There’s a great piece at Popsci.com today on the Scariest Ideas in Science. It’s all research that’s well-funded: from drugs that keep soldiers up for 48 hours, to man-made black holes. The scariest to me was Russian killer foxes that are getting selectively bred to be more and more hostile?! In any case, you can check out the lot of ‘em here at Popsci.

According to New Scientist online, a little brain damage might go a long way with smokers trying to quit. Scientists at the University of Southern California in LA were intrigued by a heavy smoker (40 cigarettes a day) who immediately lost the urge to light up once his insula was damaged. In follow-up studies, 70% of smokers with damage to that tiny part of the brain also managed to kick the habit with ease. While the research is all positive, the hope is that in the future surgeons will be able to tamper with the insula to ease addicts away from their vices without experiencing any withdrawal syndromes.
Read more here at New Scientist.

We thought we’d heard it all when we learned about Mary Hart Syndrome, in which certain Entertainment Tonight! viewers (specifically, an unidentified Indiana woman) suffered seizures triggered by the frequency of its perky host’s voice. But this, from Yahoo! news, may take the cake:

“Hundreds of chickens have been found dead in east China — and a court has ruled that the cause of death was the screaming of a four-year-old boy who in turn had been scared by a barking dog. The bizarre sequence of events began when the boy arrived at a village home in the eastern province of Jiangsu, where he screamed for a long time while bent over a henhouse window after being scared by the dog. A court ruled the boy’s screaming was “the only unexpected abnormal sound” and that 443 chickens trampled each other to death in fear. His father was ordered to pay about $230 in compensation.”

Not sure if you all got the email going around a couple weeks ago with The Washington Post’s winning submissions for its yearly neologism contest, in which readers are asked to supply alternate meanings for common words.

Some of my favorites include:

Lymph (v.), to walk with a lisp.

Pokemon (n), a Rastafarian proctologist.

Circumvent (n.), an opening in the front of boxer shorts worn by Jewish men.

I’ve posted the complete list after the jump. Meanwhile, The Washington Post’s Style Invitational also asked readers to take any word from the dictionary, alter it by adding, subtracting, or changing one letter, and supply a new definition. Again, some of my favs:

Giraffiti (n): Vandalism spray-painted very, very high.

Sarchasm (n): The gulf between the author of sarcastic wit and the person who doesn’t get it.

Ignoranus (n): A person who’s both stupid and an arse.

I’ve put the rest of that list after the jump, as well, but now open the floor to you all. Pick a word, alter it by a letter, and send us your definition. I’ll reprint the best ones next week!

(more…)

The Domain: Wife Carrying
The Master: Estonian “athlete” Margo Uusorg is probably the world’s greatest wife carrier. At the annual Wife Carrying World Championship in Sonkajärvi, Finland (where first prize is the wife’s weight in beer!), Uusorg has emerged victorious five out of the past seven years (his brother Madis won in 2004) . He’s also the only man to have won with three different female partners (you don’t have to carry your own wife, see). Uusorg and his fellow Estonians are so dominant in the sport, which involves sprinting with wifey across various surfaces and water obstacles, that their technique has come to be known as “the Estonian.” So, what is the Estonian? A position that’s definitely not in the Kama Sutra, it involves a spouse hanging upside down with her arms around her husband’s waist while her legs are clutching for dear life to his neck.
The Domain: World Records
The Master: Ashrita Furman currently holds 33 Guinness World Records, including the record for having the most Guinness World Records. In his record-setting career, which began after he dropped out of Columbia University in the mid-1970s, 51-year-old Furman has set or beaten more than 100 records, including longest continuous pogo sticking (23.11 miles), most completed hopscotch games in 24 hours (434), fastest 10 km sack race (1 hour, 22 minutes, 2 seconds), and the longest period of continuous juggling underwater (48 minutes and 36 seconds). And he’s single, ladies! On the downside, Furman is a devoted follower of the Indian philosopher Sri Chinmoy, who preaches strict celibacy.
The Domain: Eyebrow Plucking
The Master: Known as “The Eyebrow King,” Damone Roberts has plucked and sculpted the world’s most famous eyebrows, from Paula Abdul to Amanda Peet to the Backstreet Boys. A visit to Damone’s Beverly Hills salon will cost you $60, but it’s well worth the expense. After all, he’s America’s only eyebrow sculptor to have registered his own name as a trademark! Now that’s classy.
The Domain: Enigmatology
The Master: Will Shortz. It’s no contest, really, because Shortz is the only person in human history to graduate college with a degree in enigmatology (the study of puzzles). After receiving the honor from Indiana University in 1974, Shortz went on to a career in puzzles, and in 1993, he landed the best job in the business, editor of The New York Times crossword puzzle. His work there is legendary among crossword enthusiasts, as is Shortz’s 20,000-strong collection of puzzle books and magazines. As historian of the National Puzzlers’ League, Shortz goes by the nickname WILLz, which puzzlers will recognize as a rebus puzzle that translates to Will Short ‘z’.
The Domain: Collecting AOL CDs (a surprisingly competitive field)
The Masters: Collectors of the infamous AOL “free hours” CDs are legion. In fact, there are dozens of “rare” AOL CDs auctioned on eBay every day. But the masters of the AOL CD collecting domain are undoubtedly Jim McKenna and John Lieberman, two Californians who started collecting the discs back in 2002. Since then, they’ve amassed more than 385,000. (By the way, if you stacked those suckers up, they’d be taller than the Empire State Building.) When they get to the 1 million mark, they plan on returning the whole lump sum to AOL and asking the company to stop mailing unsolicited CDs.
The Domain: Chessboxing
The Master: Bulgarian Tihomir Titschko is currently the European chessboxing champion—and, because the sport hasn’t really spread to other continents, that makes him the de facto world champ. Chessboxing starts with a four-minute round of chess, followed by a two-minute round of boxing, and then it’s back to the chess. A judge decides the winner after 11 rounds (six of chess and five of boxing), unless the match is stopped first by a knockout or checkmate. And if you’re thinking Lennox Lewis could probably beat Bobby Fischer at chessboxing, you’re right. While it’s important to be not horrible at chess, it’s more important to know how to survive in the ring.

The Domain: High School Badminton
The Master: Miller Place High School in New York. Between 1973 and 2005, the Miller Place High School badminton team won 504 consecutive games. Sadly, the streak ended on April 12, 2005, when they were beaten 10-5 by Smithtown High School. But fret not, high school badminton fans! Miller Place is back to its winning ways and has already started racking up the trophies again.
 

The Domain: Pitching Professionally While Under the Influence of Drugs
The Master: Dock Ellis was a pretty eccentric baseball player, which befits a man who now claims he never played a major league game sober. On May 1, 1974, for instance, Ellis attempted to hit every batter in the Cincinnati Reds’ lineup. In the first inning alone, he pelted Pete Rose, Joe Morgan, and Dan Dreisen. Tony Perez dodged four pitches and walked, but after Johnny Bench was nearly beaned twice, Ellis was removed from the game. But by far, Ellis’ oddest accomplishment came on June 12, 1970, when (per his autobiography) he became the only major league player ever to pitch a complete game no-hitter while tripping on acid. Luckily, Ellis sobered up after his retirement and now works as a drug treatment counselor.

People seem to be endlessly fascinated by stories about missing planes and sunken ships. I’m something of a hard sell in this area, but found the saga of the “Lost Squadron” irresistibly fascinating. It’s a long story — check out Damn Interesting for an in-depth rendering — but the basic facts are this: a squadron of fighter planes was flying over Greenland toward Iceland during WWII. Poor visibility on the way forced them to fly above the clouds at around 12,000 feet, which when you’re not flying in the relative luxury of a modern DC-10, can get pretty darn cold. Numb, disoriented and with the weather only getting worse, the pilots were forced to make an emergency landing — on the ice sheets of Greenland.

Unharmed but chilly, the men were finally rescued ten days later by a dogsled team, and left their planes behind to be salvaged at a later date. That date never came, and after awhile the location of the squadron — two B-17 bombers and six P-38 fighters — became unknown. Between 1977 and 1990, eleven different teams tried and failed to locate and salvage the planes, to no avail. Finally, in 1988, members of the Greenland Expedition Society bored holes in the icecap to find the planes — under an astounding 268 feet of ice and three miles from the original crash site, thanks to glacial drift.

After tunneling a shaft to reach one of the B-17s (by melting the ice, not boring through it), the team found little more than crushed wreckage: its frame hadn’t been able to withstand the ice’s intense pressure. The P-38s, however, had been considerably more rugged planes, and so they tried again — and this time hit aviation history gold. Dubbed “Glacier Girl,” the P-38 they discovered was in rough shape, to be sure, but it was salvageable, and they removed it piece by piece and took it back to the U.S. Over nine years the airframe was transformed from a wad of crushed remains into a beautiful, working airplane. She flew again on 26 October 2002, in front of a crowd of over 20,000 people.

Another Thursday, another thingamajig! Today I’m naming those medallion-like thingamajigs you see looping/hanging/dangling from men’s pocket in those old photos where they’re all nattyed up in formal wear. You know what I’m talking about: the chain-like thing that gives the plain-black tails a little color around the waist area.

I’ve always known it was connected to the pocket watch, but I never knew what that thing was called. Whelp, it’s called a fob folks. No, not as in “friends of Bill,” but as in the Low German word Fobke, or “small pocket.”

Indeed, the little watch pocket cut into men’s dress pants is also called a fob, as is the decorative part of a keychain, the Mickey Mouse or the mini-flashlight, or whatever you’ve got going on. (Actually, it would be fun to know what you readers do have going on! I’ll tell you that my key fob is a Philadelphia Phillies “P.” )
Aside from being decorative, the watch fob was (is still?) used to pull the pocket watch out of the pocket. So it served a function. Here are a couple photos I found. Dig that gent’s fob hanging out on the left near his hand-in-pocket.

In a fancy restaurant, anyone paying $50 for a piece of fish might reasonably expect that their entree be plated in an artistic way. In fancy coffeehouses, it’s becoming increasingly common for lattes and other coffee- or cappuccino-based drinks to be presented nicely, too (and at $4 a pop, rightly so), and some ambitious baristas have raised that final touch to what many consider a new kind of art form. That’s right: latte art. According to the ‘pedia (Wiki, that is), latte art is created either by “manipulating the flow of milk from a jug into the espresso (known as free pour latte art) or by drawing designs with an implement (known as etching), using stencils, powders and milk foam.”

There’s even an annual latte art competition in the Netherlands. If you’d rather not leave it to the baristas, you can find a do-it-yourself latte art guide here. And this is a great collection of latte art photos via flickr. But the topper, of course, is a video demonstration:

According to the AP, the military now wields a giant ray gun that “shoots a beam that makes people feel as if they are about to catch fire.” The key words there are “feel as if”, since the technology is apparently harmless. However, the gun’s shock is great enough that people who get beamed are bound to drop their weapons. (More specifically people get jolted with 130 degrees of intense heat.) While the stunning guns won’t go into mass production until at least 2010, the military seems pretty giddy about it. The article states, “The system uses electromagnetic millimeter waves, which can penetrate only 1/64th of an inch of skin, just enough to cause discomfort.” The result is a weapon that’s far more effective and safe than rubber bullets. To read more on the guns, click here . Thanks Maggie!

To be exact, it’s a new species of dinosaur, recently discovered in China, called the microraptor gui. They’re about as big as a turkey, they’ve covered in feathers, lived 125 million years ago, and they flew — or at least glided gracefully — from tree branch to tree branch. What’s the big deal, you ask? After all, we know about other flying dinosaurs. But the micro, it turns out, had four wings, not two. It dropped its wing-like hind legs below its body and raised its powerful feathered arms to form an aerodynamic design not unlike that of a World War I-era bi-plane. According to a BBC article,

If one accepted the evolutionary importance of the bi-plane formation, there were striking parallels between bird flight and the development of aircraft, said Dr Chatterjee. Archaeopteryx, regarded as the earliest fossil bird, has what could be described as a monoplane design. The shift from a bi-plane to a monoplane design could have been facilitated by a much broader wingspan which would have provided increased lift. This mirrors historical developments in aviation.

“We see that the Wright brothers came up with a design for which there was no precedent in nature at the time,” said Dr Chatterjee. “This shows us that if there is a problem in engineering, sometimes there are only one or two possible solutions.”

All the best ideas, it seems, come from Mother Nature. Let’s just hope our engineers and scientists don’t mimic the evolution of dinosaurs too much, or we’ll invent ourselves right into extinction!