think could be their finding of such a subatomic particle.

Now, the search is all but over for the Higgs boson, a particle that is thought be a crucial building block of the universe. Even still though, they’re using phrases like “strongly indicates” to describe their data suggesting the Higgs boson being found, because nothing is ever truly “proven” in science. As Satoshi Kanazawa explained the idea in a post for Psychology Today, “the currently accepted theory of a phenomenon is simply the best explanation for it among all available alternatives.” (Or see an even more recent post from Kanazawa explaining the idea of “scientific proof” here.)

Physicists announced Thursday they believe they have discovered the subatomic particle predicted nearly a half-century ago, which will go a long way toward explaining what gives electrons and all matter in the universe size and shape.

The elusive Higgs boson was predicted in 1964 to help fill in our understanding of the creation of the universe, which many theorize occurred in a massive explosion known as the Big Bang. The particle was named for Peter Higgs, one of the physicists who proposed its existence, but it later became popularly known as the “God particle.”

The discovery would be a strong contender for the Nobel Prize. Last July, scientists at the European Organization for Nuclear Research, or CERN, announced finding a particle they described as Higgs-like, but they stopped short of saying conclusively that it was the same particle or was some version of it.

Scientists have now finished going through the entire set of data.

“The preliminary results with the full 2012 data set are magnificent and to me it is clear that we are dealing with a Higgs boson, though we still have a long way to go to know what kind of Higgs boson it is,” said Joe Incandela, a physicist who heads one of the two main teams at CERN, each involving several thousand scientists.

Whether or not it is a Higgs boson is demonstrated by how it interacts with other particles and its quantum properties, CERN said in the statement. After checking, scientists said the data “strongly indicates that it is a Higgs boson.”

The results were announced in a statement by the Geneva-based CERN and released at a physics conference in the Italian Alps.

The atmosphere regarding this latest announcement, at least by taking a gauge from the conversation on Twitter, is in general excitement. But there are some who express fatigue at all the announcements regarding the particle and others are sarcastically pointing out what seems to be convenient timing of the announcement with the Roman Catholic Church recieving its new pope – Pope Francis –Wednesday. Still others are also noting how it is interesting that CERN would be able to find such a particle but seems to be having trouble keeping its website up, since they were experiencing technical difficulties Thursday:

Until you’ve actually CONFIRMED that you’ve found the #Higgs #Boson, stop announcing that you almost have! The excitement has been deflated.

— Craig Rothney (@rothneychild) March 14, 2013

Higgs boson particle eh ? cool :D Just in time for the new Pope , the GOD particle gets discovered ! #Higgs #PopeFrancis

— Aravindh Ravi (@giantfootyguy) March 14, 2013

Cern – Identifies the Higgs Boson but cant keep its website running

— Blaine Hancock (@BlaineHancock1) March 14, 2013

CERN’s atom smasher, the $10 billion Large Hadron Collider that lies beneath the Swiss-French border, has been creating high-energy collisions of protons to investigate how the universe came to be the way it is.

The particle’s existence helps confirm the theory that objects gain their size and shape when particles interact in an energy field with a key particle, the Higgs boson. The more they attract, so the theory goes, the bigger their mass will be.

–

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• Did Physicists Really Find the God Particle This Time?

This story has been updated to change Psychological Science to Psychology Today. 

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This set of images compares rocks seen by NASA’s Opportunity rover and Curiosity rover at two different parts of Mars. On the left is ” Wopmay” rock, in Endurance Crater, Meridiani Planum, as studied by the Opportunity rover. On the right are the rocks of the “Sheepbed” unit in Yellowknife Bay, in Gale Crater, as seen by Curiosity. (Image and Caption: NASA/JPL-Caltech/Cornell/MSSS)

LOS ANGELES (AP) — The Curiosity rover has answered a key question about Mars: The red planet in the past had some of the right ingredients needed to support primitive life.

The evidence comes from a chemical analysis by Curiosity, which last month flexed its robotic arm to drill into a fine-grained, veiny rock and then test the powder.

This side-by-side comparison shows the X-ray diffraction patterns of two different samples collected from the Martian surface by NASA’s Curiosity rover. (Image and caption: NASA/JPL-Caltech/Ames)

Curiosity is the first spacecraft sent to Mars that could collect a sample from deep inside a rock, and scientist said Tuesday that they hit pay dirt with that first rock.

“We have found a habitable environment that is so benign and supportive of life that probably if this water was around and you had been on the planet, you would have been able to drink it,” said chief scientist John Grotzinger of the California Institute of Technology.

Watch the announcement:

The rover made a dramatic “seven-minutes-of-terror” landing last August near the planet’s equator. A key task: Find out if ancient Mars ever had conditions favorable for microscopic organisms.

The car-size rover is not equipped to detect microbes, living or extinct. It can only use its onboard laboratories to examine Martian rocks to determine the kind of environment they might have lived in.

The analysis showed the rock contained clay minerals that formed in a watery environment. It also had traces of sulfur, nitrogen, hydrogen, oxygen, phosphorus and simple carbon – essential chemical ingredients for life.

Unlike some places on Mars, scientists said the ancient water at the site appeared to be neutral and not too salty. Curiosity previously found a hint of the site’s watery past – an old streambed that the six-wheel rover crossed to get to the flat bedrock.

Curiosity has yet to turn up evidence of complex carbon compounds, considered life’s chemical building blocks. Scientists said a priority is to search for a place where organics might be preserved.

The drilled rock isn’t far from Curiosity’s landing spot in Gale Crater; the rover is ultimately headed to a mountain in the crater’s middle. Images from space spied signs of clay layers at the base of the mountain.

This false-color map shows the area within Gale Crater on Mars, where NASA’s Curiosity rover landed on Aug. 5, 2012 PDT (Aug. 6, 2012 EDT) and the location where Curiosity collected its first drilled sample at the “John Klein” rock. (Image and caption: NASA/JPL-Caltech/MSSS)

It has been slow going as engineers learn to handle the rover, which is far more tech-savvy than anything that has landed before on the red planet.

Over the years, Mars spacecraft in orbit and on the surface have beamed back a wealth of information about the planet’s geology. They’ve also been able to study rocks from Mars that have occasionally landed on Earth.

Several places on Mars – now a frigid desert – have shown evidence of a warmer and wetter environment early in the planet’s history though not necessarily friendly for life.

Scientists said they still intend to drive Curiosity to the mountain but not until it drills into another rock at its current location. Since flight controllers on Earth will be out of touch with Mars spacecraft for most of next month due to a planetary alignment, the second drilling won’t get under way until May.

In the meantime, engineers are troubleshooting a computer problem on Curiosity, which has not been able to perform science experiments for days.

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But first, some background on these three photos:

(Image: YouTube screenshot)

(Image: YouTube screenshot)

(Image: YouTube screenshot)

Crowe, who recently started notably in “Les Miserables” and the in the just released “Broken City,” posted the video showing three, what he called, “time-lapsed” photos taken outside his New South Wales home office March 5. He tweeted more information regarding them shortly afterward.

(Image: Twitter)

Watch the video:

The video now has more than 1.22 million views and has been reposted quite a few times on the video-sharing website. But Phil Poling with Parabreakdown (via NBC News) has an earthly source of the lights.

In his video explanation of the footage, Poling wrote that although Crowe didn’t use Photoshop or alter the images, the light streaks come from a moving sailboat.

“To be clear. What we are seeing here isn’t the entire sailboad. It’s just the top half of the rigging. The white running light is usually about half way up the mast,” Poling wrote.

Poling also said that although Crowe calls the photos time-lapsed, they’re really long exposure images.

Watch the Poling’s explanation on Parabreakdown:

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This story has been updated to correct the spelling for New South Wales.

(H/T: Daily Mail)

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