I’ve Been Thunderstruck

There is a very interesting article today at MSNBC.com about virgin births in sharks. Yes, that’s correct…scientiests have found another instance where a pup carried by a female Atlantic blacktip shark contained absolutely no male genetic material at all.

This is the second documented case of parthenogenesis, or asexual reproduction, in sharks. The first instance occured at a zoo in Omaha, NE.

The medical mystery began 16 months ago after the death of the Atlantic blacktip shark named Tidbit at the Virginia Beach aquarium. No male blacktip sharks were present during her eight years at the aquarium.

In May 2007, the 5-foot, 94-pound shark died of stress-related complications related to her unknown pregnancy after undergoing a yearly checkup. The 10-inch shark pup was found during a necropsy of Tidbit, surprising aquarium officials. They initially thought the embryonic pup was either a product of a virgin birth or a cross between the blacktip and a male of another shark species — which has never been documented, Chapman said.

Tidbit’s pup was nearly full term, and likely would have been quickly eaten by “really big sand tiger sharks” that were in the tank, Chapman said in a telephone interview from Florida.

That is what happened to the tiny hammerhead pup in the Omaha case.

“By the time they could realize what they were looking at, something munched the baby,” he said of aquarium workers. The remains of the pup were used for the DNA testing.

Virgin birth has been proven in other species, including some bony fish, amphibians, reptiles and birds.

Absent the chromosomes present in the male sperm, the offspring of an asexual conception have reduced genetic diversity and, the scientists said, may be at a disadvantage for surviving in the wild. A pup, for instance, can be more susceptible to congenital disorders and diseases.

Scientists speculate that such births could become more common if population densities become so low that female sharks have problems finding partners.

In magical lore and mysticism, all numbers are ascribed certain properties and energies. Seven is a number of great power, a magical number, a lucky number, a number of psychic and mystical powers, of secrecy and the search for inner truth. The origin of belief in seven’s powers lies in the lunar cycle. Each of the moon’s four phases lasts about seven days. The Summerians, who based their calendar on the moon, gave the week seven days and declared the seventh and last day of each week to be uncanny. Life cycles on Earth also have phases demarcated by seven, there are said to be seven years to each stage of human growth, and there are seven colors to the rainbow, seven notes in the musical scale, seven petitions to the Lord’s Prayer, and seven deadly sins. The seventh son of a seventh son is said to be born with formidable magical and psychic powers. The number seven is widely held to be a lucky number, especially in matters of love and money.

[Source : The Handy Science Answer Book]

Ever wonder what a square foot, or a yard equals in "sensible units?" As in things that really matter? Well, head over to sensibleunits.com and you can find out things like:

• 1 Square Foot Equals
• 2.1 CDs
• 1.3 Large Pizzas
• 1.2 Tennis Racquet Heads
• 1 Yard Equals
• 7.6 CDs Side By Side
• 18 AA Batteries End to End
• 4.2 Average Soccer Ball Diameters
• 1 Centimeter Equals
• 1.0 Stacked CD Cases
• 29 Human Female Fingernail Thicknesses
• 1.3 Dry Basmati Rice Grains End to End

The possibilities are endless…give it a shot!

Check out KB276304 from Microsoft. There’s apparently a bug that appears when Windows 2000 is configured to authenticate against an MIT Kerberos domain that throws the following error message:

Your password must be at least 18770 characters and cannot repeat any of your previous 30689 passwords. Please type a different password. Type a password that meets these requirements in both text boxes.

Holy smokes!

Yes, they do, if you happen to live in western Kenya. What follows is a story that was posted today at MSNBC.com, titled "Kenya mob reportedly burns 11 ‘witches’":

NAIROBI, Kenya - A group of up to 300 young men have burned to death 11 people suspected of being witches and wizards in western Kenya — in some cases slitting their victims’ throats or clubbing them to death before burning their bodies, officials said.

The gang moved from home to home through two villages, identifying their victims by using a list with names of suspected witches and wizards and the kind of spells they were believed to have cast on the community, said Ben Makori, a local councilor.

"The villagers are complaining that the (suspected) wizards and witches are making the bright children in the community dumb…. These (suspected) witches are not doing good things to us," Makori told The Associated Press on the phone.

Deputy police spokesman Charles Owino said the gang hunted down the eight women and three men in the western Kenya villages of Kekoro and Matembe. Most of the victims were between 70 and 90 years old, Owino said.

Senior administrator Njoroge Ndirangu said the gang hunted down their victims Tuesday night and Wednesday morning.

Victims slashed or clubbed
In some cases the gang pulled the victims out of their homes, slit their throats or clubbed them to death, said a police officer, speaking on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to talk to the media.

The victims were then thrown back into their homes, which the gang had already set on fire, the officer said. He said 36 houses were burned.

Another police officer, Mwaura Njoroge, said the body of a victim burned to death in her house was, "reduced to something so small, you cannot tell which is the leg and which is the arm."

"How can they (the young men) prove that a person is a wizard? It is likely that the people who committed these killings had personal vendettas against their victims," Njoroge said.

"These people identified who is to be killed by accusing their victims of bewitching their sons and daughters," said Ndirangu, the commissioner in charge of Kisii Central district, where one of the villages is located.

Ndirangu said that residents are superstitious and have often targeted suspected witches and wizards, but this week’s attack was the most shocking in recent years.

The police officer who spoke on condition of anonymity said investigators had little hope of making progress because the villagers have refused to identify the people who carried out attacks.

(Copyright 2008, Associated Press)

Sometimes I find it absolutely amazing the level of violence that still exists in the world today.

Ever wonder what really defines a meter? Or a second? Or a twip? From Charlie Emrich in the September 2007 issue of Wired comes this list of standards.

• Meter
• Standardized in 1983
• Measures length
• Defined by the distance light travels in a vacuum in 1/299,792/458 second
• Second
• Standardized in 1967
• Measures time
• Defined by the time it takes for a cesium-133 atom to cycle 9,192,631,770 times between two specific quantum states
• Ampere
• Standardized in 1948
• Measures electrical current
• Defined by the current required to create a force of 2×10E-7 newtons per meter between two parallel wires
• Kelvin
• Standardized in 1954
• Measures temperature
• Defined by 1/273.16 the temperature of the triple point of water - when it’s simultaneously gas, liquid and solid
• Mole
• Standardized in 1971
• Measure amount of stuff
• Defined by the number of atoms in 12 grams of carbon 12 (6.022×10E23)
• Candela
• Standardized in 1979
• Measures brightness
• Defined by the intensity of a 1/683-watt yellow-green light spread over a square meter, seen from a meter away

Now for some more interesting, obscure units of measure.

• Gou
• 180 milliliters - better known as a rice cup for an electric cooker
• Pack Year
• cigarette consumption based on one pack a day for a year
• Nibble
• typically four bit of binary code, or half a byte
• Score
• 20 of something
• Hand
• 4 inches of horse height
• Twip
• 1/20 of a typesetting point
• Thrave
• 24 sheaves of wheat
• Shake
• 10 nanoseconds
• Mickey
• ratio of computer mouse movement to onscreen cursor movement
• Jansky
• strength of radio signals from space
• Butt
• two hogsheads, or about 126 gallons, of booze
• Smoot
• a measure of length developed by some MIT students, equal to 5′ 7" - the height of one Oliver R Smoot

There was an interesting little article in the December 2006 issue of Wired about Fiction vs Fact for several things you’ve heard of before. Check out these excerpts from the article by Aria Pearson:

Fiction: If you fall into quicksand you’ll be sucked under and die.

Fact: You’ll only sink up to your waist.

Fiction: Sitting too close to the TV will ruin your eyes.

Fact: It causes fatigue but no permanent damage.

Fiction: Benjamin Franklin’s kite was struck by lightning.

Fact: The kite picked up electricity from the air, causing an arc between Franklin’s hand and a key tied to his end of the string.

Fiction: A penny dropped from the top of a skyscraper can kill someone.

Fact: It could never pick up enough velocity to kill, just to bang you up a little.

Fiction: Swimming after you eat will cause cramps and lead to drowning.

Fact: These is a very slight risk of cramps, but only for vigorous swimmers.

Fiction: There’s a dark side of the moon.

Fact: The entire lunar surface receives sunlight during the moon’s monthly orbit around Earth.

Fiction: Swallowed chewing gum takes seven years to digest.

Fact: Gum is not digested. It passes through the gastrointestinal system, usually within 24 hours.

Technorati Tags: science debunked,fallacies,fictions,gum,quicksand

It seems that Boston Dynamics, "an engineering company that specializes in robotics and human simulation," has created the most advanced quadruped robot on Earth, called "BigDog." Here is the video that can be found on YouTube:

Quite honestly, this thing is amazing. I have never seen a robot move with the precision, and "normalcy" that this one does. It walks exactly like a dog. The freakiest moment of the video, though was when it was slipping on the ice, and trying to recover it’s footing. At that moment, it looked more like a real animal than a noisy robot. I think these guys have their finger on the pulse of the future, and we’ll be seeing quite a few of their creations on the battlefield, as the project was funded in part by DARPA.

This video absolutely falls under the category of things that astound and amaze me. We have here a huge canyon in Columbia with no real way in or out of the village. The Columbian government won’t build a bridge across the river because it says there aren’t enough people in the village to warrant the cost. The solution? A cable that crosses the river and allows people to come in and out of the village. The catch? It’s 1200 feet above ground!

I struggle to understand why anybody would need to test the effects of LSD on combat troops. Never having taken it myself, but having heard of the standard reactions, I imagine that the military was looking for some way to enhance performance on the battlefield. Judging by the results below, getting LSD into the water supply of enemy combatants might be the quickest way to get them to laugh themselves to death!