‘Before a green-rumped parrotlet is even able to chirp and squawk, mom and dad teach it a distinct series of sounds used by parrots to recognize a specific individual. In short, they give their nestling a name.’ (via Wired).

“On 12 July, Neptune will celebrate its very first birthday because exactly one Neptunian year — or 164.79 Earth years — will have passed since its discovery.” (via Wired).

Reports of infectious obesity and divorce were grossly overstated: ‘We’ve heard that obesity and divorce can be passed from one person to another. Critics now wonder how the “social contagion” studies ever passed peer review.’ (via Slate).

“With the death of Osama bin Laden in May and the arrest of James (Whitey) Bulger on Wednesday night in California, there are only eight fugitives now on the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s 10 Most Wanted list…

It will take a couple of months or so for the bureau to decide which fugitives will replace Bin Laden and Mr. Bulger on the list. First, it solicits candidates from its field offices, a process that began after Bin Laden’s killing. Then representatives from the Criminal Investigative Division and the Office of Public Affairs narrow down the names. The director of the F.B.I. gives final approval.” (via NYTimes.com).

Volkswagen Autopilot Lets You Drive Hands-Free at 80 MPH: “Volkswagen is testing a self-driving system that lets you travel up to 80 MPH. It maneuvers the highways like a champ and even handles the stop and go of traffic jams. The temporary auto pilot technology uses adaptive cruise control, lane assist and a variety of sensors to track your speed, your location and all the cars around you. It’s a semi-automatic system so you need to continually monitor the car. You don’t have to keep your hands on the wheel, but you really shouldn’t be napping while the car is flying down the highway at 75MPH.” (via Gizmodo).

Google’s Driverless Cars Are Now Legal in Nevada: “A state bill with new rules for self-driving cars just passed, allowing Google’s fleet of hybrid vehicles to hit the road in Nevada soon. Google had been lobbying for the bill for weeks, saying they’re safer than human-driven cars.” (via Gizmodo)

‘After studying the chemical interactions that allow short-term learning and memorization in rats, a group of scientists lead by Dr. Theodore Berger—from the University of South California’s Viterbi School of Engineering—have built a prosthetic chip that uses electrodes to enhance and expand their memory abilities. The chip is capable of storing neural signals, basically functioning as an electronic memory, allowing rats to learn more and keep it in the devices.’ (via Gizmodo).

“…Started screaming as mourners gathered around coffin saying prayers for her soul. Her eyes fluttered but she only lived for another 12 minutes before she died again, this time for good.” (via Mail Online).

“Thunderstorms almost spoiled this view of the spectacular June 15 total lunar eclipse. Instead, storm clouds parted for 10 minutes during the total eclipse phase and lightning bolts contributed to the dramatic sky. Captured with a 30 second exposure the scene also inspired what, in the 16 year history of Astronomy Picture of the Day, the editor considers may be the best title yet for a picture…” (via APOD: 2011 June 18).

“Fred Alan Wolf… resigned from the physics faculty at San Diego State College in the mid-1970s to become a New Age vaudevillian, combining motivational speaking, quantum weirdness and magic tricks in an act that opened several times for Timothy Leary. By then Wolf was running with the Fundamental Fysiks Group, a Bay Area collective driven by the notion that quantum mechanics, maybe with the help of a little LSD, could be harnessed to convey psychic powers. Concentrate hard enough and perhaps you really could levitate the Pentagon.

In How the Hippies Saved Physics: Science, Counterculture, and the Quantum Revival, David Kaiser, an associate professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, turns to those wild days in the waning years of the Vietnam War when anything seemed possible: communal marriage, living off the land, bringing down the military with flower power. Why not faster-than-light communication, in which a message arrives before it is sent, overthrowing the tyranny of that pig, Father Time?

That was the obsession of Jack Sarfatti, another member of the group. Sarfatti was Wolf’s colleague and roommate in San Diego, and in a pivotal moment in Kaiser’s tale they find themselves in the lobby of the Ritz Hotel in Paris talking to Werner Erhard, the creepy human potential movement guru, who decided to invest in their quantum ventures. Sarfatti was at least as good a salesman as he was a physicist, wooing wealthy eccentrics from his den at Caffe Trieste in the North Beach section of San Francisco.

Other, overlapping efforts like the Consciousness Theory Group and the Physics/Consciousness Research Group were part of the scene, and before long Sarfatti, Wolf and their cohort were conducting annual physics and consciousness workshops at the Esalen Institute in Big Sur.

Fritjof Capra, who made his fortune with the countercultural classic “The Tao of Physics” (1975) was part of the Fundamental Fysiks Group, as was Nick Herbert, another dropout from the establishment who dabbled in superluminal communication and wrote his own popular book, “Quantum Reality: Beyond the New Physics” (1985). Gary Zukav, a roommate of Sarfatti’s, cashed in with “The Dancing Wu Li Masters” (1979). I’d known about the quantum zeitgeist and read some of the books, but I was surprised to learn from Kaiser how closely all these people were entangled in the same web.” (via NYTimes book review).

“In this issue of Eurosurveillance, a collaborative group of investigators, led by the WHO Collaborating Centre for Reference and Research on Escherichia and Klebsiella, report several intriguing and important new findings on the nature and possible origin of the epidemic strain. Firstly, using well- validated genotyping methods, Scheutz et al. provide convincing evidence that the STEC strain causing the outbreak in Germany is in fact not a typical virulent STEC strain, but instead is a much rarer hybrid pathotype that harbours the phage-mediated Shiga toxin determinant with an enteroaggregative E. coli (EAggEC) background, more precisely described as enteroaggregative, Shiga toxin/verotoxin-producing E. coli (EAggEC STEC/VTEC). Secondly, they also identify in this strain the presence of the receptor for iron-chelating aerobactin, known to be a virulence factor associated with the extra-intestinal E. coli pathotype. Thirdly, they provide new data attesting to a close genetic relatedness of the German outbreak strain to previously described similar EAggEC STEC/VTEC strains. These findings are relevant for identifying the ecological reservoir and evolutionary origin of the epidemic agent, gaining a better understanding of the biological determinants of unusual disease severity and clinical complications seen in outbreak cases and the design of specific diagnostic tools for detection and treatment of STEC cases, and identification of the epidemic strain for accurate outbreak monitoring.”

‘”Prison bosses made more money forcing inmates to play games than they do forcing people to do manual labour,” [one prisoner] told the Guardian. “There were 300 prisoners forced to play games. We worked 12-hour shifts in the camp. I heard them say they could earn 5,000-6,000rmb [£470-570] a day. We didn’t see any of the money. The computers were never turned off.”‘ (The Guardian via The Null Device).

“From Broadmoor to boardroom, they’re everywhere, says Jon Ronson, in an exclusive extract from his new book.” (via The Guardian).

‘Perhaps, in some way, the recent rise of the dash—and this “trend” is just anecdotal observation; I admit I haven’t found a way to crunch the numbers—is a reaction to our attention-deficit-disordered culture, in which we toggle between tabs and ideas and conversations all day. An explanation is not an excuse, though—as Corbett wrote in another sensible harangue against the dash, “Sometimes a procession of such punctuation is a hint that a sentence is overstuffed or needs rethinking.” Why not try for clarity in our writing—if not our lives?’ (via Slate Magazine).

“The economic downturn has not led to more crime—contrary to the experts’ predictions. So what explains the disconnect? Big changes in American culture, says James Q. Wilson.” (WSJ via kottke)

“In the days before scuba tanks, people used to explore the underwater world with the aid of diving bells. These large open-bottomed chambers were dunked into the water, and divers used the air trapped inside them to breathe. The bells have been around since at least the time of Aristotle, but in the rivers and lakes of Europe, one animal has been using similar structures for far longer – the diving bell spider.

The diving bell spider is the only member of its group to spend its entire life underwater. But it still needs to breathe air, and it does so by building its own diving bell.” (via Not Exactly Rocket Science | Discover Magazine).

‘They exist for only seconds at most in real life, but they’ve gained immortality in chemistry: Two new elements have been added to the periodic table.

The elements were recognized by an international committee of chemists and physicists. They’re called elements 114 and 116 for now — permanent names and symbols will be chosen later.

“Our experiments last for many weeks, and typically, we make an atom every week or so…” ‘ (via NYTimes.com).

‘A superhot substance recently made in the Large Hadron Collider (pictures) is the densest form of matter ever observed, scientists announced this week.

Known as a quark-gluon plasma, the primordial state of matter may be what the entire universe was like in the immediate aftermath of the big bang.

The exotic material is more than a hundred thousand times hotter than the inside of the sun and is denser than a neutron star, one of the densest known objects in the universe.

“Besides black holes, there’s nothing denser than what we’re creating,” said David Evans, a physicist at the University of Birmingham in the U.K. and a team leader for the LHC’s ALICE detector, which helped observe the quark-gluon plasma.

“If you had a cubic centimeter of this stuff, it would weigh 40 billion tons.” ‘ (via National Geographic).

Thomas Friedman: “You really do have to wonder whether a few years from now we’ll look back at the first decade of the 21st century — when food prices spiked, energy prices soared, world population surged, tornados plowed through cities, floods and droughts set records, populations were displaced and governments were threatened by the confluence of it all — and ask ourselves: What were we thinking? How did we not panic when the evidence was so obvious that we’d crossed some growth/climate/natural resource/population redlines all at once?” (via NYTimes op-ed).

When the Sun Sets in Style – “Monday was Manhattanhenge in New York, one of the two days of the year when the setting sun lines up exactly with the city’s east-west streets. This year the astronomical event fell on Memorial Day; the next time this happens will be July 12, which will be during pro baseball’s All-Star Break. “Future anthropologists might conclude that, via the Sun, the people who called themselves Americans worshiped War and Baseball,” predicted Hayden Planetarium director Neil deGrasse Tyson. Well, whatever its significance, Manhattanhenge sure is pretty. For those that didn’t get a view or a picture themselves, here’s what it looked like.” (via The Atlantic Wire)

“I was understandably apprehensive – if not a little curious – about an evening that came with the warning “may contain body parts”.Sure enough, What will we eat in future?, the event hosted this week at the .HBC art space in Berlin, was not for the squeamish or faint-hearted.

A collaboration between visual artist Anastasia Loginova and food systems planner Lynn Peemoeller, who specialises in coordinating farmer’s markets and fostering public engagement about where food comes from, the performance used cinema, literature and audience interaction to question what food means to us and how our relationship to sustenance is changing.” (via New Scientist CultureLab)

“According to the AP, 300 WAR DOGS go up for adoption each year after they finish their duties overseas. They may be 10 years old, and costs upwards of $2000 to have shipped back to the U.S., but people are rushing to get their hands on one.” (via Gizmodo)

“Isn’t this thoughtful? Those demented bawbags who are waiting for the Rapture this weekend have prepared a letter to help explain where they and “millions and millions” of the faithful have disappeared to.” (via Dangerous Minds). Anyone know anyone who was raptured this weekend? I’m not sure if the Rapture didn’t happen or if I just don’t know any of the righteous. I did brush my teeth and put on fresh underwear yesterday morning just in case.

“Timothy Ray Brown, a 45-year-old San Francisco man previously known to the medical community as “the Berlin patient,” has become the first person to ever be cured of AIDS.

After a stem cell bone marrow transplant, doctors say his HIV, the infection which causes AIDS, was eradicated.

His bone marrow donor was one of a very small percentage of people who are immune to HIV.” (via Raw Replay).

“A sweeping study chronicling more than a century’s worth of deadly encounters with black bears in Canada and the United States is …dispelling the widely held notion that a sow protecting her cubs is the prime danger.

… the vast majority of the confrontations weren’t the result of chance meetings in the woods, but the outcome of predatory behaviour, nearly always by lone male black bears. Surprisingly, only 8 per cent of the deadly attacks were attributed to mother bears.

Even the world’s foremost bear-attack expert, study leader Stephen Herrero, was taken aback by this finding…”  (via The Globe and Mail)

“In outsourcing critical parts of their defense to mercenaries — the soldiers of choice for medieval kings, Italian Renaissance dukes and African dictators — the Emiratis have begun a new era in the boom in wartime contracting that began after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks. And by relying on a force largely created by Americans, they have introduced a volatile element in an already combustible region where the United States is widely viewed with suspicion.

The United Arab Emirates — an autocracy with the sheen of a progressive, modern state — are closely allied with the United States, and American officials indicated that the battalion program had some support in Washington.” (via NYTimes).

“…[S]tudents are taught by fewer full-time tenured faculty members while being looked after by a greatly expanded number of counselors who serve an array of social and personal needs. At the same time, many schools are investing in deluxe dormitory rooms, elaborate student centers and expensive gyms. Simply put: academic investments are a lower priority.

The situation reflects a larger cultural change in the relationship between students and colleges. The authority of educators has diminished, and students are increasingly thought of, by themselves and their colleges, as “clients” or “consumers.” When 18-year-olds are emboldened to see themselves in this manner, many look for ways to attain an educational credential effortlessly and comfortably. And they are catered to accordingly. The customer is always right…” (via NYTimes)

“Federal lawmakers are planning to cut vital funding for international conservation programs that save gorillas’ lives and protect their habitats.The tragedy is that these cuts are too small to make a difference in the federal budget, but large enough to completely cripple efforts to save gorillas.Send a letter to your members of Congress right now and urge them to stand up for Africa’s gorillas.” (via Wildlife Conservation Society).

“As a sci-fi and fantasy genre fan, this new HBO show based on a popular book series initially appealed to me. I easily stomached plotlines involving incest, attempted murder of a child, and gory beheadings. But nothing prepared me for the appearance of a nomadic race called the Dothraki.

Unlike the other alabaster-colored, civilized characters on the show, every single one of them is a shade of brown. Blacks, Latinos and actors of Indian descent make up the part of the cast that engages in fireside orgies, random disembowelments and feasts of raw meat. One could argue that, yes, nomadic people would bronze in the sun, but the Dothraki are well beyond bronze…” (via redeyechicago.com).

“Many birds can mimic sounds but lyrebirds are the masters. They are nature’s living tape recorders, and sometimes their songs can be troubling.

For example, when the BBC’s David Attenborough ran into a lyrebird deep in the Australian woods, the bird not only sang the songs of 20 other forest birds, it also did a perfect imitation of foresters and their chainsaws, who apparently were getting closer. That same bird made the sound of a car alarm.

These birds were, in effect, recording the sounds of their own habitat destruction. And they were doing this, ironically, inside their mating songs.”

An incredible Youtube video is embedded in the article (via Krulwich Wonders… : NPR).

“My reputation in some circles as a person who eats bugs has been blown out of proportion. Yes, I have knowingly and voluntarily eaten insects, but I wish people wouldn’t pluck out that historical detail to epitomize me (“You remember, I’ve told you about John—he’s the bug-eater!”). It was so out of character for me. As a boy, I was fastidious to the point of annoying priggishness; other children would probably have enjoyed making me eat insects had the idea occurred to them, but I wouldn’t have chosen to do so myself. Bug eating was something I matured into, and performed as a professional duty, even a public service.

Here’s how it happened…”

“The spectacular rise and fall of Leary and Ginsberg’s plot to turn on the world is the subject of a new book by Peter Conners called White Hand Society, published by City Lights Books. I knew Ginsberg well for 20 years and was his teaching assistant at Naropa, a Buddhist university in Colorado, yet I learned a lot about Ginsberg’s role in helping to create Leary’s public identity by reading the book, which is based mostly on the lively correspondence between the two men. (For more detailed analysis of White Hand Society, see this insightful review by poet, Buddhist student, and Ginsberg scholar Marc Olmsted.)  I spoke with Conners when he came through San Francisco on his book tour…” (via NeuroTribes)

“Twin Houston men were charged Tuesday with the murder of their 89-year-old mother after police say the pair allowed her to die on the floor in their foyer after she fell, then lived for three months with her decomposing, bug-infested corpse…

The twins later told police they lived with their mother and cared for her. On Jan. 10, Edwin Berndt said he and his brother were watching the BCS Championship football game when their mother “came in ranting and raving and she then fell down and did not get up.” He said they decided to leave her on the floor because they didn’t have money to provide her with medical treatment.

For the first day, Sybil Berndt was conscious and able to speak, but did not ask for any help, Edwin Berndt said. His brother said they didn’t give her any food or water while she lay on the floor.” (via Seattle Times).

 

‘Physicists at the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory are planning to announce Wednesday that they have found found a suspicious bump in their data that could be evidence of a new elementary particle or even, some say, a new force of nature. 

…“Nobody knows what this is,” said Christopher Hill, a theorist at Fermilab who was not part of the team. “If it is real, it would be the most significant discovery in physics in half a century.” ‘  (viaNYTimes.com).

“If you live in Hawaii, California, British Columbia, Alaska or Baja California, here is some bad news: According to computer models made by scientists at the International Pacific Research Center, University of Hawaii at Manoa, all the debris washed out by the Japan tsunami is coming your way.

This is how the trash will spread through the Pacific and hit the West Coast of the United States, Canada and Mexico…” (via Gizmodo).

“Leonard: Although there’s an extraordinary range of variation, based on the climate and the environment, hunter-gatherers get a fair amount of meat in their diet. We require a diet that is more energy-dense than other primates and historically, we may have reached that point by incorporating more meat. It’s reflected in evolutionary changes in our face, our teeth, and in our gastrointestinal tract. Indeed, the GI tract of modern humans looks more like a carnivore’s than a large primate’s. Because early humans increasingly used tools to hunt, we don’t show the same kinds of dental adaptations as modern carnivores…” (via GOOD).

“It was a routine day at the Birmingham, England airport in 1990. The British Airways crew had gotten up early to prepare for a trip to Malaga, Spain. About 13 minutes into the flight, flight attendant Nigel Ogden walked into the cockpit to offer the captain Tim Lancaster and co-captain Alistair Atcheson a cup of tea. As he was walking out, the plane was rocked by an explosion. He turned around and this is what he saw, as he told it to the Sydney Morning Herald‘s Julia Llewellyn Smith.” (via The Atlantic).

‘Astronomers have witnessed a cosmic explosion so strange they don’t even know what to call it. Although the blowup, discovered with NASA’s Swift satellite on March 28, emits high-energy radiation like a gamma-ray burst would, the event has now lasted for 11 days. Gamma-ray bursts last for an average of about 30 seconds.
Also unlike a gamma-ray burst, the explosion has faded and brightened, emitting staccato pulses of energetic radiation lasting for hundreds of seconds. 

“It’s either a phenomenon we’ve never seen before or a familiar event that we’ve never viewed in this way before,” says Andrew Fruchter of the Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore…’ (Wired)

“The choice is yours, follow the lead of the top cancer specialists in the world and get the pat down, or go with the take of televisons talking head doctors and radiate yourself.” (via EconomicPolicy Journal).

“What makes an April Fools’ prank hilarious? A cognitive scientist’s (actually funny) new book shows how the brain breaks down the elements of a joke and why we laugh.” (via The Daily Beast).

“A British woman with locked-in syndrome has been able to conduct an orchestra using just the power of her thoughts.The woman is only able to make eye, facial and slight head movements orllowing a stroke which left her paralyzed.But, monitored using electroencephalography EEG, she wore a cap with electrodes which picked up different patterns in her brainwaves depending on what she was looking at on a screen – in this case objects flickering at different frequencies.This ‘frequency-following’ effect was then adapted so that the different frequencies related to different musical instruments which the patient operated with her eyes. After a couple of hours of the trial, the patient was able to play a mini orchestra solo, just by brainpower alone.” (via TG Daily)

‘Rush Limbaugh laughed about Japanese refugees recycling after the earthquake that struck the country on his Tuesday show.

A caller asked Limbaugh, “If these are the people that invented the Prius, have mastered public transportation, recycling, why did Mother Earth, Gaia if you will, hit them with this disaster?”

Limbaugh called this an “interesting question,” and played a clip of ABC’s Diane Sawyer reporting from a shelter in Japan. In the clip, Sawyer is surprised that the refugees in the shelter have maintained a recycling program. Limbaugh first mocked Sawyer, doing an impression of her and saying that “she sounds like she saw her husband for the first time in six months.” He then turned to his caller’s question.

“He’s right,” Limbaugh said. “They’ve given us the Prius. Even now, refugees are recycling their garbage.” Here, he began to laugh, continuing, “and yet, Gaia levels them! Just wipes them out!” ‘ (via HuffPo).

“..(T)onight the moon will make its closest approach to Earth in 18 years—making the so-called supermoon the biggest full moon in years.

And despite Internet rumors, the impending phenomenon had no influence on the March 11 Japan earthquake and tsunami…” (via National Geographic)

“The Times scheme allows readers 20 free stories per month before they have to pay. However, if you come in via Twitter or Facebook, reading the story doesn’t count against your total. So, cheapskates, meet @freenyt, a three-hour old Twitter feed that intends to tweet all the Times stories.” (via The Daily Dish)