Oct 1, 2011
Two-headed Cat ‘Frankenlouie’ Turns 12
“A two-headed cat in Worcester, Mass., has twice the reasons for celebrating his recent birthday: It got him in the Guinness Book of World Records.
The double-domed feline is named “Frankenlouie,” and according to its owner, who only wants to be known as Marty, he turned 12 on Sept. 8, according to the Worcester Telegram.
In doing so, he earned a place in the record books for being the longest-lived Janus cat (the term for cats with two heads, which comes from the name of a two-faced Roman god).
“He is the most astounding two-headed animal of all,” according to Todd Ray of the Venice Beach Freakshow, who has some by estimates, the largest collection of bizarre animals in the world — including 22 living two-headed animals and a five-legged dog.
Still, he says Frankenlouie is in a class by his two-headed self.
“We might never see another one in our lifetime,” Ray told HuffPost Weird News. “I have seen many two-headed animals die within a week. To see one alive for weeks is incredible, but to have one alive for years is truly amazing.”"
Read more at Huffington Post
Galaxy Caught Blowing Bubbles
The intricate glowing shells of gas in Holmberg II were created by the energetic lifecycles of many generations of stars. High-mass stars form in dense regions of gas, and later in life expel strong stellar winds that blow away the surrounding material. At the very end of their lives, they explode in as a supernova. Shock waves rip through these less dense regions blowing out and heating the gas, forming the delicate shells we see today.
Holmberg II is a patchwork of dense star-forming regions and extensive barren areas with less material, which can stretch across thousands of light-years. As a dwarf galaxy, it has neither the spiral arms typical of galaxies like the Milky Way nor the dense nucleus of an elliptical galaxy. This makes Holmberg II, gravitationally speaking, a gentle haven where fragile structures such as these bubbles can hold their shape.
While the galaxy is unremarkable in size, Holmberg II does have some intriguing features. As well as its unusual appearance -- which earned it a place in Halton Arp's Atlas of Peculiar Galaxies, a treasure trove of weird and wonderful objects -- the galaxy hosts an ultraluminous X-ray source in the middle of three gas bubbles in the top right of the image. There are competing theories as to what causes this powerful radiation -- one intriguing possibility is an intermediate-mass black hole which is pulling in material from its surroundings.
This colourful image is a composite of visible and near-infrared exposures taken using the Wide Field Channel of Hubble's Advanced Camera for Surveys.
Read more at Science Daily
Sep 30, 2011
Mighty Tevatron Shuts Down After Decades of Discoveries
Today, protons and antiprotons will stop speeding around the 4-mile-long circular accelerator track at Fermilab in Batavia, Illinois, and data from the Tevatron's final particle collisions will be recorded. The end will be marked by a ceremony to turn the machine off and celebrate the dozens of discoveries it made, broadcast live online at 2 p.m. central time.
“For the last 28 years, the Tevatron has been the real workhorse of particle physics,” said physicist Paul Halpern of the University of the Sciences in Philadelphia and author of the book Collider. Without it, physicists would have a large gap in their knowledge of the universe, he added.
Over the course of its life, the Tevatron has made a number of remarkable findings related to the Standard Model of physics, which describes the characteristics and behavior of subatomic particles. The facility's two detectors, the Collider Detector at Fermilab (CDF) and DZero experiments, have both competed and worked together to reveal the nature of matter.
Even after Europe's Large Hadron Collider began producing higher-energy beams, and budget constraints forced the lab to schedule its shut down, the Tevatron continued to perform and put in an impressive ninth-inning effort in pursuit of the still elusive Higgs boson, the last undiscovered particle predicted by the Standard Model. And there is still a chance it could succeed, as scientists continue to analyze the Tevatron's data, even after the machine goes dark.
Here are some of the Tevatron's greatest achievements.
Ring of Energy
The Tevatron accelerates charged particles to extremely high speeds using a four-mile long ring of magnets. The instrument then slams the particles together in order to split them up into their constituents. The Tevatron typically shoots a beam of protons and antiprotons in opposite directions around the ring until they reach a desired energy range and then allows the two beams to meet. The ensuing collision produces a rain of particles that researchers then dig through to search for those predicted by the Standard Model.
The accelerator produces an extremely bright beam of these particles and is able to reach energies up to 1 TeV, or roughly a trillion times the energy of ordinary visible light. The facility was the world-record holder in high-energy physics until it was surpassed by the LHC, which will ultimately be able to reach energies seven times those of the Tevatron’s peak.
Read more at Wired Science
Self-Claimed Vampire-Werewolf Accused of Murder
A Florida teenager is behind bars as an accessory to the brutal murder of 16-year-old Jacob Hendershot. But that may not be the most shocking part of the crime -- Stephanie Pistey says she believes she's part vampire and part werewolf. Florida police say that, in July, Pistey's friends lured Hendershot to a house, killed him, and then left his body in a storm drain.
Pistey told a local TV station "I know this is going to be crazy, but I believe that I'm a vampire and part werewolf." She claims she drank blood from her fiancé and co-defendant William Chase.
The fact that Pistey claims to be a vampire is not, by itself, that unusual. Many people are interested in vampires, and they are everywhere, from "Twilight" to "True Blood" and "Fright Night." In the mainstream media and pop culture, vampires are very alluring, with elements of power, romance, eroticism and immortality.
It's not surprising that many people identify with vampires and some even claim to be them. But it's usually done in the context of goth-inspired role-playing.
As strange as the case is, it's also not the first time that a person claimed to be a vampire/werewolf hybrid.
In 2007 a 19-year-old Pennsylvania man named Kristian Carl came to believe he was a werewolf (partly because he has prominent canine teeth). According to police, Carl convinced his new girlfriend that he was a vampire-werewolf before having sex with her. Apparently intrigued at the prospect of sleeping with both a werewolf and a vampire at the same time, the real-life Bella Swan agreed.
However, supernatural hybrid or not, Carl's girlfriend was 15 at the time and he was charged with statutory rape in February 2008.
Most vampire enthusiasts engage in harmless role-playing, though now and then criminals with a vampire fascination make the news. Just last month a Texas man named Lyle Bensley allegedly broke into a woman's apartment and bit her on the neck. He claimed to be a vampire needing blood to survive; his victim was unsympathetic and called police. In 1996 (coincidentally also in Florida) five teenagers accused of killing two people were said to be part of a "vampire cult."
Already there is talk about a "vampire cult" in this case, and as often happens, entertainment media is blamed. The news media loves stories like this, but the fact is that 99.9 percent of kids -- even those fascinated by vampires -- have a pretty good grasp on reality.
Typically it's not the occult subject matter that is the problem; troubled individuals will always find some avenue for their issues. There were about 15,000 homicides last year, virtually none of them connected with vampires, Satanists, or the occult. It's only troubled kids with a sensational angle who make the news.
Read more at Discovery News
Genocide Skulls Returned to Namibia
A delegation of 55 Namibians is in Berlin to attend the solemn ceremony to receive the remains which they hope will be just a first step toward a greater reckoning with Germany's brief but brutal African adventure a century ago.
"We have come to first and foremost to receive the mortal human remains of our forefathers and mothers and to return them to the land of their ancestors," delegation member Ueriuka Festus Tjikuua told reporters in Berlin.
He said the mission intended to "extend a hand of friendship" to Germans and encourage a dialogue "with the full participation and involvement of the representatives of the descendants of those that suffered heavily under dreadful and atrocious German colonial rule".
The skulls are among an estimated 300 taken to Germany after a massacre of indigenous Namibians at the start of the last century during an anti-colonial uprising in what was then called South West Africa, which Berlin ruled from 1884 to 1915.
Incensed by German settlers stealing their land, cattle and women, the Herero people launched a revolt in January 1904 with warriors butchering 123 German civilians over several days. The Nama tribe joined the uprising in 1905.
The imperial German colonial rulers responded ruthlessly. General Lothar von Trotha signed a notorious extermination order against the Hereros.
Rounded up in prison camps, captured Namas and Hereros died from malnutrition and severe weather. Dozens were beheaded after their death and their skulls sent to German researchers in Berlin for "scientific" experiments.
Up to 80,000 Hereros lived in Namibia when the uprising began. Afterwards, only 15,000 were left.
Over time, the skulls gathered dust in the German archives until three years ago when a German reporter uncovered them at the Medical History Museum of the Charite hospital in Berlin, and at Freiburg University in the southwest.
So far, 47 skulls have been found at the Charite and about a dozen more in Freiburg.
The publicity around their discovery prompted Herero and Nama leaders to ask the Namibian government to seek their return. After three years of talks, the delegation arrived in Berlin Sunday.
"The skulls will be handed over to the Namibian government in a ceremony that reflects their historical and cultural importance," a foreign ministry spokeswoman said, adding that Deputy Foreign Minister Cornelia Pieper would take part.
Charite spokeswoman Claudia Peter said the purported "research" on the skulls performed by German scientists had been rooted in the perverse racial theories that later planted the seeds for the Nazis' genocidal ideology.
"They thought that they could prove that certain peoples were worth less than they were," she told AFP. "What these anthropologists did to these people was wrong and their descendants are still suffering for it."
German researchers have now determined the region from which the skulls came as well as the sex and age of the victims but say there is no hope of learning their identity or cause of death.
The Namibian representatives will return home Tuesday with a memorial service planned in the capital Windhoek the following day to welcome the 11 Nama and nine Herero skulls, which will go on display in a local museum.
Read more at Discovery News
Bats Have Fastest Mammal Muscles
The findings, published in the latest issue of the journal Science, put bats on a short list of animals that possess rare superfast muscles. The list includes rattlesnakes, which have them in their tails, and certain other species of reptiles, birds and fish.
Songbirds may have the world's fastest muscles, since a sound-producing organ allows them to modulate volume and pitch at rates up to 250 times per second. Tying possibly with bats on the fastest muscles list might be a fish that uses gas to its advantage.
"One of the champions among fish is the oyster toadfish, found along the U.S. East Coast," lead author Coen Elemans told Discovery News. "This animal uses superfast muscles to contract its gas bladder about 200 times per second to generate its courtship 'boatwhistle.'"
Elemans, an assistant professor in the Center for Sound Communication at the University of Southern Denmark, and his colleagues focused their attention this time on bats. They measured sound production in free-flying Daubenton's bats as the bats closed in on flying insects.
During this high call rate phase, dubbed the "terminal buzz," bats send out 160 or more calls per second. As part of this echolocation process, the calls produce echoes when they hit nearby objects. Bats then use these echoes to locate and identify prey.
The researchers identified the superfast muscles that help to control tension in the folds and membranes located within a bat's larynx. All species with these muscles use the speedy muscles for sound production.
"This is because superfast muscles trade-off force and power for speed," Elemans explained. "Therefore, the bones and tissue they move can only be very light and small. Because of this tradeoff, superfast muscles would not be useful for locomotion. They simply do not generate enough power."
Co-author John Ratcliffe, also from the University of Southern Denmark, told Discovery News that bats likely evolved the muscles to meet the demands of hunting at night.
"Echolocation has evolved only in those species of mammals and birds that operate in the dark, or under conditions of uncertain lighting, and so better echolocation was probably an easier option that better eyesight," Ratcliffe said. "On the other hand, improved flight performance may have co-evolved with improvements in the bat’s ability to update spatial information through echolocation. That is, complimentary changes in echolocation and powered flight worked together to improve both target tracking and acquisition."
Ratcliffe believes the superfast muscles that power part of the bat's echolocation system are present in all bats that take airborne prey while on the wing -- more than 70 percent of bat species alive today.
Brock Fenton, a leading expert on bats who is in the Department of Biology at the University of Western Ontario, told Discovery News that the new study is "excellent and imaginative work. (It’s) an important contribution to our knowledge about the evolution of echolocation in bats."
Read more at Discovery News
Sep 29, 2011
500-Year-Old Music Books Accessible to All
Some of the books date back as far as the 1500s and, due to their fragile nature, would not be freely available to researchers, but thanks to this digitization project, musicians from around the world can now source the original music free of charge using the Early Music Online website.
Highlights of the collection include church music by the Flemish composer Josquin des Prez and the English musicians Thomas Tallis and William Byrd; drinking-songs from Nuremberg and love-songs from Lyon; lute music from Venice and organ music from Leipzig.
Dr Stephen Rose, from the Department of Music at Royal Holloway, said: "This is an invaluable resource for any musician as it offers many insights into how these early works were originally sung and played. For the first time, musicians now have immediate access to more than 9,000 individual compositions."
Dr Sandra Tuppen, from the British Library, added: "It's wonderful to be able to share such fantastic musical treasures at the click of a button and make the works available to anyone in the world."
Dr Rose explained that the British Library had worked with the College's music department on previous database projects and they were keen to make use of the College's expertise again. The project was funded by JISC, the UK's technology consortium for higher and further education.
Read more at Science Daily
Galaxy Clusters Back Up Einstein’s Theory of Relativity
The researchers, led by Radek Wojtak of the Niels Bohr Institute at the University of Copenhagen, set out to test a classic prediction of general relativity: that light will lose energy as it is escaping a gravitational field. The stronger the field, the greater the energy loss suffered by the light. As a result, photons emitted from the center of a galaxy cluster — a massive object containing thousands of galaxies — should lose more energy than photons coming from the edge of the cluster because gravity is strongest in the center. And so, light emerging from the center should become longer in wavelength than light coming from the edges, shifting toward the red end of the light spectrum. The effect is known as gravitational redshifting.
Wojtak and his colleagues knew that measuring gravitational redshifting within a single galaxy cluster would be difficult because the effect is very small and needs to be teased apart from the redshifting caused by the orbital velocity of individual galaxies within the cluster and the redshifting caused by the expansion of the universe. The researchers approached the problem by averaging data collected from 8000 galaxy clusters by the Sloan Digital Sky Survey. The hope was to detect gravitational redshift “by studying the properties of the redshift distribution of galaxies in clusters rather than by looking at redshifts of individual galaxies separately,” Wojtak explains.
Sure enough, the researchers found that the light from the clusters was redshifted in proportion to the distance from the center of the cluster, as predicted by general relativity. “We could measure small differences in the redshift of the galaxies and see that the light from galaxies in the middle of a cluster had to ‘crawl’ out through the gravitational field, while it was easier for the light from the outlying galaxies to emerge,” Wojtak says. The findings appear online today in Nature.
Besides confirming general relativity, the results strongly support the Lambda-Cold Dark Matter model of the universe, an already popular cosmological model according to which most of the cosmos is made up of invisible stuff that does not interact with matter constituting stars and planets. The test also lends support for dark energy, the mysterious force that appears to be pushing the universe apart.
Read more at Wired Science
As Temps Rise, Amphibians May Vanish
When researchers mapped out the escape routes that a variety of amphibians would need to take in the coming decades to adapt to changing climate conditions, they uncovered some serious trouble.
Because of unpredictable rises and dips in temperature, many salamanders, frogs and newts will get stuck in unfavorable conditions along their travels -- enough to threaten their survival.
The findings are likely to apply not just to amphibians, but also to insects and other types of animals as well as plants. The study adds fire to a longstanding debate among conservation biologists and wildlife managers.
Some experts argue that threatened species need to be bred in captivity or that animals should be moved to places that will foster their survival. Others cite infamous examples like the invasive cane toad in Australia and argue that introducing species to new environments is simply a recipe for disaster.
"What conservationists have been planning for some time is that we might be able to use green habitat corridors so species can jump from place to place quite easily," said Regan Early, a climate change ecologist at the University of Évora, in Portugal. "We're finding it isn't going to be that simple. If we put corridors in place, we are going to have to do a lot of work to help species along."
"I don't think there is a silver bullet," she added. "We are going to be faced with a lot of hard decisions about what we want to do. We can either act and do things we might not be happy with, or not act and see a lot of species that we're used to seeing every day start to disappear."
"We need to decide what it is we want form our environment and how we’re going to manage it."
Amphibians are perfect subjects for studies on climate change, Early said, because they are extremely sensitive to changes in temperature. Because frogs and related creatures are so small, they are also limited in how far they can move at a time. So they can't easily escape from conditions that become inhospitable to them.
Early and colleagues looked at 15 amphibian species: Two types of newts, two types of frogs and 11 varieties of salamanders, all native to the western United States.
Armed with detailed information about the survival needs of each species, the researchers used climate projections to map out the routes they would need to take to survive climate changes. The study plotted data in 10-year increments, from 1990 to 2100.
Resulting maps showed that four of the 15 species will end up going extinct, without any suitable places to go in the future, the researchers report today in the journal Ecology Letters. A large potential range will continue to exist for six other species, but they will be able to access just half of that range. Four species are likely to become vulnerable or endangered as a result of climate changes.
Read more at Discovery News
Sep 28, 2011
200 Tons of Silver Found on WWII Ship
In service of the Ministry of War Transport, the Gairsoppa was laden with tea, iron and tons of silver. Because of bad weather and insufficient coal, she was forced to break away from the military convoy off the coast of Ireland.
As the captain re-routed in emergency for Galway, on the west coast of Ireland, the merchant steamship and its crew of 86 men were hit by a torpedo from a Nazi U-boat. She sank in icy seas within 20 minutes.
Left at the mercy of the winds and waves, two lifeboats soon disappeared. A third boat managed to sail for 13 days, with only one person, second officer Richard Ayres, surviving the long journey to shore.
Laying deeper than the Titanic, the wreck is believed to hold the largest haul of precious metal lost at sea.
According to U.S. underwater archaeology and salvage company Odyssey Marine Exploration Inc, up to 240 tons of silver, valued at more than $200 million, could be retrieved by next spring.
"We've accomplished the first phase of this project -- the location and identification of the target shipwreck -- and now we're hard at work planning for the recovery phase," Andrew Craig, Odyssey Senior Project Manager, said in a statement.
The robot-captured video footage showed a unique view into the rusty ship, revealing a ladder leading to the forecastle deck, a stern compass, and even an intact toilet.
The torpedo hole in the hull, which featured the red-and-black colors used by the British Indian Steam Navigation Company, was also clearly visible.
Although none of the precious metal was filmed, Odyssey is confident that it is still there.
Read more at Discovery News
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)