The Lighter Side of the News

[Geo]

Bah, happens about once a year.

That's even less then a solar -or moon eclipse!

[Unorthodox]

Not locally.

[Geo]

True that.

[gwillybj]

The New York Times
Science - Observatory
The Secret of the Disco Clam’s Light Show
by SINDYA N. BHANOO
June 26, 2014

Disco Clams Light Up the Ocean Floor

Disco Clams Light Up the Ocean Floor
Video by UC Berkeley Campus Life

Ctenoides ales is well known to scuba divers, who call it the disco or electric clam for its mirror-ball luminescence. But few scientists had given it much notice until Lindsey Dougherty came along.

Ms. Dougherty, a 31-year-old integrative biologist and doctoral student at the University of California, Berkeley, says she fell in love with the clam the first time she saw one flashing at her in the waters off Indonesia. She did an underwater disco dance and decided on the spot that she would do her doctoral research on the species.

Now, in The Journal of the Royal Society Interface, she and colleagues report that they have discovered the mechanism that causes the clam’s flash.

The inside of the clam’s lip, it turns out, is full of nanospheres of light-reflecting silica; by contrast, the outside of the lip has no silica and is highly light-absorbent.

“So it furls and unfurls, creating two flashes per second,” Ms. Dougherty said.

Continue reading the main story
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When she presented the clams with artificial predators in the lab, she saw an increase to four flashes per second. The inside lip is particularly good at reflecting blue light — perfect for the ocean.

Now the question is why the clams flash at all. They may be using their flashes to attract prey, scare away predators or even “attracting each other to settle nearby,” Ms. Dougherty said.

She is also interested in studying the eyes of C. ales. Each clam has about 40.

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/07/01/science/the-secret-of-the-disco-clams-light-show.html

[gwillybj]

[Geo]

 

[gwillybj]

(The subject in this article probably would not think it was "light" news, but certainly it is a curious or odd thing.)

Snakebite Causes Huge Mass in Woman's Leg, 50 Years Later
By Bahar Gholipour, Staff Writer   |   June 27, 2014 11:50am ET


X-ray images show multiple views of patient's leg, revealing a
calcified mass that developed following a snake bite.
Case report: doi:10.1186/1752-1947-8-193

More than 50 years after being bitten by a venomous snake, a woman developed a large mass in her lower leg, according to a new report of her case.

The 66-year-old woman in Thailand had been bitten by a Malayan pit viper, a venomous snake native to Southeast Asia, when she was 14.

The painless mass had become noticeable 10 years earlier, and on an X-ray it looked like an enlarged cavity wrapped in a tough, calcified membrane, resembling an eggshell. It ultimately grew so large that it broke through the woman's skin. Doctors surgically removed the mass, and the wound completely healed by one month after the surgery, they wrote in their report, published June 16 in the Journal of Medical Case Reports.

Such masses have rarely been reported following a snakebite, but they have been seen following other types of traumatic injury to muscles, according to the report's authors, who are researchers at the Prince of Songkla University in Thailand. [16 Oddest Medical Cases]

A calcified mass can form as muscle tissue starts to die after a crushing injury or disruption of the blood supply, usually in the lower leg, said Dr. Darren Fitzpatrick, an assistant professor of Radiology at Mount Sinai Medical Center in New York, who wasn't involved in the woman's case.

The result is usually a firm, hard, palpable mass that can be examined using X-ray or MRI scans. [Image of the mass]

"It's very common for it to be mistaken for a tumor, but usually, the imaging helps with the diagnosis," Fitzpatrick told Live Science.

In the case of this patient, doctors suspected that, because of the snakebite, the woman had developed a condition called compartment syndrome; the name refers to sections of muscle that are held together, along with nerves and blood vessels, by a tough tissue called the fascia, which does not stretch easily.

The woman's compartment syndrome had been left untreated, according to the report.

"Compartment syndrome usually happens below the knee," Fitzpatrick said. "You have a big group of muscles there, and they are in kind of a tight compartment.

"If the muscles start to swell from trauma or injury, they can run out of space, and that could result in compromised blood flow," he added. "That's certainly a very plausible reason as to why this could have happened in this case."

Editor's Note: This article was updated at 5:00 p.m. ET. It incorrectly referred to the snake as poisonous rather than venomous.

http://www.livescience.com/46571-giant-mass-late-reaction-to-snakebite.html

[Geo]

�

________________________

It's noteworthy the NY Daily forgot the wager was with a Flemish newspaper, so national anthem should've been sung in Dutch.

[gwillybj]

Got Unwanted Oxen? Try Bear Urine to Ward Them Off
Associated Press
July 3, 2014

NOME, Alaska (AP) — Alaska wildlife officials have turned to an unusual source in efforts to persuade a herd of musk oxen to leave this Bering Sea coastal town for good.

Bear urine.

Some suspect the large shaggy animals are seeking refuge in Nome because of brown bears, Alaska Department of Fish and Game wildlife biologist Tony Gorn told KNOM (http://is.gd/QZEXE7).

"We routinely, almost daily now, move musk ox. But then they come back," Gorn said. "So, this is an attempt to maybe put out some type of deterrent to prevent them from coming in so close to town."

The musk oxen began moving a few weeks ago into Nome, famous for being the finish line for the nearly thousand mile Iditarod Trail Sled Dog Race every March.

Their presence has caused some problems, especially with pets.

In June, two of the musk oxen were run off by a homeowner chasing them with a pickup after the animals tried to ram a dog pen.

Wildlife officials have tried shooting rubber bullets at the musk oxen and setting off fireworks, but the only thing that seems to provide temporary relief is moving them out of town on foot. Then they come back.

Gorn said it may be time to try the bear urine.

The Seward Peninsula's musk oxen population has declined 13 percent a year, Gorn said. There isn't a current brown bear population estimate, but he finds the hypothesis compelling.

"Some of the groups, at least, of musk ox are moving close to town because they're trying to find a bear-free zone. So really the idea is to make it appear like there may be bears in the local area and maybe they would move back out," Gorn said. "It's absolutely not tested yet, but it's worth a try."

He has placed bear urine in a few small containers where the musk oxen have been problematic to see if that drives them out. However, he's not sure how well the scent is carrying given Nome's windy, wet climate.

For anyone wondering where or how one can acquire bear urine, Gorn says: "Well, you can buy it commercially. The Internet's a wonderful thing."

The experiment will continue for a while at test sites. In the meantime, he recommends people use chain-link fences and dog kennels to keep their pets safe from the musk oxen.

___

Information from: KNOM-AM, http://www.knom.org

http://news.yahoo.com/got-unwanted-oxen-try-bear-urine-ward-them-161054700.html

[gwillybj]

Live birds found in Elmo doll at US-Mexico border

SAN LUIS, Ariz. (AP) — Federal agents inspecting a couple's belongings at an Arizona entry port on the U.S.-Mexico border found two live parrots hidden inside an Elmo doll.

The Customs and Border Protection says agriculture specialists found the birds on July 1 after cutting open the doll when an X-ray revealed something unusual about the contents.

The seized birds were placed in quarantine and transferred to a Department of Agriculture holding facility, while the couple was fined $300.

The border agency says birds entering the country are regulated because they can carry viral and bacterial diseases.

http://news.yahoo.com/live-birds-found-elmo-doll-us-mexico-border-150449712.html


------------

After car stalls, driver finds giant snake under the hood

A woman in Santa Fe, New Mexico, had just left her home early Thursday morning when her car suddenly stalled. A good Samaritan pulled over to help, but when he opened the hood of the car he didn’t find a dead battery. Instead, he found a very much living 9-foot, 20-pound python.

“It was looking right at me. It flicked its little tongue, and I kind of freaked out a little bit,” Jackson Ault said of the discovery.

So Ault and the woman, who wasn't identified, called the local police to help. The first officer on the scene wasn’t anymore interested in dealing with the snake (believed to be a Burmese python) than Ault.

But then police Lt. Louis Carlos showed up and the story suddenly became much less frightening and far more adorable.

“Cool, I want to hold it!” Carlos told local affiliate KOAT about his reaction to seeing the snake. “It was easy for me to just go in there, pick her up and hold onto her and let her feel the warmth of my hands and body.”

After soothing the snake, Carlos called animal control services, which picked up the snake and brought it to the Santa Fe Animal Shelter and Humane Society.

Authorities say the snake is not dangerous and most likely a pet that escaped from its owner’s home. She’s also just a baby, only halfway toward her estimated adult length. They say it almost certainly crawled on top of the car’s engine seeking warmth and shelter.

“We had a lot of fun with the stray python today — everyone wanted to confront their phobias and handle the snake,” reads a post on the Santa Fe Animal Shelter’s Facebook page.

Well, not everyone exactly.

“I’m hesitant to pop my own hood even though that sounds ridiculous,” Ault said.

http://news.yahoo.com/blogs/sideshow/after-car-stalls--driver-finds-giant-snake-under-the-hood-151808533.html

[Geo]

A 3 meter, 9 kilo Python, and that's still a baby?!

[gwillybj]

The Cornish Beaches Where Lego Keeps Washing Up
By Mario Cacciottolo
BBC News Magazine
20 July 2014



A container filled with millions of Lego pieces fell into the sea off Cornwall in 1997. But instead of remaining at the bottom of the ocean, they are still washing up on Cornish beaches today - offering an insight into the mysterious world of oceans and tides.

"Let me see if I can find a cutlass," says Tracey Williams, poking around some large rocks on Perran Sands with a stick.

She doesn't manage that, but does spot a gleaming white, pristine daisy on the beach in Perranporth, Cornwall. The flower looks good for its age, seeing as it is 17 years old.

It is one of 353,264 plastic daisies dropped into the sea on 13 February 1997, when the container ship Tokio Express was hit by a wave described by its captain as a "once in a 100-year phenomenon", tilting the ship 60 degrees one way, then 40 degrees back.

As a result, 62 containers were lost overboard about 20 miles off Land's End - and one of them was filled with nearly 4.8m pieces of Lego, bound for New York.

No-one knows exactly what happened next, or even what was in the other 61 containers, but shortly after that some of those Lego pieces began washing up in both the north and south coasts of Cornwall. They're still coming in today.




A quirk of fate meant many of the Lego items were nautical-themed, so locals and tourists alike started finding miniature cutlasses, flippers, spear guns, seagrass and scuba gear as well as the dragons and the daisies.

"There's stories of kids in the late 1990s having buckets of dragons on the beach, selling them," says Tracey, who lives in Newquay.



"These days the holy grail is an octopus or a dragon. I only know of three octopuses being found, and one was by me, in a cave in Challaborough, Devon. It's quite competitive. If you heard that your neighbour had found a green dragon, you'd want to go out and find one yourself."

She says the ship's manifest - a detailed list of everything in the containers - shows a whole range of Lego items, not all sea-themed. After all this time "it's the same old things that keep coming in with the tide", particularly after a bad storm.

Tracey runs a Facebook page which documents the Lego discoveries, and recently received an email from someone in Melbourne who found a flipper which they think could be from the Tokio Express spillage.

US oceanographer Curtis Ebbesmeyer has tracked the story of the Lego since it was spilled. "The mystery is where they've ended up. After 17 years they've only been definitely reported off the coast of Cornwall," he says.

It takes three years for sea debris to cross the Atlantic ocean, from Land's End to Florida. Undoubtedly some Lego has crossed and it's most likely some has gone around the world. But there isn't any proof that it has arrived as yet.

"I go to beachcombing events in Florida and they show me Lego - but it's the wrong kind. It's all local stuff kids have left behind."

Since 1997, those pieces could have drifted 62,000 miles, he says. It's 24,000 miles around the equator, meaning they could be on any beach on earth. Theoretically, the pieces of Lego could keep going around the ocean for centuries.




"The most profound lesson I've learned from the Lego story is that things that go to the bottom of the sea don't always stay there," Ebbesmeyer adds. The incident is a perfect example of how even when inside a steel container, sunken items don't stay sunken. They can be carried around the world, seemingly randomly, but subject to the planet's currents and tides.

"Tracking currents is like tracking ghosts - you can't see them. You can only see where flotsam started and where it ended up."

Lost Lego Pieces
Cargo included:

Toy kits - Divers, Aquazone, Aquanauts, Police, FrightKnights, WildWest, RoboForce TimeCruisers, Outback, Pirates
Spear guns (red and yellow) - 13,000 items
Black octopus - 4,200
Yellow life preserver - 26,600
Diver flippers (in pairs: black, blue, red) - 418,000
Dragons (black and green) - 33,941
Brown ship rigging net - 26,400
Daisy flowers (in fours - white, red, yellow) - 353,264
Scuba and breathing apparatus (grey) - 97,500
Total of 4,756,940 Lego pieces lost overboard in a single container
Estimated 3,178,807 may be light enough to have floated
Source: Beachcombers' Alert, vol 2. No 2 1997

But there's also a dark side to the story, he says. If Lego is on land then it's fun. If it's on the ocean it's deadly, a poison for birds. If you lose one container with 5m pieces of Lego in it, that is a catastrophe for wildlife.

Much more text and more pictures at http://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-28367198

[gwillybj]

c|net
tech culture
Crows: Officially Smarter Than Children
by Michelle Starr @riding_red
July 24, 2014 6:14 PM PDT

New research with New Caledonian crows has demonstrated that they perform as well as 7- to 10-year-old children on cause-and-effect water displacement tasks.

We know that crows are capable of some pretty complex problem solving. Earlier this year, we saw a crow figure out how to complete an eight-step puzzle to retrieve food, demonstrating the supreme reasoning capability of corvids.

That crow, however, had already been shown each of the steps. Not in order -- the crow put them together on its own, which is still a highly impressive feat -- but it knew which items triggered which effects. Now, it seems, that crows are capable of figuring out at least one of the steps: how to get water from a tall glass.

To you or me, the solution seems simple: drop rocks into the glass to raise the water level. One would not usually expect a bird to be able to figure this out, but -- as has been demonstrated in the past by Sarah Jelbert at the University of Auckland-- crows can. Moreover, they can differentiate between a floating object and a sinking one, and can tell the difference between sand and water.

New research, conducted by a team of researchers at the University of California, Santa Barbara led by Corina Logan, has shown that they can distinguish between water volumes, too.

Using New Caledonian crows caught in the wild, the team presented them with two volumes of water, one in a wide beaker of water, the other in a narrow one. Both beakers were the same height. However, unlike Jelbert's research -- where the crows were given enough stones to succeed in raising the water level to a desired height no matter which vessel they chose -- Logan's team only gave them enough for one.

"When we gave them only four objects, they could succeed only in one tube -- the narrower one, because the water level would never get high enough in the wider tube; they were dropping all or most of the objects into the functional tube and getting the food reward," Logan said. "It wasn't just that they preferred this tube, they appeared to know it was more functional."

The other test, called the U-tube test, involved sets of tubes. One set is connected by a hidden mechanism; when stones are dropped in one tube, water rises in the other. The other set of tubes is unconnected, so dropping stones in one produces no result in the other. Each set of tubes is colour-coded so that the test subject can differentiate between them.

While children aged 7 to 10 can figure out the simple rules, children aged 4 to 6 cannot; and, when Jelbert tried it with her crows, they failed. Logan decided to re-attempt the test, moving the beakers farther apart -- and one of the crows, a six-month-old nicknamed Kitty, figured it out.

"We don't know how she passed it or what she understands about the task," Logan said, "so we don't know if the same cognitive processes or decisions are happening as with the children, but we now have evidence that they can. It's possible for the birds to pass it."

The full paper, "Modifications to the Aesop's Fable Paradigm Change New Caledonian Crow Performances", can be read online in the journal PLOS One.
http://www.plosone.org/article/info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fjournal.pone.0103049

http://www.cnet.com/news/crows-officially-smarter-than-children/

[Rusty Edge]

I enjoy the crow stories. Especially now that I am no longer a corn farmer.

[Buster's Uncle]

Fart@France-The Result

Toot Sweet! Brit Fires 16-Foot Fart Machine at France
LiveScience.com
By Laura Geggel, Staff Writer  August 1, 2014 7:59 AM


An English plumber welded an enormous fart machine, drove it to the White Cliffs of Dover and blasted it at France.

"Did you hear anything or did you not?" he asked after calling a woman across the English Channel in Calais, France, on July 24, according to a YouTube video of the fart machine. Her answer? Yes.

Colin Furze has a reputation for constructing eccentric creations, including the world's fastest baby stroller last year after the birth of his son.

The 34-year-old inventor went on holiday this week and didn't have time to talk about his machine, but Live Science still took a whiff at how this inventor broke wind.

The idea came to him from YouTube commenters, he said in a video. "People always say, 'I'd hate to live next to you. You make too much noise!' And it's fair to say I do make a bit of noise."

Inspired, Furze decided to make a valveless pulsejet — the loudest machine he's ever assembled. He decided to annoy not just his neighbors but also the French, his country's neighbor to the south.

"I'm going to make the biggest pulsejet I've ever made, and I'm going to take it down to the White Cliffs of Dover [along the English coastline], point it toward France, see if they can listen," he said.

He fashioned a U-shaped pulsejet, describing it as an engine that wastes most of its energy on heat and noise. Once the pulsejet is ignited with a mixture of air and fuel such as gas, a series of pressure waves pulse back and forth in the long tubes, creating a deafening noise.

In fact, the engine is similar to a U-shaped organ pipe, said Adam Bruckner, a professor of aeronautics and astronautics at the University of Washington in Seattle, who was not involved with the project.

"The way it works is that when you initiate a combustion by mixing some fuel — it could be propane or gasoline sprayed into it — it burns suddenly and makes pressure waves that go out in both directions," Bruckner told Live Science. "What you hear are the pulses of pressure waves coming out of the engine."

Toward the end of World War II, Germany used pulsejets to power the Nazi V-1 flying bombs against England. But pulsejets are incredibly loud, and they're so inefficient that few people use them anymore, Bruckner said.

"These things are really better at making noise than producing anything useful for a serious engine, [such as] for aircraft for producing thrust," Bruckner said.

But noise is what Furze wanted. To make the fart machine look realistic, Furze built a 16-foot (5 meters) "massive bum to stick it behind," he said in the video. He then rallied his fans to meet him at the White Cliffs of Dover, where he warned the French, yelling, "We will fart in your general direction."

Furze lit the fuel and a thunderous blare ensued. Two phone calls confirmed that people on the other side of the channel heard the blasts, but a video taken near the French Coast provided less definite results.

"The bit of video that I've been shown is basically quite a lot of wind noise, so you can't really take anything from it," Furze said. "But I do have two people who said they clearly hear a kind of a muffled mumbling coming over the water."

Whether the noise hit its intended audience depends on a number of factors, including atmospheric conditions, wind speed and direction, and temperature, Bruckner said.

"For example, back in 1883, the volcanic eruption that happen in Krakatoa near the island of Sumatra was supposedly heard in Chile thousands of miles away," Bruckner said. "But that was a much bigger explosion."

Fart@France-Building/Testing the BIGGEST valveless pulsejet ever made

http://news.yahoo.com/toot-sweet-brit-fires-16-foot-fart-machine-115959057.html