Strange Japanese Giant Hornet

From: Japan, obviously.

Why you must fear it:
It's the size of your thumb and it can spray flesh-melting poison. We really wish we were making that up for, you know, dramatic effect because goddamn, what a terrible thing a three-inch acid-shooting hornet would be, you know? Oh, hey, did we mention it shoots it into your eyes? Or that the poison also has a pheromone cocktail in it that'll call every hornet in the hive to come over and sting you until you are no longer alive?

Think you can outrun it? It can fly 50 miles in a day. It'd be nice to say something reassuring at this point, like "Don't worry, they only live on top of really tall mountains where nobody wants to live," but no, they live all over the goddamned place, including outside Tokyo.

Forty people die like that every year, each of them horribly.

More scary:

Here's how the Japanese hornet treats other insects (and would presumably treat us, if we were small enough). An adult hornet will fly miles to find some squishy shit to feed to its children. Often times, it finds its food in, say, a hive inhabited by thousands of bees.

What to do? Well, Vespa japonica sprays the nest with some of the acid/pheromone and brings in reinforcements, usually consisting of 30 or so fellow hornets. They then descend upon the beehive like an unholy plague of hell-born death engines and proceed to make this world a scary goddamned place. This is maybe 30 wasps against 30,000 bees and the 30,000 bees do not stand a chance.

Behold the hornets systematically seize them with huge, wicked jaws and literally fucking cut them apart, one by one by one by fucking one. In three hours, there are piles of limbs and heads and just fucking bits of things that could possibly have been alive at one point, and the hornets have stormed the hive and flown away with all the bee's children. Who will then be eaten.

Strange fly: Bot Fly

From:
Most species found in Central and South America, some species found all over the world

Why you must fear it:
Oh boy. Ohhhhh boy. Okay, Bot flies.

There are dozens of varieties of Bot Fly, they're each highly adapted to target a specific animal, they have delightfully descriptive names like Horse Stomach Bot Fly, Sheep Nose Bot Fly and, hey, guess what. One of them is called Human Bot Fly.

They each have a different and elaborate reproductive cycle, all of which end with a fat, half-inch maggot embedded in living flesh. Feeding.

Horse Stomach Bots, for example, lay their eggs in grass. Horses eat the grass. And the eggs. Which hatch in the heat of the horse's mouth. Upon which they chew through the horse's tongue and burrow, through the horse, into its belly. Where they meet up and dig honeycombs into the horse's stomach. And get fat. When they're ready to be flies, they just let go and get pooped out of the system.

The Human Bot Fly lays its eggs on a horsefly or a mosquito, something that will attempt to land on a human. This carrier finds a human and lands on him or her. The eggs rub off onto the human, whose body heat hatches the eggs. The larvae drop onto the skin and burrow right the fuck in. Where they live. Under your skin. Eating.

Here's video of them removing one.

More scary:
Here is the best part. The larvae can grow anywhere in your body, it just depends on where the eggs wind up. Which could end up with you having a fat wormy thing in your tear duct. Or your brain. We know, because that's happened.

5-legged puppy not freak show

How much is that five-legged doggy in the window?

$4,000.

A kind-hearted North Carolina woman outbid a Coney Island freak show operator to buy a five-legged puppy last week, saving the 6-week-old dog from a life of humiliation.

Allyson Siegel, 45, of Charlotte, N.C., was stunned to learn that little Precious, a Chihuahua-terrier mix, was bound for a Brooklyn freak show, so she called the dog's owner, Calvin Owensby, and offered him more bones.


"I called Calvin and I said, 'I understand this is about money,' and I just said, 'How much,'" Siegel told the Daily News yesterday.

"She is beautiful, she's not a freak, she's a normal little puppy dog and she should be just like all the others," Siegel said.

Precious was born with a fifth leg protruding from her stomach, between her hind legs. The extra leg has six toes.

John Strong, the freak show proprietor in Coney Island, had already offered Owensby $3,000 and sent a $1,000 down payment, but Siegel convinced him to back out and sell her the puppy for $4,000.

"[Precious] wasn't a freak, she was just a dog born with five legs," Owensby told the Daily News. "My girlfriend decided she didn't want to see her in a freak show."

"Strong told us it was an amazing animal farm," Owensby said. "I don't think a dog should go to a freak show."

Strong invited Owensby to visit his "Freaks of Nature" museum on Surf Ave. to prove that he treats all the animals with respect - including the two-headed cow, Nosey Rosey, and the Siamese turtles, Pete and Repeat - but Owensby refused.

"I told him it was an amazing animal show with freaks and oddities," Strong told The News. "I told him the puppy was very rare, but someone offered him more money."

Siegel renamed the puppy Lilly and scheduled a surgery to remove the dog's extra appendage this month.

"I saw her and she's so adorable and I felt like I needed to be an advocate for her because she can't speak," she said. "It just broke my heart," she added. "I needed to see if there was something I could do."

Strong first called Owensby early this month and said he wanted to buy the dog. Owensby was laid off in December and hasn't found a new job. He was sad to part with the puppy, but needed the cash, he said.

When asked if $4,000 seemed like too high a price for a deformed dog, Siegel said: "I just knew I wanted to get the puppy and make sure she had a good life."

Blind man got his sight back after having a tooth implanted into his eye

Martin Jones a 42-year-old builder was left blind after an accident at work more than a decade ago. But a remarkable operation - which implants part of his tooth in his eye - has pierced his world of darkness. The procedure, performed fewer than 50 times before in Britain, uses the segment of tooth as a holder for a new lens grafted from his skin.

He lost his sight after a tub of white hot aluminium exploded in his face at work in a scrapyard. He suffered 37 per cent burns and had to wear a special body stocking for 23 hours a day. He also had his left eye removed. But surgeons were able to save the right eye, even though he was unable to see through it. At first specialists in Nottingham tried to save his sight using stem cells from a donor but the attempt failed.

It was only when a revolutionary new operation was pioneered at the Sussex Eye Clinic in Brighton that he was given a chance to have his sight back. During the procedure, a minute section of a patient's tooth is removed, reshaped and chiselled through to grip the man-made lens which is then placed in its core. It is implanted under an eyelid where it becomes covered in tissue.

The process requires a living tooth as an implant because doctors suggest there are chances the eye would reject a plastic equivalent. So a canine - which is the best option due to its shape and size - was taken out of Mr Jones' mouth. A patch of skin is then taken from the inside of the cheek and placed in the eye for two months, where it gradually acquires its own blood supply. The tooth segment is finally transplanted into the eye socket. The flap of grafted skin is then partially lifted from the eye and placed over its new sturdy base.

Mr Jones, from Rotherham, South Yorkshire, was able to see for the first time his wife Gill, 50, whom he had married four years ago.

Strange Frogs

Strange Malagasy Rainbow Frog

The Malagasy rainbow frog lives in the rocky dry forests of Madagascar's Isalo Massif, where it breeds in shallow temporary pools found in canyons. This species is well adapted to climbing in its rocky surroundings, and can even scale vertical surfaces! When threatened, this frog will inflate itself as a defence mechanism against predators.


Strange Transparent Frog

Hyalinobatrachium pellucidum, also called as glass or crystal frog because you can see through its transparent flesh (right down to its guts). This guy's not new, but he's definitely endangered, so the find is heartening for environmentalists.


Strange Atelopus Frog

The atelopus frog is known by many names such as the clown frog or the Costa Rican Variable Harlequin Toad. Whatever you call the frog, it is a neo-tropical toad that was once quite wide spread living throughout Costa Rica and Panama. The species is listed as critically endangered and is thought to be living primarily in Panama today. Photo: Paul Ouboter / Conservation International.

World's Smallest Frog

Generally speaking, higher altitude means larger animals. But the world's smallest known frog species lives high in the Andes Mountains of southern Peru, between 9,925 and 10,466 feet.

World's Largest Frog

The goliath frog or Conraua goliath is the largest extant anuran on Earth. It can grow up to 13 inches (33 cm) in length from snout to vent, and weighs up to 8 lb (3 kg). This animal has a relatively small habitat range, mainly in West Africa (near Gabon). The goliath frog can live up to 15 years. Goliath frogs eat scorpions, insects and smaller frogs. These frogs have acute hearing but no vocal sac.

Strange Red Mantella Frog

As suggested by the name, the Red Mantella has a orange/red dorsal surface. These frogs are small, reaching a size of 2.5 centimetres (1 in) in length. It is is a small, terrestrial frog native to Madagascar.

Strange Poison Dart Frog

Poison dart frog, like this sapphire-blue species, is the common name of a group of frogs in the family Dendrobatidae which are native to Central and South America. Unlike most frogs, species are active during the day, and often exhibit brightly-colored bodies. Although all dendrobatids are at least somewhat toxic in the wild, levels of toxicity vary considerably from one species to the next, and from one population to another. Many species are critically endangered. These amphibians are often called "dart frogs" due to indigenous Amerindians' use of their toxic secretions to poison the tips of blowdarts.

Strange Ornate Horned Frog

The ornate horned frog can grow up to six inches long and inhabits Uruguay, Brazil, and northern Argentina. While it may look like a lifeless pincushion, it's quick to lunge when lizards, small rodents, birds, or other frogs blunder by.

Strange Chile Darwin's frog

The Chile Darwin's frog was fairly regularly seen until around 1978, since when it seems to have disappeared, and the species my now be extinct. This species, which lives in the leaf litter on the forest floor, has an unusual method of parental care; the male takes the fertilised eggs from the nest into his vocal sac where they hatch into tadpoles after approximately eight days. When he starts to feel the newly hatched tadpoles wriggling, the male carries them to a stream where he expels the young. Here they complete metamorphosis.

Strange Vietnamese Mossy Frog

Theloderma corticale, or the Vietnamese mossy frog, is a species of frog in the Rhacophoridae family. It is found in Vietnam and possibly China. Its natural habitats are subtropical or tropical moist lowland forests, intermittent freshwater marches, and rocky areas. The common name of the mossy frog arises from the fact that its skin is a mottled green and black that resembles moss growing on rock, and forms an effective form of camouflage.

Some people have this frog as a pet. The price of this beautiful animal is about $45-$75 (each).

The Strange Forests that Drink—and Eat—Fog

On the rugged roadway approaching Fray Jorge National Park in north-central Chile, you are surrounded by desert. This area receives less than six inches of rain a year, and the dry terrain is more suggestive of the badlands of the American Southwest than of the lush landscapes of the Amazon. Yet as the road climbs, there is an improbable shift. Perched atop the coastal mountains here, some 1,500 to 2,000 feet above the level of the nearby Pacific Ocean, are patches of vibrant rain forest covering up to 30 acres apiece. Trees stretch as much as 100 feet into the sky, with ferns, mosses, and bromeliads adorning their canopies. Then comes a second twist: As you leave your car and follow a rising path from the shrub into the forest, it suddenly starts to rain. This is not rain from clouds in the sky above, but fog dripping from the tree canopy. These trees are so efficient at snatching moisture out of the air that the fog provides them with three-quarters of all the water they need.

Understanding these pocket rain forests and how they sustain themselves in the middle of a rugged desert has become the life’s work of a small cadre of scientists who are only now beginning to fully appreciate Fray Jorge’s third and deepest surprise: The trees that grow here do more than just drink the fog. They eat it too.

Fray Jorge lies at the north end of a vast rain forest belt that stretches southward some 600 miles to the tip of Chile. In the more southerly regions of this zone, the forest is wetter, thicker, and more contiguous, but it still depends on fog to survive dry summer conditions. Kathleen C. Weathers, an ecosystem scientist at the Cary Institute of Ecosystem Studies in Millbrook, New York, has been studying the effects of fog on forest ecosystems for 25 years, and she still cannot quite believe how it works. “One step inside a fog forest and it’s clear that you’ve entered a remarkable ecosystem,” she says. “The ways in which trees, leaves, mosses, and bromeliads have adapted to harvest tiny droplets of water that hang in the atmosphere is unparalleled.”

Every living thing here does its part. Mosses and lichens absorb moisture from the air like sponges. Tree leaves are oriented to provide the broadest surface to the incoming fog rather than to the sun. Dead leaves collect in the crooks of branches, creating little pockets of soil in which ferns, mosses, and bromeliads grow. Trees sprout roots that extend into these masses of lodgers to extract their share of the moisture. Birds, beetles, and other creatures in search of water migrate into the forests during the dry summers. Birds and bats then spread the seeds and pollen of these remarkable plants.

Even more marvelous is the way the trees at Fray Jorge receive nutrients as well as water from the fog. Weathers and her colleagues have discovered that the fog, originating offshore from some of the richest ocean waters on the planet, arrives bearing essential nitrogen and other fertilizing nutrients such as phosphorus, calcium, and sulfur. Ajit Subramaniam, an oceanographer at the Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory at Columbia University, says the droplets in the fog contain a high concentration of these nutrients and transport that life-supporting material high up into the mountains. “Most nutrients flow from land to ocean, not ocean to land, especially in these amounts. It’s almost counterintuitive,” Subramaniam says.

Without the fog from the ocean, Weathers and her colleagues suggest, the rain forest of Fray Jorge might starve to death.

Despite the often lush appearance of the terrain, the soil in a rain forest is typically nutrient-poor compared with, say, the soil of the American Midwest, which is rich enough to support most of our farming. The enormous number of plants crammed together in a rain forest compete aggressively for soil nutrients, and the abundant moisture washes out the rest. This is one reason why the fogborne nutrients, particularly nitrogen, are so important to Chile’s pocket rain forests.

Weathers first came to Chile in the late 1980s and worked for more than 10 years in the southern extreme of the temperate rain forest belt, in Punta Arenas, Torres del Paine National Park, and Chiloé Island. More recently she joined a group of Chilean collaborators at northerly Fray Jorge because she wanted to work in a forest where the climate is much drier, and hence the influence of the fog is more clearly separated from that of the rain. “The place to understand how fog affects the maintenance of forest is not where there is six meters [20 feet] of rain a year in addition to fog,” she says.

These fogs are a local result of enormous global processes, not all of which are completely understood. Weathers has brought together scientists from different disciplines to decipher this natural system. Low-lying coastal regions like Chile’s are subject to advection fog, where warm ocean air crosses a band of cold water before reaching land. The band of cold water off Chile’s coast is produced by the Humboldt Current, a slow northerly ocean flow that runs more than 3,000 miles along the Pacific coast of South America, from southern Chile all the way to the equator. The warm air pulls moisture off the cool ocean, and onshore winds at night help drive the resulting fog inland.

The Humboldt Current runs north with a bend to the west. This moves water away from the coast, causing upwellings that bring cold, nutrient-rich water from the ocean floor to the surface, where it feeds innumerable microorganisms and algae. These waters are home to one of the most productive marine ecosystems on earth. But the recent discovery that they share their nutrients with the land was unexpected. Weathers believes that “winds and waves kick surface scum high into the air, where it can be incorporated into the fog that moves inland.” Fog water can hold concentrations of nutrients or pollution 5 to 300 times greater than what rain can carry, she says.

Human pollutants—not natural nutrients—are what first set scientists looking at the chemistry of fog, following fatal smog clouds that settled over Donora, Pennsylvania, in 1948 and over London in 1952. In the 1980s fog grabbed attention again in the United States when researchers found it was contributing to the damage caused by acid rain. Weathers and other scientists determined that clouds and fog were major carriers of acid and other pollutants, transporting them even to remote places such as the White Mountains of New Hampshire and Great Smoky Mountains National Park. Acidity in all forms of moisture was causing stunted growth and injury to forests, researchers realized. “Although the clouds did not always deliver a huge amount of water relative to rain, they had a huge amount of pollution,” Weathers says. Fog is essentially a ground-level cloud, so it can transfer pollutants to vegetation without the need for rain.

Scientists and policymakers then needed to know how the acidity of the polluted clouds and rain compared with that found in a pristine environment. Lacking detailed historical records of what substances were typically found in American rainwater prior to industrialization, researchers decided to measure the next-best thing: unpolluted rain from the most remote regions of the world. This is what prompted Weathers to assemble a full set of fog-sampling equipment and head for southern Chile, a location that had the cleanest rain measured anywhere. She and her colleagues learned that even there the fog was acidic, although not nearly as acidic as it then was in the eastern United States. The fog also contained much more nitrogen than expected. Weathers wondered where it came from, sparking a search that eventually uncovered the critical moisture and nutrient roles of the fog originating over the Humboldt Current.

Forest ecologist Juan Armesto of the Universidad Católica de Chile, who collaborates with Weathers, says that the country’s modern coastal rain forest represents small fragments of what must have once been a contiguous forest, connected to the Amazon Basin, that changed gradually over the past 5 million to 25 million years due to the colossal upheaval that created the Andes Mountains. When the Andes were not yet fully uplifted, this forest extended unbroken from east to west, as documented by many plant and animal species that have close relatives on both sides of the mountain range. Over time, trees in Chile evolved with special branching systems to capture fog because of the need to grab sustenance out of the air. “If you are there to capture fog, height is not as important as branching,” Armesto says.

An analogue to the Chilean rain forests exists in the United States. The coast near Fray Jorge basks in a mild, Mediterranean-type climate similar to that of the famous coastal redwood forests of California, an area with long summer droughts. Despite being in different hemispheres and featuring very different species, these two forest systems have an important commonality: They both exist along coastal mountains that front highly productive marine systems—the Humboldt and California currents.

When major banks of fog invade these forests, tree canopies intercept the wind-driven water droplets via branches and leaves or clusters of needles that extend into the air. In most trees, sap flows from the roots, up through the trunk to the branches and leaves. But studies in California’s coastal redwood forests show that sap flow sometimes runs in reverse during fog events, with captured water moving from the atmosphere into the leaves and then down through the branches—something that may be happening in Chile as well. Fog may also help sustain trees simply by wetting the leaves, which prevents the release of interior moisture into the air.

Tracking the movement of nitrogen is much harder, but Armesto and Weathers believe that the nitrogen transported by fog is also critical to the survival of Chile’s coastal rain forests. “These forests recycle a lot of their nutrients from the leaf litter, and they also keep their leaves for several years rather than lose them each fall,” Armesto says. “Such processes help retain a large amount of the nutrients the forest takes in, but the main source of fresh nutrients is the fog.”

Researchers are still trying to quantify the percentages of nitrogen obtained from fog versus other sources, such as rain. But Weathers believes fog delivers significant quantities of nitrogen to Chile’s coastal forests, where growth is limited by a lack of this critical nutrient.

The fog forests are sensitive measures of every aspect of the environment, including atmospheric movements, ocean currents, pollutants, and nutrients. Climate change therefore poses special dangers to Fray Jorge and other fog forests around the world. Alterations in air and sea temperatures could lower fog frequency, for instance. It could also elevate the fog base, moving the life-giving fog higher than the mountains the thirsty forests cling to.

In California, “Records are limited, but from what we have for the last 50 years, rainfall has become more variable,” says Todd Dawson, a professor of integrative biology at the University of California at Berkeley. “The length of the ‘fog day’ has decreased from greater than 14 hours to about 11 hours.” According to Dawson, “Changes in the frequency and amount of fog could have important impacts, not so much to the mature trees but to young trees and seedlings. And that could have profound consequences for new generations of forest.”

In Chile’s temperate rain forest, Armesto sees similar vulnerabilities. Rising temperatures could influence Chile’s inversion layer, a warm air mass that rides over the fog and contains it. It could also modify coastal upwellings and the nutrients they deliver. As a result, climate change could affect the frequency of foggy days or alter the elevation of the fog zone. “Warming should mean more fog, but that doesn’t mean more fog will be delivered to the forest,” Armesto says.

For all these reasons, fog forests are good places to watch for warning signs. “The fog forests are living on the edge and are thus harbingers of major environmental changes,” Weathers says. But they are also uniquely adaptive environments. Going back 250 years, studies of the tree rings in Chilean fog forests reveal that despite some extremely dry periods produced by El Niño cycles, the rain forests continued to produce new plants. Redwood forests have weathered these same cycles as well. Could the robustness in the face of drought displayed at Fray Jorge and elsewhere help these forests survive the next set of climatic shifts?

Just as fog forests are places to understand the sensitivity of natural systems, they are also places to look in wonder at how such systems interact and adapt. “There is a connection here between the atmosphere, the moisture it holds, and the organisms that depend upon these things that you can see, feel, and smell, which is rarely presented so graphically in nature,” Weathers says.

That is perhaps the final twist at Fray Jorge: It takes a journey into this foggy forest to perceive nature’s intricacies with true clarity.

Invisibility Cloak

A paper published in the March 2009 issue of SIAM Review, "Cloaking Devices, Electromagnetic Wormholes, and Transformation Optics," presents an overview of the theoretical developments in cloaking from a mathematical perspective.

One method involves light waves bending around a region or object and emerging on the other side as if the waves had passed through empty space, creating an "invisible" region which is cloaked. For this to happen, however, the object or region has to be concealed using a cloaking device, which must be undetectable to electromagnetic waves. Manmade devices called metamaterials use structures having cellular architectures designed to create combinations of material parameters not available in nature.

Mathematics is essential in designing the parameters needed to create metamaterials and to show that the material ensures invisibility. The mathematics comes primarily from the field of partial differential equations, in particular from the study of equations for electromagnetic waves described by the Scottish mathematician and physicist James Maxwell in the 1860s.

One of the "wrinkles" in the mathematical model of cloaking is that the transformations that define the required material parameters have singularities, that is, points at which the transformations fail to exist or fail to have properties such as smoothness or boundness that are required to demonstrate cloaking. However, the singularities are removable; that is, the transformations can be redefined over the singularities to obtain the desired results.

The authors of the paper describe this as "blowing up a point." They also show that if there are singularities along a line segment, it is possible to "blow up a line segment" to generate a "wormhole." (This is a design for an optical device inspired by, but distinct from the notion of a wormhole appearing in the field of gravitational physics.) The cloaking version of a wormhole allows for an invisible tunnel between two points in space through which electromagnetic waves can be transmitted.

Some possible applications for cloaking via electromagnetic wormholes include the creation of invisible fiber optic cables, for example for security devices, and scopes for MRI-assisted medical procedures for which metal tools would otherwise interfere with the magnetic resonance images. The invisible optical fibers could even make three-dimensional television screens possible in the distant future. The effectiveness and implementation of cloaking devices in practice, however, are dependent on future developments in the design, investigation, and production of metamaterials. The "muggle" world will have to wait on further scientific research before Harry Potter's invisibility cloak can become a reality.

take on the immune system and blood type of her organ donor

Demi-Lee Brennan, 15, (centre) with her sister Stacey and her mother, Kerrie Mills, is the first patient to take on the immune system and blood type of her organ donor.

SHE'S got purple highlights in her hair and bright blue fingernails, but to doctors at the Children's Hospital at Westmead, Demi-Lee Brennan is a one in 6 billion miracle.

The 15-year-old liver transplant patient has defied science by being the first person in the world to take on the immune system and blood type of her donor, negating the need for anti-rejection drugs for the rest of her life. The phenomenon, which has been documented in the New England Journal of Medicine, has amazed doctors, who say they have no idea how it occurred.

Demi-Lee, of Gerroa on the South Coast, was nine when she contracted a virus that destroyed her liver. She was given less than 48 hours to live until a donated liver from a 12-year-old boy became available.

"She's my little hero," her mother, Kerrie Mills, said yesterday.

"When she was admitted to intensive care, she was very sick, and yellow and had to be put on a ventilator. We were told we were losing her."

With only hours to spare, Demi-Lee underwent a 10-hour operation and was started on an extensive cocktail of immunosuppressant drugs, the standard fare for all transplant patients to ensure their bodies do not reject the donated organ. Nine months later, when her condition worsened and she was re-admitted to the hospital, doctors were shocked to find her blood type had changed.

The head of haematology, Julie Curtin, said she was stunned when she first realised Demi-Lee was now O-positive, rather than O-negative.

"I was convinced we had made a mistake, so we tested it again and it came up the same. Then we tested her parents and they were both O-negative, so it was confirmed that Demi absolutely had to have been O-negative."

Dr Curtin said Demi-Lee's blood began to break down, requiring more medications.

"We then realised it was her own residual cells which were causing the problem and we needed to get rid of them. And that's when we knew we had to convince the doctors that Demi's immunosuppressant drug regime should be stopped, rather than increased."

But pediatric nephrologist, Stephen Alexander, says he wasn't easily convinced. "We didn't believe this at first. We thought it was too strange to be true," Dr Alexander said. "Normally the body's own immune system rejects any cells that are transplanted … but for some reason the cells that came from the donor's liver seemed to survive better than Demi-Lee's own cells. It has huge implications for the future of organ transplants."

Demi-Lee, who has now been off all immunosuppressants for three years, is playing sport and working towards her school certificate. "I feel quite normal, it's almost like it never happened," she said yesterday. "I can't thank the donor's family enough, and the doctors, for giving me this second chance at life."

Demi-Lee has her sights on starring on Australian Idol. "That's partly why I've dyed my hair black. I'm a rock singer."

Sorce: theage.com.au

Sleepwalking man draws masterpieces

Meet Lee Hadwin By day a nurse, at period he's a \"sleepwalking artist\" who produces strange and fantastical artworks which he has no recollection of drawing when he wakes up the next morning.

Dubbed 'Kipasso', he says he is utterly mystified by his nocturnal talent, while at the daytime he shows no interest or ability in art whatsoever. Major galleries have been asking for examples of his work, which they hope to market on its artistic merit as well as its novelty value.

Hadwin first started sleepwalking when he was four eld old, but his parents believed it was a normal childhood phase. When he was in his teens, he began producing art impact while asleep, at first on his bedroom walls. Once, staying over at a friend's house, he awninged the kitchen walls with doodles in his sleep, an embarrassing discovery at breakfast time the next day. In his late teens and early 20s, the intensity of his sleepwalking increased and Hadwin would wake to encounter everything in the vicinity: tableclothes, newspapers, clothes and walls, awninged in artwork.

Hoping to harness the strange ability, he started leaving artists' materials discover when he went to bed and, sure enough, when he awoke he says he would encounter full-blown pictures beside him. Now, he leaves his bag prepared for nocturnal wanderings, with sketchbooks and charcoal pencils scattered around the house, specially under the stairs, a favorite venue.

Strange Sleepwalking Dog

Apparently, sleepwalking is not exclusive to humans. Meet Bizkit (Strange dog), a cute dog who suffers from somnambulism and became an instant viral hit on the web.

Honduras' Rain of Fishes

The Rain of Fish is common in Honduran Folklore. It occurs in the Departamento de Yoro, between the months of May and July. Witnesses of this phenomenon state that it begins with a dark cloud in the sky followed by lightning, thunder, strong winds and heavy rain for 2 to 3 hours. Once the rain has stopped, hundreds of living fish are found on the ground. People take the fish home to cook and eat them. Since 1998 a festival known as "Festival de la Lluvia de Peces" (Rain of Fish Festival) is celebrated every year in the city of Yoro, Departamento de Yoro, Honduras.

Dog Experiment - Living without a body!

Sergei Bruyukhonenko: The Dog Decapitator


Way before Vladimir Demikhov, Bruyukhonenko's mad experiments on dogs led to the development of open-heart procedures. He developed a crude machine called the autojektor (a heart and lung machine). By using this primitive machine, Bryukhonenko kept the heads of severed dogs alive. In 1928, he displayed one of the heads in front of an audience. To prove it was real, he banged a hammer on the table. The head flinched. When a light was shone in its eyes, the eyes blinked. And when it was fed a piece of cheese, the remnants promptly popped out of the esophageal tube, much to the displeasure of disgusted viewers.

People with Strange Medical Conditions

The Woman Who has 200 Orgasms every day

UK's Sarah Carmen, 24, is a 200-a-day orgasm girl who gets good, good, GOOD vibrations from almost anything. She suffers from Permanent Sexual Arousal Syndrome (PSAS), which increases blood flow to the sex organs. "Sometimes I have so much sex to try to calm myself down I get bored of it. And men I sleep with don't seem to make as much effort because I climax so easily."

She believes her condition was brought on by the pills. "Within a few weeks I just began to get more and more aroused more and more of the time and I just kept having endless orgasms. It started off in bed where sex sessions would last for hours and my boyfriend would be stunned at how many times I would orgasm. Then it would happen after sex. I'd be thinking about what we'd done in bed and I'd start feeling a bit flushed, then I'd become aroused and climax. In six months I was having 150 orgasms a day—and it has been as many as 200."

She and her boyfriend split— and new partners struggle to keep up with her sex demands. "Often, I'll want to wear myself out by having as many orgasms as I can so they stop and I can get some peace," she said.



The Man Who Can't Get Fat

Mr Perry, 59, can eat whatever he likes - including unlimited pies, burgers and desserts - and never get fat. He cannot put on weight because of a condition called lipodystrophy that makes his body rapidly burn fat.

He used to be a chubby child, but at age 12 the fat dropped off "almost over night". He initially tried to eat more to gain weight, but it had no effect. Mr Perry, of Ilford in Essex, endured a decade of tests before the illness was diagnosed. It finally emerged that his body produces six times the normal level of insulin. Doctors have admitted that the condition would be a "slimmer's dream".








The Man Who Doesn't Feel Cold
Dutchman Wim Hof, also known as the Iceman, is the man that swam under ice, and stood in bins filled with ice. He climbed the Mt. Blanc in shorts in the icy cold, harvested world records and always stands for new challenges.

Scientists can't really explain it, but the 48-year-old Dutchman is able to withstand, and even thrive, in temperatures that could be fatal to the average person.



The Boy Who Couldn’t Sleep: stayed awake 24 hours a day for years

Rhett Lamb is often cranky like any other 3-year-old toddler, but there’s one thing that makes him completely different: he has a rare medical condition in which he can’t sleep a wink.

Rhett is awake nearly 24 hours a day, and his condition has baffled his parents and doctors for years. They took clock shifts watching his every sleep-deprived mood to determine what ailed the young boy.

After a number of conflicting opinions, Shannon and David Lamb finally learned what was wrong with their child: Doctors diagnosed Rhett with an extremely rare condition called chiari malformation.

"The brain literally is squeezed into the spinal column. What happens is you get compression, squeezing, strangulating of the brain stem, which has all the vital functions that control sleep, speech, our cranial nerves, our circulatory system, even our breathing system," Savard said.


The Girl Who is Allergic to Water
Teenager Ashleigh Morris can't go swimming, soak in a hot bath or enjoy a shower after a stressful day's work - she's allergic to water. Even sweating brings the 19-year-old out in a painful rash.

Ashleigh, from Melbourne, Australia, is allergic to water of any temperature, a condition she's lived with since she was 14. She suffers from an extremely rare skin disorder called Aquagenic Urticaria - so unusual that only a handful of cases are documented worldwide.
























The Woman Who Can’t Forget
That's the story of AJ, an extraordinary 40-year-old married woman who remembers everything.

McGaugh and fellow UCI researchers Larry Cahill and Elizabeth Parker have been studying the extraordinary case of a person who has "nonstop, uncontrollable and automatic" memory of her personal history and countless public events. If you randomly pick a date from the past 25 years and ask her about it, she’ll usually provide elaborate, verifiable details about what happened to her that day and if there were any significant news events on topics that interested her. She usually also recalls what day of the week it was and what the weather was like.

The 40-year-old woman, who was given the code name AJ to protect her privacy, is so unusual that UCI coined a name for her condition in a recent issue of the journal Neurocase: hyperthymestic syndrome.




The Girl Who Eats Only Tic Tacs
Meet Natalie Cooper, a 17-year-old teenager who has a mystery illness that makes her sick every time she eats anything. Well, almost anything. She can eat one thing that doesn’t make her sick: Tic tac mint!

For reasons that doctors are unable to explain, Tic tacs are the only thing she can stomach, meaning she has to get the rest of her sustenance from a specially formulated feed through a tube.













The Musician Who Can't Stop Hiccupping

Chris Sands, 24, from Lincoln, hiccups as often as every two seconds - and sometimes even when he is asleep. He has tried a variety of cures, including hypnosis and yoga, but nothing has worked. Mr Sands thinks his problem stems from an acid reflux condition caused by a damaged valve in his stomach. "If the acid levels are severe enough they are going to do keyhole surgery and grab part of my stomach and wrap it around the valve to tighten it," he said.

Mr Sands, who is a backing singer in the group Ebullient, said the condition has hampered his career as he has only been able to perform four times. In the next couple of weeks --as of the day of the report--, doctors at Nottingham's Queen's Medical Centre will put a tube into his stomach to monitor acid levels and decide if keyhole surgery is possible.



The Girl That Collapses Every Time She Laughs


Kay Underwood, 20, has cataplexy, which means that almost any sort of strong emotion triggers a dramatic weakening of her muscles. Exhilaration, anger, fear, surprise, awe and even embarrassment can also cause sufferers to suddenly collapse on the spot.

Kay, of Barrow-upon-Soar, Leicestershire (UK), who was diagnosed with the condition five years ago, once collapsed more than 40 times in a single day. She said: "People find it very odd when it happens, and it isn't always easy to cope with strangers' reactions. "

Like most cataplexy sufferers, Ms Underwood is also battling narcolepsy - a condition that makes her drop off to sleep without warning. Narcolepsy affects around 30,000 people in the UK and about 70 per cent of them also have cataplexy.



The Woman Who is Allergic to Modern Technology

For most people talking on a mobile phone, cooking dinner in the microwave or driving in a car is simply part of modern living in 21st century Britain. But completing any such tasks is impossible for Debbie Bird - because she is allergic to Cell Phones and Microwaves.

The 39-year-old is so sensitive to the electromagnetic field (emf) or 'smog' created by computers, mobile phones, microwave ovens and even some cars, that she develops a painful skin rash and her eyelids swell to three times their size if she goes near them. As a consequence, Mrs Bird, a health spa manager, has transformed her home into an EMF-free zone to try and stay healthy. 'I can no longer do things that I used to take for granted,' Mrs Bird said. "My day-to-day life has been seriously affected by EMF".

Metal Injections Make A Strannge Spider Silk

Scientists have managed to make extra-strength spider silk—already notable for having a tensile strength higher than many alloys of steel, even though its comprised entirely of proteins [Ars Technica]—by incorporating small amounts of metal into it. A research team at the Max Planck Institute was inspired by studies showing traces of metals in the toughest parts of some insect body parts. The jaws of leaf-cutter ants and locusts, for example, both contain high levels of zinc, making them particularly stiff and hard [Reuters]. The researchers wanted to try adding metals into existing biological materials, and decided to start with the Araneus spider.

The researchers, whose work is published in Science, used atomic-layer deposition to pulse zinc, titanium, and aluminum ions into spider silk [Technology Review]. The process is used normally to apply a thin film layer of one material onto another, but the researchers found that the metal ions had actually penetrated and reacted with the protein structure of the silk, yielding a material significantly stronger than natural spider silk, though they don’t quite understand how the integration occurred. One of the researchers, Mato Knez, attributes the strengthening effect to the metal’s displacement of hydrogen bonds within the silk’s protein structure…. The team were also able to show that the outer metal coating of the silk was of minor importance in the improvement of strength, and therefore that the phenomena was caused by the metals imbedded in the protein fibres [Chemistry World].

The technique may be useful for manufacturing super-tough textiles and high-tech medical materials, including artificial bones and tendons. “It could make very strong thread for surgical operations” [Reuters], said another of the researchers, Seung-Mo Lee.

10 Most Disturbing Bugs

The Lymantrid moth (Calliteara pudibunda) is widespread in Danish beech (Fagus sylvatica) forests. The species has one generation in Denmark, with the dull grey moth flying during June. Each female can lay 300-400 eggs which she normally does very near the place where she emerged from the pupae. The small caterpillar is very hairy and can easily be transported by the wind. In late autumn the caterpillar is fully grown, is about 5 cm long and is very beautifully coloured. Pupation takes place among leaves on the ground where a silken cocoon is made.






The Idolomantis Diabolica is sometimes known as the "King of all mantids" for the obvious reason: it's beauty, size and rarity, is one of the largest species of praying mantis that mimic flowers.





Damselfly is the common name for any of the predaceous insects comprising the suborder Zygoptera of the order Odonata, characterized by an elongated body, large multifaceted eyes that are widely separated, and two pairs of strong transparent wings, which at rest typically are held folded together above the abdomen or held slightly open above the abdomen. They commonly fly in tandem during mating. For humans, they are a popular subject of art and culture in various nations, and their grace, often striking colors, and unique mating behaviors add to the beauty of nature.





Also known as the "Robin Moth", Cecropia moths are the largest moth found in North America, often achieving a wingspan of six inches. They range across the entire eastern two-thirds of the continent to the Rocky Mountain range. They are a member of the Saturniidae family, or giant silk moths. Females with a wingspan of 130 mm or more have been documented. The larvae of these moths are most commonly found on Maple trees, but they have been known to feed on Wild Cherry and Birch trees among many others.





The Calleta Silkmoth (Eupackardia calleta) is a moth of the Saturniidae family. Found in Mexico, Guatemala and the southernmost part of the United States, it’s the only species in the Eupackardia genus. The larvae mainly feed on Fraxinus species, Leucophyllum frutescens, Sapium biloculare and Fouquieria splendens.




The Hymenopus coronatu, aka Orchid mantis, is a variety of flower mantis usually found in Malaysia and Indonesia. Doesn’t the mantis pictured look just like an orchid? They hide in the flowers they resemble, waiting for other delicious insects to alight.



A species of rhinoceros beetle that lives in South America, the Hercoles Beetle can grow to over 6 inches in length (counting its horns), but its claim to fame is its strength: it can support 850 times its own weight on its shell! This beetles eats only vegetation and is not aggressive, except to other Hercules beetles, when males fight each other over females.



Perhaps we would never --or rarely-- have heard of such a creature if it was not because of the tales and photos the United States Servicemen in the Persian Gulf War and afterwards the Iraq War carried back home. It was said that a giant camel spider crawled into the sleeping bag of a soldier, biting the man while he was asleep. Fortunately, the giant desert camel spiders native to Iraq aren't venomous. It uses its claws to catch its prey, which is never bigger than the arachnid itself. They are also known for being fast. Giant Camel Spiders have been known to run around 10 MPH. This creature real name is Arachnid Solifugae. "Solifugae" means, in Latin, "flee from the sun".

Belostomatidae is a family of insects better known as "giant water bugs" or "toe-biters." Most species in the Belostomatidae family are relatively large and nearly reaching the dimensions) of some of the larger beetles in the world. All of them are fierce predators which stalk, capture and feed on aquatic crustaceans, fish and amphibians. They often lie motionless at the bottom of a body of water, attached to various objects, where they wait for prey to come near. They then strike, injecting a powerful digestive saliva and suck out the liquefied remains. Yum! Their bite is considered one of the most painful that can be inflicted by any insect. The saliva liquefies muscle tissue. In rare instances, their bite can do permanent damage to humans. So don't get drunk and pass out with your face near one of these guys. Occasionally when encountered by a larger predator, such as a human, they have been known to "play dead" and emit a fluid from their anus to make them look less appetizing.




The Giant Leopard Moth or Eyed Tiger Moth (Hypercompe scribonia) has a distinct pattern of black rings, reminiscent to those found in its namesake the leopard. The moth’s unmistakable colorings is aposematic, meaning that they are actually "advertising" the bug’s unpalatability to potential predators.

“The Cloned Child is Coming”: Doctor Claims He’s On the Verge

A U.S. fertility doctor has claimed that he can clone human embryos—and plant them inside the wombs of women who want cloned babies.

So far, none of his implantations have led to successful pregnancies, but Panayiotis Zavos is certain that the first cloned baby is not far off. Britain’s The Independent, a less-than-the-most-reliable source for science news, reports that Zavos can be seen here creating human embryos before injecting them into the the womb.

Zavos says he has transferred 11 of a total of 14 cloned embryos to the wombs of female patients, and that this is only the “first chapter” in his research—which he is confident will eventually produce successful results.

“I may not be the one that does it, but the cloned child is coming. There is absolutely no way that it will not happen,” Zavos told The Independent. He isn’t sure whether the research can be expedited to produce a cloned baby within a year or two. But then again, rushing it would emphasize the wrong priority: “We’re not really under pressure to deliver a cloned baby to this world. What we are under pressure to do is to deliver a cloned baby that is a healthy one.”

His patients include three married couples and a single woman coming from the U.K., the U.S, and a Middle Eastern country. Zavos, a naturalized American who has fertility clinics in Kentucky and Cyprus, is said to have carried out the work in a secret lab most likely in the Middle East, where there is no cloning ban. Perhaps those bans exist for a reason?

Update: Not surprisingly, the science community has not taken Zavos’s claims at face value. Here is The Guardian’s (skeptical) take on the situation.

Transparent Aluminum: Glass-Like See-Through Metal

Stronger than glass, various military and commercial applications for this remarkable material are already being tested. What was once used in the science-fiction Star Trek movies, see-through aluminum is now something that - through test mixing with rubies, sapphires and more - is now being tried out in all kinds of ways to create transparency where strength is also required.
For now, it is used in static-free transparent aluminum wrapping for computer parts and other electronics. It is also being tested in otherwise-conventional see-through soda cans and military shielding for vehicles where windows once were. At over ten dollars per square inch, however, it is still not cheap enough for mainstream everyday use - but may be someday soon.

The Red of Autumn’s Leaves May Be a Stop Sign for Pests

In the latest development in the ongoing debate about why some leaves turn bright red in the fall, a new study suggests that the color is a signal to insect pests to stay away. Harvard biologist Marco Archetti sought to prove the theory, first put forth in 2001 by the late evolutionary biologist William Hamilton, that the red pigments, or anthocyanins, serve as a plant’s chemical defense. Archetti studied aphids’ survival rates in wild apple trees, which turn more red, compared with farmed trees, which produce more green and yellow leaves. He found that aphids don’t show up as frequently on apple trees that turn red in the fall [ScienceNews]. He also reports in the study, published in Proceedings of the Royal Society B, that once spring came, young aphids who had fed on red trees in the fall were less likely to grow to maturity than aphids placed in the green or yellow trees.

Archetti chose aphids for the study because fall is their mating season: They leave their summer plants to find a good tree for mating and egg laying. Aphids can damage trees in two ways, especially when the new generation hatches in the spring. The insects steal the sap and also spread diseases with their piercing mouthparts that end up as entomological dirty needles. So trees would do well to dodge aphids [ScienceNews]. To test whether the red signals a threat to the insects, Archetti placed nesting aphids in both red- and green-leaved apple trees in the fall of 2007, and found that the next spring, 60 percent of those in green trees had survived, compared with 29 percent in red trees. The reason behind this disparity is unclear, but Archetti’s and other studies suggest that the red leaves either have toxic chemical defenses or hold fewer nutrients for young aphids [ScienceNow Daily News].

Not everyone buys Archetti’s answer to the long-debated question. Environmental scientist David Wilkinson believes that leaves turn red for a different reason: “I think the most likely explanation is that these [anthocyanins] are effectively sunscreens that allow the photosynthesis to continue as the machinery of photosynthesis is broken apart in the autumn” [BBC], he says, while plant geneticist Andrew Flavell thinks that a genetic link between leaf color and fruit taste may be the cause. Florida scientist David Lee said, “The nice thing about this article is that it collects and reports important new data on the phenomenon.” … But he still questions some of the interpretations. And says the paper hasn’t wooed him away from his contention that anthocyanins protect leaf chemistry from light damage at cool temperatures [ScienceNews].

Clearly, the debate is far from over, but researchers all agree that trees must have a really good reason for producing the red pigment. The pigments that produce yellow and orange leaves in the fall are present year-round, and help protect chlorophyll, the molecule at the heart of photosynthesis, from sunlight damage; when chlorophyll is broken down in the autumn those yellows and oranges become visible. In contrast, the red anthocyanins are produced only in the fall. It is a costly job of molecule building for the plant and an enigma to scientists, since the leaves will at that point soon be dropped entirely [BBC News].