It must have seemed like a good idea at the time - one dead whale needing disposal, several kilos of high explosive gathering dust in a sheriff’s office somewhere… And everyone knows, blowing something up - even a large whale - results in its instant vaporisation, right? Wrong.
5 comments March 31st, 2008
ABC show Nightline does a good job covering the story of Biblically Correct Tours, a organisation of Young Earth Creationists that takes children on tours of natural history museums, distorting the science on display and deploying a dazzling array of straw man arguments, circular logic, and outright lies. The museum tolerates the tours in the spirit of open debate. Whether the church behind this will invite the museum curator to outline the discrepancies in their bible remains to be seen.
4 comments March 30th, 2008
If the sight of this bacterial colony is making you drool, relax in the knowledge that this is actually a dessert item! Creator Mark Rehorst explains:
I’ve had a few microbiology classes and cultured many different types of bacteria on different media, so I thought it would be fun to make dessert that looked like bacterial cultures served in Petri dishes!
Ace! To see the rest of Mark’s yummy fake-microbial treats click here.
2 comments March 30th, 2008
This video isn’t particularly new, but even those who’ve seen it will benefit from a rerun. The animation was carried about by the people at XVIVO for Harvard University’s Department of Molecular and Cellular Biology. In contrast to this short piece, the full length animation is 8 minutes long and includes descriptions of the processes.
1 comment March 24th, 2008
I’ve no idea how accurate this is, but this website purports to tell you how long you could survive the desolate emptiness of space without the comfort of a spacesuit. For the record, Frances Ashcroft describes the effects in her excellent book ‘Life At The Extremes‘:
Step into the vacuum of space and you would perish in a few brief agonising moments. The air would rush out of your lungs; the dissolved gases in your blood and bodily fluids would vaporise, forcing apart your cells and forming bubbles in your capillaries, so that no oxygen would reach your brain; air trapped in your internal organs would expand, rupturing your gut and eardrums; and the intense cold would cause instant freezing. you would be unconscious within fifteen seconds.
Which is a relief, as I’m told I’d live for a minute longer than that.
2 comments March 23rd, 2008
Some pretty neat footage of what happens in a petrol station if someone hits ‘the red button’. Instant Christmas effect!
Add comment March 21st, 2008
As if soldiers in Afghanistan didn’t have enough worries from hostile weather, enemy troops and camel spiders, this video shows another peril - giant terrorist hornets, who appear to have blocked a mountain path then ambushed the soldiers when they tried to clear it.
2 comments March 19th, 2008
In another example that Mother Nature has a pretty messed up personality, here’s a skin-crawling video of a Surinam Toad giving birth. Well, of course, it’s an amphibian, so it doesn’t give birth as such… Over to Wikipipedia to explain things:
Surinam toads are most well-known for their remarkable reproductive habits. The partners rise off of the floor while in amplexus and flip through the water in arcs. During each arc, the female releases 3-10 eggs, which get embedded in the skin on her back by the male’s movements. After implantation the eggs sink into the skin and form pockets over a period of several days, eventually taking on the appearance of an irregular honeycomb. The larvae develop through the tadpole stage inside these pockets, eventually emerging from the mother’s back as fully developed toads
Freaky!
5 comments March 16th, 2008
Rapidly becoming a sub-genre of its own… songs about pi, that most irrational of numbers. Whereas previously purely about the number, now we get this wonderful ballad to geometry’s dark horse. Follow the link for probably the only math-based Don McLean animated mash-up you’re likely to see all year. Sing for pi!
Add comment March 14th, 2008
Thanks to Claire for forwarding this - music magazine NME reports that a company in Ireland is offering free tickets to any European festival in exchange for a sperm donation. Before you drop your trousers, however, I can reveal that it’s sadly just a PR stunt.
The NME says:
Sperm donors are to be offered free tickets to any music festival in Europe under a new initiative.
Passes to a festival of their choice will be offered to any donors in Europe who contribute to Ireland’s sperm reserves.
The Sperm For Tickets website says:
we have set up an alternative method for donations by using specially developed donation containers combined with a fast courier network to offer a mail system. The patented container is a new discovery that was made by our research and development team, which allows samples to to stay fresh for up to 3 days. We offer a worldwide courier service using DHL and UPS that guarantee delivery times.
And there, unfortunately, is the line that gives it all away. There is absolutely no way any regular next-day courier service is going to transport biohazardous materials like blood or semen. A quick phonecall to both DHL and UPS confirms that neither are willing to collect my precious seed (”…without special licences and so on”). There are, of course, other tell-tale signs that this isn’t true: Sperm For Tickets don’t mention who they’re collecting it for (NHS? private clinics?), and don’t list any contact information on their website. They own a .com domain rather than a .org domain. The likelihood that they’ve struck some deal with every single festival in Europe, great and small, to turn your junk into free passes is improbable in the extreme.
And finally, the website was registered by Dave Clayton of Area52, a Dublin-based marketing firm. Wait, did I say firm? I meant, “group of marketing students at Dublin University”. They say:
Ever tried eating your shoe while scuba diving up-side-down in the hope of having a eureka moment to come up with an amazing idea?
No.
Well, we have. And after a few attempts we realised it was not working, so instead we gathered Ireland’s sharpest minds to generate ideas in a think-tank environment.
Ireland’s sharpest minds are more preoccupied with masturbation than curing cancer, it seems. Well done guys - you’ve created a thinly-veiled hoax masquerading as a news story to no obvious benefit to anyone. I’d say that makes you indistinguishable from most PR hacks already working out there.
8 comments March 12th, 2008
I found this neat little puzzle last night. The challenge is to build a 3D representation of the plans given with a set number of blocks. Seems easy at first, until you realise that the number of blocks available is grossly fewer than you expect, and you have to rethink your plan. A few hints - blocks can float in mid-air if needed, and my strategy was to build a working model and then remove superfluous blocks until I hit the target.
Don’t be put off by the warning that the puzzles ‘are not easy’ - I finished all 10 in the time it took me to drink a can of imported lager. Of course, I could have been experiencing the Ballmer Peak.
2 comments March 12th, 2008
Here is an image showing what all the water in the world collected into a single sphere would look like. On the right is Earth’s atmosphere, collected into a sphere at sea-level density. Now, some people would choose to accept or refute this based on a guess. Not so Dan Phiffer, who has kindly done all the maths for us:
1) Measure the spheres representing Earth, water and air in the image. Obtain the diameter in pixels of each sphere. Also, identify relevant physical constants.
2)Starting with data independently provided by Andrew Nowicki, calculate the diameters of spheres that would contain Earth’s water and air.
3)Normalize the results from Step 2 into pixels and compare with measurements from Step 1.
To find out whether the images are accurate, or simply ‘tree-hugger shock media’ you’ll have to visit his blog.
1 comment March 11th, 2008
Some enterprising scripters have animated the motion graphics described by John Whitney in his book Digital Harmony. No, it didn’t mean anything to me either. But the site says:
In three minutes, the largest dot will travel around the circle once, the next largest dot will travel around the circle twice, the next largest dot three times, and so on.
The dots are arranged to trigger notes on a chromatic scale when they pass the line
The effect is very pleasant and quite mesmerising. I’m sure there are some high level mathematics going on here, I just wish I was smart enough to understand what they were. The site has many variations of scale and harmony, all of which are interesting and delightfully musical. Fascinating stuff!
1 comment March 10th, 2008
Ever since I performed a simple experiment, detox footpads have been something of a running theme here at SciencePunk. We’ve seen how pouring water on them will turn them brown (supposedly this colour is from ‘toxins’ in your body). Then me and my 5-yr-old assistant dissected a footpad to discover it was made of kitty litter and powdered wood vinegar. I also showed that Champneys’ “clinical trials” didn’t even measure the detoxification action of their footpads. And the cats over at MockDock did a full-term trial of the detox pads.
A lot of people here have commented that I should have done a proper scientific analysis of the footpads. That’s tough, because I’m not a proper scientist and I don’t have a lab at my disposal. However, other people do, and thanks to Lynne for sending me a link to this, a Study in the Effectiveness of Detoxification Foot Patches. Sweet! A proper scientific analysis at last, published in The Journal of Orthomolecular Medicine, Volume 20 Fourth Quarter, 2005 Number 4. They were particularly interested in one of more bizarre claims made by Kinoki detox footpads - that they could remove heavy metals from the body. Say the authors:
A small study of commercially available Detoxification Foot Patches was undertaken to determine if there is evidence of heavy metal detoxification after using the foot patches as instructed by the manufacturer. Three foot patches were used in the experiment: an unused “virgin” foot patch as a control, one that was used by Patient A who’s mineral status showed no heavy metal poisoning, and another used by Patient B, who’s mineral status showed contamination with several heavy metals.
Concluding:
…there was no evidence of any detoxification of heavy metals. More importantly, the experiment revealed the control foot patch contained toxic levels of six heavy metals. For this reason, employing them as a therapeutic method of detoxification may contribute to toxic exposures of heavy metals they are purposed to be detoxifying.
This is the pinnacle of irony - these detox patches actually contain toxic levels of heavy metals! I don’t know what else there is left to say. These pads are not only useless, a scam, and a waste of money - they are a health risk! Read the full scientific report here.
29 comments March 10th, 2008
‘Winning the lotto/lottery for everyday players’: This book actually exists. It’s written by ‘Professor Jones’ - that’s not a title. It’s apparently the author’s name.
Says Cracked:
This book contains enough compressed stupidity to erase all science as far back as the middle ages. The title alone proves the retardedness of everyone who’s even touched it three times over:
1) They had to write both Lotto and Lottery on the cover, for fear of missing half their target market. “Dur, this book is for lott-e-ry, dat sounds more fancier than the lotto we simple folk play ’round these parts”
2) The use of “everyday players” make you realize that the target market for this book is a group of folks who think of themselves as mere regular players, while a secret cabal of professionals keeps scooping all the jackpots. Why, if only these everyday players had access to some kind of inside knowledge!
3) Third. Goddamn. Edition. We have no idea what possible refinements to lotto-winning technology the author could be adding each time, short of scribbling “hahaha, oh God this is working–I can’t believe it’s working” all over the proof copy before sending it back to the printers. A third edition of anything hasn’t damaged our faith in humanity so much since the newspapers ran their “Princess Diana–still dead” memorials in 2000.
See the rest of Cracked’s article: “5 Books That Can Actually Make You Stupider“.
Add comment March 10th, 2008
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