A goblin shark attempts to ward off a scuba diver. Having never seen one of these in motion, the Alien style jaw protrusion came as a bit of a surprise. The translucent skin appears so gauze-like, I half expected them to separate from the shark completely.

Goblin Shark [YouTube]

Admiral ‘Spike’ Blandy and his wife celebrate the success of Castle Bravo, the detonation of the world’s first practical hydrogen bomb — and the largest nuclear explosion ever set off by the United States — at Bikini Atoll, Marshall Islands on March 1, 1946. The fallout plume spread dangerous levels of radiation over an area over 100 miles long, including inhabited islands.

Records showing fallout levels from the cake are unknown. However, testimony from those who attended the event depicts a frosting that was nice to look at, but inedible otherwise. The raspberry filling was said to have been delicious. Five people fell ill, though this was attributed to excessive amounts of Scotch.

Update: Christ, have I been doing a lot of these lately or is it just me? Anyway, as wile_e_quixote points out in the comments, this photo does not depict the celebration after Castle Bravo, but a previous exercise involving atomic bombs. We now return you to your regularly scheduled program.

Nuclear Cake [a near life experience]

Eliza may piss and moan about our new arctic hideaway and the lies with which Brownlee lured us into the frosty fortress, but really, where else were we going to put all the equipment? It’s not as if Ross was willing to pony up the shekels to get us a location in a more moderately climed locale. Nor could we simply put off the work, it’s very important!

I’m … I’m not quite sure why it’s important, or what it is we’re exactly doing to be perfectly honest, but Brownlee says our experiments are crucial and the last time I questioned him he injected me with remote controlled nano-electrodes.

Suffice it to say our business is quite serious indeed — as the sepia tones clearly indicate.

Les travailleurs de l’acier [Van Olffen : Dark Roasted Blend]

I cannot even begin to tell you just how difficult being a rancher is at times. Used to be you could stake your claim to a parcel of land, put up some barb wire fence, and let your neonates out to graze. If one of them broke loose, it was simply a matter of leaving out some formula baited traps and waiting. With the explosion in demand for infant meat though, more and more people got in on the baby game and the threat of rustling has become a very real problem.

Thanks to modern science, however, baby barons now have a weapon to fight these thieves. This simple, hand held device uses ultraviolet light to brand your babies, making them easily identifiable. Now you can rest easy knowing that, should some dastardly thief abscond with some of your prized, free-range babies, you — and the sheriff — will have the ability to quickly identify them which means more hangings and, hopefully, less baby rustling. Yes indeed, it’s Science and frontier justice working hand in hand.

So the next time your family sits down to a nice, baby dinner raise a glass to Science; branding our babies today, for a tasty, more secure tomorrow.

New Sun Lamp Held in Hand Brands Babies (Dec, 1938) [Modern Mechanix]

Photos taken during the construction of the the Large Hadron Collider, located on the border of Switzerland and France. The bowels of the facility are dazzling in their complexity and scale. This wire-rimmed sphincter is the “CMS (Compact Muon Solenoid) experiment Tracker Outer Barrel (TOB)”.

Large Hadron Collider nearly ready [The Big Picture]

Zeb Hogan, a biologist who is searching for giant freshwater fish as part of the National Geographic Society’s Megafishes project, poses with a 44lb, giant freshwater ray (Himantura chaophraya) caught in the Maeklong River in Thailand. As monstrous as this fish is, Hogan is convinced that there are fish at least ten times larger, having heard stories of “Cambodian fishermen catching rays that weighed over 1,100lb (500kg) with wingspans of 14ft (4.3m).” He admits, however, that in his five years of searching he has yet to find anything quite that large.

The current world record is held by the Mekong giant catfish and Mr Hogan aims to document and protect freshwater giants that weigh at least 200lb (91kg) or measure 6ft (1.83m) long.

[…]

“Of the two dozen or so species of giant fish, about 70 percent are threatened with extinction,” said Mr Hogan, an assistant research professor at the University of Nevada-Reno.

“We’re getting close to the record and I’m very confident that a fish of record size existed,” he said. “The question is whether it still exists.”

Giant freshwater stingray is just a tiddler [Telegraph]

Scientists at the Museum Victoria in Melbourne will be holding a public dissection of a giant squid caught by fisherman, by accident, in May of this year.

The squid weighs around 245kg, making it the largest giant squid that Australian researchers have encountered and just 30kg lighter than the largest giant squid ever found. It is estimated that, intact, the animal would have been over 12m long.

The dissection will also be streamed live over the very internet you find yourself on at this moment and is scheduled to take place at 11:30 AM AEST/1:30 AM GMT, July 17th. Looking at my handy world clock, it indicates that it is already tomorrow in Australia meaning that the event will be broadcast through time from The Future for my viewing pleasure and may feature scientists with jet-packs. It also means that it is set to begin in roughly two hours.

Update: For all those who missed it, the museum has an unedited, archived video of the entire procedure here.

Public dissection of giant squid [Museum Victoria] : Slashdot : Thanks, Dub Tea!

In a study to test the theory that octopuses have a preferred arm which they use to feed and investigate, sadistic scientists are providing the captive creatures with, among other objects, Rubick’s Cubes.

Claire Little, marine expert at the Sea Life Centre in Weymouth, Dorset, said the study could eventually help to reduce stress among octopuses.

She said: ‘It will be very interesting to see the results.

‘Uniquely, octopuses have more than half their nerves in their arms and have even been shown to partially think with their arms.

‘We hope the study will help the overall well-being of octopuses. They are very susceptible to stress so if they do have a favourite side to be fed on, it could reduce risk to them.”

This woman must be some sort of Rubik’s Cube savant because my experience with what is obviously Hungary’s “Fuck you!” to the world is untold frustration. A more interesting experiment would be to see if an octopus could actually solve one of these devilish puzzles or if, after hours of trying to conquer this Sisyphean conundrum, it merely removes and rearranges all the colored squares in an attempt to fool its captors.

Octopuses given Rubik’s Cubes to find out if they have a favourite tentacle [Daily Mail] : Thanks to Darmus and kid icarus!

All I know is that its highly unlikely that a normal (i.e., not related to Lady Deathstrike) human being could, over time, scratch a hole into their brain cavity using their fingernails (which, again, even over time, would be worn down to nubs in the face of bone) and cause inexplicably green brain matter to leak out. Especially since in order to leak out, it would have to be either melting from high fever, or under pressure due to internal swelling, and either way she’d likely be unconscious, if not dead. Again, the wound probably just got badly infected (with staph or similar) and pustulent, which is a perfectly good reason to send someone to the hospital, especially if they have HIV. Its even possible that between the infection, the external damage, and the HIV, the virus managed to make it to her brain, or trigger a heavy fever, causing the apparent brain damage.

M was probably just misunderstanding or misremembering the incident, which is understandable given the stress she was probably under at the time. Unless I see a medical chart with notes saying “perforation of the skull”, or perhaps a particularly impressive episode of Mythbusters, I’m not buying it.

Comment by Joe Shadows — June 25, 2008 @ 8:17 pm

While Mr. Shadows and I may have our differences — for example: he thinks me a gullible fool and I am fairly certain that he is a Communist — we can both agree that the only way to settle this is to get the Mythbusters on this conundrum post-haste. Hopefully they can construct an itch scratching machine, comprised of a hand made from ballistics jelly and bone connecting to a large motor, designed for the specific purpose of creating a perforation in a severed pig’s head.

Last month the world was astounded by photographs, taken in the Amazon, showing one of the last tribes of uncontacted indigenous people, according to reports at the time. News agencies were quickly setting their presses ablaze with the news, the Casually Racist Victorian Antiquarian Times running the headline “Tribe Of Savages, Unconverted And Unsullied, Found: Fear Of Flying Machine Proves The Need For Our Intervention”.

At least that’s the kind of headline one would expect to have read considering the current reaction to the revelation that, far from lost, the tribe’s existence had been known about since 1910, and that the photographer, one José Carlos Meirelles — working for the Brazilian Indian Protection Agency — deliberately flew out to terrify them with his flying, mechanical dragon photograph them to lend credence to the thinking that the “policy of no contact and protection was working.”

The outrage over this seems to me to be, perhaps, misplaced. I could find few articles from major news agencies claiming that a lost tribe had been discovered. An MSN article even quotes Jose Carlos dos Reis Meirelles, head of the Brazilian government’s National Indian Foundation (FUNAI), as saying

We have been watching this isolated indigenous community for at least 20 years. The idea in revealing the photos was to raise the alarm over the risk threatening them.

This information is repeated in another article by The Associated Press:

Anthropologists have known about the group for some 20 years but released the images now to call attention to fast-encroaching development near the Indians’ home in the dense jungles near Peru.

So, yes, 20 years is not the same as the now revealed 98, however, the fact still remains that the Brazillian government knew of this tribe and did not claim to have just discovered them at the time the photos were taken. There also seems to be some anger over the fact that by flying over this village and photographing them, Meirelles has in fact contacted them in the process. This I can understand, but I have a feeling that, having been recorded as early as 1910, chances are they have been contacted previously, though most likely sans airplane. Anyone care to enlighten me as to why people are so up in arms about this?

Secret of the ‘lost’ tribe that wasn’t [The Observer]

Are you a seal? Are you young, inexperienced and confused? Are you a lake of roiling sexual frustration, mingled with feelings of inadequacy and rage? If so, you may want to seriously consider attempting to rape a king penguin!

At least that’s what scientists seemed to have witnessed on a beach on the sub-Antarctic Marion Island when a fur seal pinned down a king penguin:

“At first glimpse, we thought the seal was killing the penguin,” says Nico de Bruyn, of the Mammal Research Institute at the University of Pretoria, South Africa.

It became clear, however, that the aforementioned seal’s intentions were less than savory:

The 100kg seal first subdued the 15kg penguin by lying on it.

The penguin flapped its flippers and attempted to stand and escape - but to no avail.

The seal then alternated between resting on the penguin, and thrusting its pelvis, trying to insert itself, unsuccessfully.

After 45 minutes the seal gave up, swam into the water and then completely ignored the bird it had just assaulted, the scientists report.

Scientists theorized that the seal, being too young to win the attention of a female, turned his eye on the next available animal. They believe it was a one-off occurrence, as no other instances of this nature have been reported. The penguin seems to have survived the experience unharmed, at least physically. No doubt it will be left with some pretty hefty emotional baggage.

‘Sex pest’ seal attacks penguin [BBC News] : ectochat : Thanks, nic0!

Some webcam footage of the defrosting process being conducted on the half ton colossal squid caught in Antarctic waters in February 2007, and currently housed in a New Zealand lab. The entire process will take up to two day to complete in order to not damage the specimen, as thawing it too fast would mean that the outside would being to rot before the internal organs had fully thawed. Researchers will only have a short time to examine the corpse before it is placed in a preservative, during which time they hope to, among other things, determine the squid’s sex; although the apparent lack of a six and a half foot penis leads them to speculate that it is female. It seems like a logical conclusion. They will also be live webcasts spanning the entire project. After the examination is concluded the squid will be put on display at Te Papa Tongarewa, New Zealand’s national museum in Wellington.

Colossal Squid Thawing; Hints at Even Bigger Beasts [National Geographic News] : YouTube : Thanks to everyone who sent this in!

Festo, a robotics company who has previously designed robots based upon the mechanics of sea creatures, has released video of their newest creations. Based on jellyfish the AquaJelly and Air Jelly are sea and air based, respectively. They are extraordinarily graceful and almost perfectly mimic the movements of their living counterparts. The AquaJelly in particular is especially interesting. The idea is that these autonomous robots can communicate with each other and with aquatic charging stations using LEDs , allowing them to replenish their batteries and work in groups, making it much easier for them to wipe out our naval forces once they achieve self awareness.

Robot Jellyfish [YouTube] : Deep Sea News : Gizmodo : Thanks, Nark

A massive collection of beautiful, Japanese anatomical charts, among other ephemera. I love how they flow from one to the next, creating chains of imagery. The second photo shown above is only a small part of a much longer chain.

Anatomical Charts [Kano Collection, Tohoku University Library] : Morbid Anatomy

I can’t wait for lab grown meat. The possibilities that industrialized in vitro meat production brings are not only ecologically and socially conscious, but potentially deviant as the day is long. The long march of science nearly vibrates with the science community’s eagerness to make human hocks, chimp scampi, rhino roasts, and sure, ethically obtained beef. Yet while supermarkets lined with freezers full of laboratory delights have been the stuff of science fiction for some time; the hour of orgiastic over-indulgence in SmartFlesh is nigh.

Recently, at the In Vitro Meat Symposium in Ås, Norway, an economic analysis was presented that indicates meat grown in tanks would be cost competitive with European beef prices. So while the benefits of lab grown food are blatantly obvious to anyone that stops to think about it for more than a minute, it’s a similarly obvious fact that the almighty dollar (or euro as the case may be) is what really speaks, and the sweet, sweet song of bio-science gone oh so right is tickling my tympanics.

But doubt runs rampant among freak meat elite, with experts revealing skepticism as to whether “there is a large market of early adopters who want to eat test tube meat for environmental, health or ethical reasons.” I am here to calm your quaking. Not only is there a market for it, but if the readership of any number of blogs in my feed reader is an indication, the market is not only large but eager and deeply, deeply disturbed.

With a little luck — and a basement full of “missing” puritanical no-fun-niks — the first Ectomo barbecue will be vegan friendly.

Tube Meat [grinding.be : Wired]