Squid vs. Owlfish

A squid captures an owlfish in this amazing video, captured by the Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute using a remotely operated vehicle. 

The fish seen in the video is also known as a smelt, species Bathylagus, and is about 10 to 12 inches (25 to 30 centimeters) long. The squid, a Gonatus onyx, is about 4 to 5 inches (10 to 12 cm) long

The "Diarrhea Bot" and 4 other weird inventions

...the EcoBot III, designed by the Bristol Robotics Laboratory in the U.K., and it's made to run on biofuels -- that there's fancy-boy college-talk for "food." After imbibing a liquid that consists of yeast, salt, and minerals, the EcoBot III can function for 24 hours, powering itself without any other energy sources. But as with everything else that eats to survive, what goes in must come out the other side, so once a day its handlers have to slide it over to its litter box and watch it take a shit.

...Due to its liquid diet, one researcher fittingly refers to the EcoBot III as the "diarrhea bot." Because what comes out of its putrid robo-butthole more closely resembles the aftermath of chasing a case of Miller Lite with Fourth Meal..

Read it all at Cracked.com

Albino Sea Turtle

Doesn't this real-life photo remind you of an M.C. Escher drawing?

h/t Animal Planet

Lt. Uhura: NASA recruiter

Well, if she's what's waiting in outer space, sign me up!

From the late 1970's until the late 1980's, NASA employed Nichelle Nichols to recruit new astronaut candidates. Many of her new recruits were women or members of racial and ethnic minorities, including Guion Bluford (the first African-American astronaut), Sally Ride (the first female American astronaut), Judith Resnik (one of the original set of female astronauts, who perished during the launch of the Challenger on January 28, 1986), and Ronald McNair (the second African-American astronaut, and another victim of the Challenger accident).

Plus, it's a well-known story, but worth repeating - how Martin Luther King convinced Nichelle Nichols to stay on Star Trek

New technology developed at MIT could lead to surgery and physical repairs done over the internet

This is only at the early stages, but you can see that with technological improvements, it's not that far away before emergency medical care could be delivered by laying a tablet computer and some special device in front of someone:

The inFORM was developed by MIT PhD students Sean Follmer, Daniel Leithinger, and Professor Hiroshi Ishii, from MIT’s Tangible Media Group. Revolutionary steps when thinking of physical form science and architecture, being able to shape and mold an object without even being in the room.

Science Defines Booty Calls, One-Night Stands

This is why it's so important to study science!

No! I am NOT being sarcastic this time ;-) 

Previously, Jonason had studied booty calls — or casual sexual relationships in which one party calls or texts the other for sex that day or evening — and found that they involve more emotion than one-night stands but are far less "touchy-feely" than long-term relationships. 

In the new research, Jonason surveyed 192 undergraduate students — 124 women and 68 men — at the University of West Florida. Each participant was asked to rank how likely booty calls, friends with benefits (people who have casual sex while remaining "just friends"), long-term relationships and one-night stands were to fulfill each of four functions: sexual gratification, social and emotional support, a "trial run" for a serious relationship and a placeholder to stave off boredom or to bide time until something better came along.

Read it all at Live Science 

James Woods talks about being a geek and the future of science

Tarantula Facts

As the world’s largest spiders, tarantulas are both feared and beloved. There are more than 800 species of these often hairy, nocturnal arachnids. Tarantulas live primarily in the tropical, subtropical, and desert areas of the world, with the majority found in South America. 

In the United States, tarantulas are found in Southwestern states. Despite their fearsome appearance, tarantulas are not threatening to humans. Their venom is milder than a honeybee, and though painful, their bites are not harmful. In fact, tarantulas have become a popular pet for arachnophiles around the world.

More at LIVE SCIENCE 

Golden Goose Awards Honor Strange Scientific Discoveries

...To combat wide-eyed allegations about useless government-supported research, a group in Washington, D.C., on Thursday (Sept. 19) gave out the Golden Goose Awards to seven researchers whose federally funded studies, though they may sound obscure, have led to practical breakthroughs.

...Lloyd Shapley, Alvin Roth and David Gale (who is being honored posthumously) were bestowed a Golden Goose Award for their work on theoretical mathematical algorithms — which at first, were aimed at finding a formula for compatible marriages.

The Gale-Shapley algorithm, developed in the 1960s, tackled the so-called stable marriage problem. It showed how to match equal numbers of men and women with a spouse so that no two people of the opposite sex would prefer each other over their partner. But the formula also could be used to ensure stable matches in real markets, which Roth helped to show.

Their collective research, though decades apart, has led to mathematical models used around the country to help place graduating medical students in their hospital residencies, match kidney donors with compatible patients and put students in the right schools in urban districts. Shapley and Roth were awarded Nobel Prizes in Economic Sciences in 2012, but Gale, who died in 2008, was not eligible for the prestigious award. 

A Gila Monster helped with the science
behind one of this year's Golden Goose Awards

More at LIVE SCIENCE

Turtle Tears are a Delicacy for Amazonian Flying Insects

This is quite intriguing, and beautiful to observe - butterflies and bees in South America have developed a taste for the tears of turtles.

The butterflies are likely attracted to the turtles' tears because the liquid drops contain salt, specifically sodium, an important mineral that is scant in the western Amazon, said Phil Torres, a scientist who does much of his research at the Tambopata Research Center in Peru and is associated with Rice University.

Australian newspaper debunks jet-setting "Global Warming" doomsday apostle, David Suzuki

How credible is he? Here’s just some fact-checking: 

David Suzuki, The Age, yesterday: 

...Half the coral on the Great Barrier Reef has disappeared in the past 27 years and its size could halve again in the next decade with degradation of the environment and the increasing frequency of cyclones.

Frequency of cyclones? Australian Bureau of Meteorology:

TRENDs in tropical cyclone activity in the Australian region ... show that the total number of cyclones has decreased in recent decades ... Two (recent studies) suggest that there will be no significant change in tropical cyclone numbers ... The third study, based on the CSIRO simulations, shows a significant decrease in tropical cyclone numbers for the Australian region ..

Great Barrier Reef Marine Park Authority: 

CORAL reefs can cope with natural disturbances like floods and cyclones ...

And what exactly is damaging the reef? Brian Handwerk in National Geographic, June 8: 

TERRY Hughes, who heads the Australian Research Council Centre of Excellence for Coral Reef Studies headquartered at James Cook University ... (said) ... “Coastal reefs have been obliterated by run-off of sediment, dredging, and pollution.”

More HERE

h/t Blazing Cat Fur

New research shows life on Earth originated on Mars

Evidence is mounting that we are all Martians. 

According to new research presented at the annual Goldschmidt geochemistry conference in Florence, there is compelling evidence that life on Earth was kick-started by a meteorite from Mars bearing simple, RNA-based organisms. Furthermore, the same research also indicates that the ancient, primordial surface of Earth would’ve been inhospitable to the formation of the building blocks of life (RNA, DNA, and proteins) — therefore, the only way that life could’ve begun more than three billion years ago is if it arrived here from Mars.

MORE HERE 

Real Life mind-meld developed! Scientists develop way of using computers to control human brains over the Internet

It's not just Vulcans or Jedis in science fiction who are capable of using mind-melds to control the actions of other people any more.

In some exciting, and potentially scary news, at the University of Washington, scientists have developed a way of doing real-life mind melds to link human brains using computer technology.

"A scientist sent a brain signal over the internet to control a colleague’s hand—and made his finger move on the keyboard to play a simple video game."

More HERE

Researchers Building a Computer Chip Based on the Human Brain

...Despite their ability to perform thousands of tasks in the blink of an eye, none of these devices even come close to rivaling the computing capabilities of the human brain. At least not yet. But a Boise State University research team could soon change that.

...“By mimicking the brain’s billions of interconnections and pattern recognition capabilities, we may ultimately introduce a new paradigm in speed and power, and potentially enable systems that include the ability to learn, adapt and respond to their environment,” said Barney Smith, who is the principal investigator on the grant.

The project’s success rests on a memristor – a resistor that can be programmed to a new resistance by application of electrical pulses and remembers its new resistance value once the power is removed. Memristors were first hypothesized to exist in 1972 (in conjunction with resistors, capacitors and inductors) but were fully realized as nano-scale devices only in the last decade.

For my part, I just hope they are very careful about whose brains they decide to try to get the computers to mimic.

More HERE 

U of Toronto develops 3D printer that can print skin (and maybe organs) for medical treatment

...The device is still at a prototype stage, with live-animal testing of its output to begin later this year. If successful, Leng’s tissue printer could mark a huge advance in quality of life and survivability for severely burned patients, and dramatically reduce treatment costs. Eventually it could morph into a machine for fabricating internal organs.

Tissue engineering has produced various techniques for building up fabricated skin, usually layer by layer. But that’s a time-consuming process that doesn’t offer much help for people with extensive, life-threatening burns.

“We were interested in easing this process of creating organ-scale tissues,” says Leng, referring to the large patches of skin that could be needed to treat extensive burns. She advanced the idea of the device in her master’s thesis in 2010, and began working on the prototype a year later, with a team that includes her PhD supervisor Axel Guenther, a professor in U of T’s Department of Mechanical and Industrial Engineering.

More at The Globe and Mail

New studies on Global Warming could make David Suzuki's head explode

Challenges to the unproven notion that human-driven, carbon-dioxide emissions are causing the world to go to hell in a handbasket appear to be on the increase. 

According to surprising new research from the University of Waterloo in Ontario, chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs) are responsible for global warming since the 1970s, not carbon dioxide. 

And researchers at Oxford University say the climate is less sensitive to carbon emissions than had been believed. 

Daily Telegraph reporter Tom Chivers says the new U.K. findings may bolster the argument of those who argue there are better responses than making "grandiose pledges to cut emissions." 

Chivers quotes Prof. Bjorn Lomborg, economist and high-profile author of The Skeptical Environmentalist, as saying rich countries are in a better position to deal with climate-change problems than poor ones are. So it's crucial to foster economic growth.

Plus: More on the Oxford studies at The Economist 

and 

Global Warming Alarmists Caught Doctoring '97-Percent Consensus' Claims

Canadian study shows anxiety makes you less likely to get a job

A study by researchers from the University of Guelph in Canada discovered that job seekers who are anxious perform worse on job interviews, with the effects greater for men than women.

Deborah Powell, one of the study's authors, said anxiety during an interview can present itself in a number of ways, such as nervous tics, difficulty speaking and trouble coming up with answers, all of which are known to influence hiring outcomes.

Jizz Caveat Emptor: Sperm buyers beware

For most men, a fantasy leading to arousal and orgasm is not the dream of being left alone in a mundane, nondescript office with a couple of posters of mass-produced, pedestrian art on the wall and a pornographic magazine for an inspirational boost.

But the sperm donor is an entirely different sort of guy.

A growing number of people; in some cases infertile couples, in others, women desperate to reproduce but lacking a male in their lives willing to father a child with them, have turned to the anonymous sperm bank donor for a solution.

But there's a major downside to that approach, aside from the obvious irritants of expense and invasive medical intervention in something that, for most of us, is a natural biological process.

There have been recent court cases highlighting some of the legal quandaries emerging from this relatively new phenomenon, but the consequences to sperm donation are often far worse.

As much as many social scientists would like to believe that personality and human characteristics are a consequence of environment and education, real science points to genetics as being the overwhelming factor in shaping our personalities.

So what kind of man chooses to go through a vetting process for the privilege of masturbating into a plastic cup and possibly passing his genes along in the form of a child he's never likely to meet, let alone have any personal involvement with?

Odds are, it's going to be a guy with some serious psychological problems. The kind of problems that are very likely to be passed along to the products of such conception.

That assertion outrages some women, particularly childless women in their mid-thirties to early forties who hear their biological clock winding down but don't want to be compelled to deal with a prospective father for the foreseeable future. These women often insist that sperm donors must be wonderful, altruistic men who are prepared to bestow an invaluable gift to those in need.

But try asking a sane man whether he would want to be an anonymous sperm donor. Almost invariably,  the response is a disgusted shake of the head and a loud "no!"  It's one thing, in jurisdictions where sperm donors are paid, for a drunk college kid to extemporaneously find a convenient way to continue a drinking binge. But to walk in dead sober and do what needs to be done requires a very peculiar personality-type. Narcissism combined with social maladjustment are a couple of the features that spring to mind, but not in as fun, or as smart a way as The Big Bang Theory. They are features one might not want to see in anyone's offspring, especially their own.

I know women that are still sceptics. Try asking them if the roles were reversed, would they anonymously donate an egg so that someone else could have one of her children; a child she would never see or hold or meet?  The typical first response is to point out how the medical procedure for egg collection is not comparable as it requires painful surgery. Fair enough.

But what if, hypothetically, the method for a woman was the same as for a man? What if all it required was for a woman to go in that room and stimulate herself to orgasm to cause an egg or two to cheerfully pop out of her into a sterile receptacle, never to be seen again, either in pre or post natal form. Would a psychologically balanced woman do it?

I think we all know the answer to that one.

And there are studies that confirm it. Offspring produced by sperm donation have a very high rate of psychiatric problems.

Apparently in China, they've found a way of improving the gene pool of sperm donors that is typical of that country's methodology since Chairman Mao. They force people to do it. 

But until we adopt that means, which we likely never will, it's worth considering that if nature doesn't want something to happen, maybe it shouldn't.

Oldest dinosaur embryo fossils discovered in China

Palaeontologists working in China have unearthed the earliest collection of fossilized dinosaur embryos to date. The trove includes remains from many individuals at different developmental stages, providing a unique opportunity to investigate the embryonic development of a prehistoric species.

Robert Reisz, a palaeontologist at the University of Toronto in Mississauga, Canada, and his colleagues discovered the sauropodomorph fossils in a bone bed in Lufeng County that dates to the Early Jurassic period, 197 million to 190 million years ago. The site contained eggshells and more than 200 disarticulated bones — the oldest known traces of budding dinosaurs, the researchers report online today in Nature¹.

Blackberry inventor to attempt to build Star Trek Tricorder

Mike Lazaridis, inventor of the BlackBerry smartphone, is starting a $100 million quantum technology fund that’s aiming to turn devices like the medical tricorder from “Star Trek” into reality.  

Apparently, in the future, doctors with cool devices will be
accorded the respect they deserve

More Star Trek medical devices can be seen here