iscussion of weird science items is one thing I always enjoy.  Various examples are collected on this page.

More recent weirdness is on top.

January 26, 2004

This is one of the coolest photos I've ever seen, and the fact that there's no more information about it anywhere (I even tried Google) online is driving me nuts.  The only info is the photo caption on Yahoo, and I've quoted it here.

A recently taken undated hand out photograph received on January 25, 2004 shows a fake baby dragon encased in a 30 inch (0.76 metres) jar which was discovered by David Hart in a garage in Oxfordshire, southern England. A metal tin found alongside the dragon contained paperwork written in an old-fashioned German style of the 1890s, a time when their was intense rivalry between Britain's and Germany's scientists. The documents suggest that Britain's Natural History Museum turned the dragon away and sent it to be destroyed, only for the jar to be intercepted by David Hart's grandfather, Frederick Hart, who worked as a porter. REUTERS/Allistair Mitchell

So basically it sounds like the German and English museums were competing for whatever, fame or recognition or prominence, and the Germans dreamed up this elaborate hoax, constructed this frighteningly-lifelike fake baby dragon embryo thing, and shipped it off to England, no doubt hoping the English scientists/curators would think it was real and put it on display as an amazing natural find, at which point the Germans would reveal that they constructed it and that it was a fake and thus destroy the the credibility of their bitter rivals.

As the caption says, the English museum saw through it and didn't put it on display, and in fact sent it to be destroyed, only to have it saved by the janitor.  Makes you curious what other sorts of things they threw out back then, and if any of them were real and they just didn't know it?

I really want to know how it was made, who made it, etc.  It's been floating in that jar for over 100 years, and it still looks damned real, even with some decay.  In fact that probably just makes it more real, since it makes it look ancient.  The body looks something like a plucked chicken in some places, but overall it's strikingly well done.  The wings even have veins, there are tiny claws on the fingers, the back legs and tail are nicely proportioned, etc.  What did they make it of and preserve it in that it's still so solid today, and how did the scientists know it was a fake back then?

Besides the fact that it's clearly a mythological beast, I mean.

Here's the bigger shot on Yahoo, and it gives you a better look at the veins and such. I guess the tube there is supposed to be an umbilical cord, like this one was an embryo?

Hopefully there will be some news articles about it in the days to come, and perhaps someone will even x-ray or CAT scan it and see how they put the thing together.

January 30, 2004

I've still not found a useful article about that freaky dragon in a bottle that I posted about a few days ago.  Here's an article about it from an Australian site, and it's got a quote from an actual scientist, but adds no new info.

Mr Mitchell said: "The dragon is flawless, from the tiny teeth to the umbilical cord. It could be made from indiarubber, because Germany was the world's leading manufacturer of it at the time, or it could be made of wax. It has to be fake. No one has ever proved scientifically that dragons exist. But everyone who sees it immediately asks, 'Is it real?"'

November 13, 2003

The first human face transplant may soon take place.

Teams on both sides of the Atlantic are now confident they have the skills to attempt the operation. Surgeons insist the procedure, which involves transplanting an entire face from a corpse to a living person, will only be available for patients with the most severe facial disfigurements - and not as a cosmetic vanity treatment.

Momentum for the operation is gathering pace after years of painstaking groundwork. Plastic surgeon Peter Butler, who will lead any UK attempt, believes the radical procedure offers remarkable new hope for patients with very severe facial disfigurements, particularly burns.

So yeah, it would be potentially a great thing for people with horrible facial scarring, from acid or burns or whatever.  The issue is how freaky it would be, since in theory, the new person would look more or less exactly like the corpse they're wearing, though I assume bone structure would make them look at least a little bit different.  Would they only allow this for people who lived in different areas?  I mean how weird would it be to bump into someone you knew years ago, when you hadn't heard that he/she was dead?

As if often the case when something weird like this comes along, I have a lot of questions:

• Does the transplant recipient get to pick the face they want?
  • Like can you say, "She's ugly, I want a prettier, younger face."
• Does this include the ears and everything, or just patches to replace scar tissue, or do they go to the hairline to hide the stitches?
• Does the facial hair, eyelashes, eyebrows, etc grown normally, post-transplant?
• Do they do the whole scalp also, so the head hair matches the facial hair?
• Could they do just scalp transplants for bald men?
• How exactly does the corpse have to match the living person for the nose and eyebrows and eye holes and everything to fit properly?  Or can they stretch it some, snip off the edges to make it fit, etc?

There also have to be endless criminal and espionage applications for this sort of total appearance change; various drug lords have died trying to get enough radical plastic surgery to change their appearance, so you know they'd be all over this shit once it became common and available outside of the most picky hospitals, with their "disfigurement victims only" rules.

It reminds me of Minority Report, where Tom Cruise got the eyeball transplant in some filthy rented room with dead rats and stuff lying around.  "Hello, Doctor Nick!"

October 23, 2003

Weird science news story about ships possibly being sunk by ocean farts.

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Methane bubbles from the sea floor could, in theory, sink ships and may explain the odd disappearances of some vessels, Australian researchers reported on Tuesday.

The huge bubbles can erupt from undersea deposits of solid methane, known as gas hydrates. An odorless gas found in swamps and mines, methane becomes solid under the enormous pressures found on deep sea floors.

The ice-like methane deposits can break off and become gaseous as they rise, creating bubbles at the surface.

That would be a hell of a way to lose your ship and life, eh?

May 19, 2003

Here's a weird study. Racists who talk to the sort of people they hate do worse on mental tests afterwards.

The study included 59 white college students. They were given a test to assess the degree of racial bias in their thinking. The students then spent time talking with either a black or a white person and afterwards were given a test that measured their ability to concentrate on a challenging mental task.

The more racially biased the students were, the worse they did on the mental task after speaking with a black person. But racially biased students who spoke with a white person, even if they discussed racially sensitive issues, had no decline in mental function.

"When you have to control your behavior, it takes a lot of energy. And if you expend energy in a social interaction, then you don't have so much left over to do something else," researcher Nicole Shelton says in a news release..

My first thought is that now I have something on which to blame the idiotic behavior of most racists I know.  I mean yeah, I blame it on them for being racist and stupid, but now when some of the white boys at work come in with some especially stupid comment, and follow it up with Rush-aping incoherent babblings about "towel-heads", I'll figure they talked to some security guard or something on the way in, and haven't yet recovered.

May 6, 2003

A reader sent me this Scientific American article about synesthesia, a fascinating condition wherein people associate colors with numbers and letters, and other such things.  Yes, it's hard to explain.  I posted about another article on this topic October 20th, though it seems much more recent than that.  I swear, every time I remember something I wrote about in a blog a week or two ago, I find it like 3 months back.  I must be getting old.

One funny thing about it is that scientists didn't even agree that it was a real condition until just recently, and as part of the recent study they set about proving once and for all that this was a real condition, and not some sort of childhood memory artifact that people thought they were seeing in a special way.

We began trying to find out whether synesthesia is a genuine sensory experience in 1999. This deceptively simple question had plagued researchers in this field for decades. One natural approach is to start by asking the subjects outright: "Is this just a memory, or do you actually see the color as if it were right in front of you?" When we tried asking this question, we did not get very far. Some subjects did respond, "Oh, I see it perfectly clearly." But a more frequent reaction was, "I kind of see it, kind of don't" or "No, it is not like a memory. I see the number as being clearly red but I also know it isn't; it's black. So it must be a memory, I guess."

We wondered what would happen if we showed the mixed numbers to synesthetes who experience, for instance, red when they see a 5 and green with a 2. We arranged the 2's so that they formed a triangle. If synesthesia were a genuine sensory effect, our subjects should easily see the triangle because for them, the numbers would look colored.

When we conducted pop-out tests with volunteers, the answer was crystal clear. Unlike normal subjects, synesthetes correctly reported the shape formed by groups of numbers up to 90 percent of the time (exactly as nonsynesthetes do when the numbers actually have different colors). This result proves that the induced colors are genuinely sensory and that synesthetes are not just making things up. It is impossible for them to fake their success. In another striking example, we asked a synesthete who sees 5 tinged red to watch a computer display. He could not tell when we surreptitiously added an actual red hue to the white number unless the red was sufficiently intense; he could instantly spot a real green added to the 5.

April 3, 2003

WELLINGTON (Reuters) - A rare and dangerous squid with eyes the size of dinner plates and scores of razor-sharp hooks to snag its prey has been caught by fishermen off Antarctica, New Zealand scientists said on Thursday.

Reminds me of my first wife.

The species, whose scientific name is mesonychoteuthis hamiltoni, was previously thought to have lurked at least half a mile down in the freezing waters near Antarctica, but the specimen found a fortnight ago was near the surface.

O'Shea said the discovery raised questions about what else was down deep in the ocean.

"We know so little about the marine environment in general. If animals like this are turning up, what's going to be at 3,000-meters (10,000-foot) depth. We don't know," O'Shea said.

There are two pictures of the super squid on today's news images page.

April 2, 2003

Cool article on National Geographic about rats in Alberta.  Apparently there aren't any.

Alberta's continuing success began with proactive measures to stop the advance of Norway rats before they entered the province.

To stop the encroaching rodent population, provincial authorities established a 600- by 70-kilometer (380- by 18-mile) rat control zone along the province's vulnerable eastern border. Still of key importance, the zone remains staffed by eight dedicated professionals.

"In that buffer zone it's best described as a search and destroy mission," said John B. Bourne, a man with the official job title of "Vertebrate Pest Specialist" with Alberta Agriculture's rat control program. "It's all agricultural farmland, and in this harsher climate the rats need to live as close to humans as they possibly can. Structures and food sources are what they seek out to survive."

Interesting, but I liked this part best.

The average rat can wriggle though a hole the size of a quarter, scale a brick wall, tread water for several days, gnaw through lead pipes and cinder blocks, survive a five-story fall, survive being flushed down a toilet—and even enter a building through the same route.

They can not go through a hole the size of a quarter, at least not more than their heads.  But they can go through rather tiny openings. It's quite a listing of skills though; something like a rodent Fear Factor.

February 11, 2003

Fascinating article about why humans hiccup.

The reason why humans hiccup has baffled scientists for hundreds of years, not least because it does not seem to serve any useful purpose.

A group of scientists led by Christian Straus, at Pitie-Saltpetriere Hospital in Paris believes the brain circuitry controlling gill ventilation has persisted into modern mammals, including humans.

The researchers point to many similarities between hiccupping and gill ventilation in animals such as tadpoles. Both are inhibited when the lungs are inflated, for example, and by high carbon dioxide levels in air or water.

February 5, 2003

My mom sent me a link to this cool 10x viewer, and having watched it a few times recently, I can give is a hearty recommendation. You load a java applet of the universe.  And it shows everything. I mean everything.

The viewer starts at the outer edge of the universe, at something like 10 to the 17th power, and then pulls in towards the earth a power at a time.  See the universe, then the Milky Way, then our solar system, etc, down to a leafy oak tree outside Florida State University.  And then it keeps going, magnifying the leaf down the cellular structure and beyond.  It's quite a nice little demonstration.

I have to wonder what the greatest scientific minds from centuries past would have thought if they could have somehow seen such a presentation, and accepted it as reality.  They'd need to see evidence from telescopes and microscopes and such, to believe, but assuming that were all possible, what would it have meant?

There were brilliant men in the 16th and 17th centuries, men whose discoveries and advancements provide much of the foundation for all of our current scientific knowledge.  But they had neither the theories nor the technology to have any inkling of just how large, and how small, objects could be.  Would the knowledge have blown their minds? Or so expanded their horizons that human history would be radically altered?

I think about this sort of thing whenever some theories of "aliens built the pyramids" or other such ancient astronaut stuff comes up, and something that we could easily do today, or even could have done hundreds of years ago, is said to be impossible for the people of 1000 or 2000 years ago do have done. I.E. build something really large, or lay down straight lines on a desert plain or whatever. People like to believe we're so smart now, and therefore weren't smart in the past, therefore it must have been magic, but since we don't believe in magic outside of religious settings, we attribute it to aliens.

It seems incredibly short-sighted to attribute something like "stacking heavy rocks" to alien intelligence; intelligence vastly greater than our own, being as they would have had to invent space flight capable of reaching other solar systems, which is something we've never done.  And while stacking up heavy rocks to make a pyramid or obelisk or whatever is impressive, how about they taught people to refine petroleum to make plastic?  Or taught them the proper use of the arch?  Or molecular biology?  Or modern medicine?  Hell, just the knowledge that germs cause disease would have set human civilization forward about 1500 years.  Any alien could have dropped that tidbit of knowledge while taking a smoke break.

So while the aliens were levitating around giant blocks to make the pyramids, they couldn't bother to mention how an arch worked?  The Egyptians never figured that out on their own, which is why their ancient temples have stone ceilings supported by very thick pillars so close to each other than you can reach any two with your outstretched arms.

How about leaving them a circuit board from a broken coffee maker?  We've got churches with bones from some martyr who was torn apart by lions 1500 years ago.  The holy stones in Mecca are probably meteorites, and have been in their current locations for over 1000 years. Are you going to tell me that if aliens were ever on earth they wouldn't have left something made from plastic, or some space age polymers, or carbon fibers?  And that people wouldn't have (rightly) protected and worshiped such an object ever since?

And just in case anyone is preparing to email, yes I know that archeologists have demonstrated how the pyramids were built with entirely human labor, and that all but the kookiest of fringe nuts have long since given trying to argue extraterrestrial Egyptian construction techniques.  It was just an example.

October 16, 2002

I saw a PBS special about this months ago, but don't think I posted about it here.  It's depressing; the permanent snows atop Mt. Kilamanjaro are melting steadily, and will likely be gone entirely in twenty years.  Pretty picture of the mountain top here. The article talks only about temperature rise, but that's not really the problem.

The white-capped mountain was thought to be just native legend for centuries. One early French explorer reported tales of it, and was thought to be a fool.  It wasn't until like 80 years later that a larger party explored the area the mountain was in, and saw it and returned with more detailed stories.  There is no mountain range around it; just the one peak sticking out of the earth amid hundreds of miles of flat grasslands, so it seemed impossible to the early explorers.  It's a dead volcano, of course.

There is a whole ecosystem just around the volcano/mountain, with a rain forest on the sides of the mountain, alone in the much drier surrounding savannah.  The problem is that people living there have cut down most of the trees and planted cash crops, rather than letting the natural trees and jungle grow.  The sugarcane and rice they grow consumes far more water and and ruins the run off, so there's not the return of water in the form of clouds and snow in the winter. It's not so much that the snow is melting faster due to higher temperatures, it's mostly that it's not being replenished as quickly as it always has been, before humans wrecked the natural balance.  The glacier atop the mountain is already far smaller than it was just a few decades ago, and with global warming it's likely going to continue to shrink for the foreseeable future.

September 26, 2002

Interesting article about New Orleans and its potential fate.  Most of the city is at least eight feet below sea level, and only stays dry due to various sea walls and dykes.  Plus it's sinking deeper, and ocean levels are probably rising from global warming.  I've heard in the past that a huge hurricane would probably flood most of the city, if it brought a substantial sea swell with it (as hurricanes usually do), but this article is more about the eventual un-sustainability of the city, and why it's sinking ever deeper.  More on this NPR site.  New Orleans is like a tourist trap open bar in an African country, and I think we'd be fine without it, personally.

September 22, 2002

The shark Messiah is born!  Well, hatched.  The article tells about eggs laid by a female shark that have hatched.  This isn't a big shock, other than for the fact that the female in question has never been in contact with any male sharks in her entire life.  Hence the "Jesus shark" comment.

It sounds like this type of shark has sex, gets fertilized eggs, and then lays them on the sea floor.  Sort of a combination between live birth, and the "drop eggs, hose with sperm" technique that most fish use. (Watch a nature show on salmon runs sometime, they live for underwater sperm cams.)

The article posits various explanations.

The mother could have both male and female reproductive characteristics and able to self-fertilize its eggs. But Sweet said this would be "an even more unusual occurrence."

The most likely scenario -- though thought to be very rare -- is that the shark somehow stimulated the eggs without sperm. This complex process, known as parthenogenesis, is the ability of unfertilized eggs to develop into embryos without sperm. It is very common in snails and water fleas, but becomes more unusual in higher vertebrates.

"It's kind of rare, but how much do we really know about the reproductive habits of bamboo sharks?" Sweet said. "It may be happening out in nature all the time, and we don't know it."

My thought was that perhaps the water in the aquarium is circulated between tanks, and they have male sharks in another area.  I don't suppose the odds are very good that some drop of sperm from one tank floated along and happened to hit the eggs in the other tank, but it's not much worse than their theories.

Bonus facts: The god or other famous character being spawned by a virgin birth is an ancient archetype in religions/myths.  Jesus was far from the first to allegedly originate in that fashion; that Biblical story was apparently adapted from pre-existing tales from other cultures, like most of the rest of the "historical" stuff in the Old and New Testaments.

Either that or all of the older myths from other cultures inspired Yahweh to cause those things to actually happen, so he could then inspire later scribes to write about them as facts.  What do you think?

May 20, 2002

A science news item that I found rather amazing. According to study, plane contrails, the cloud trails jets leave behind when they travel across the sky at very great altitudes, actually have a considerable effect on the temperature.  Apparently the contrails can provide a sort of seed to other clouds forming, and a few contrails can quickly grow into huge cirrus clouds that block a lot of sun from reaching the earth.  This actually lowers the temperature in the day, and lessens the temperature difference between day and night.  They were able to study this phenomena in greater detail recently, thanks to all flights being grounded in the US shortly after the events of 9/11.  I'd remark that every cloud has a silver lining, but that would be a bad joke on several levels.

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