August 2012 – Museum of the Weird

Posted on August 31, 2012 by MOTW Admin

‘CYBORG’ TISSUE CREATED WITH LIVING CELLS AND ELECTRONICS

The line between human and robot begins to blur.

The future is now folks!

Scientist’s have developed human tissue that is half electronics and half organic cells!

New Scientist writes:

They beat like real heart cells, but the rat cardiomyocytes in a dish at Harvard University are different in one crucial way. Snaking through them are wires and transistors that spy on each cell’s electrical impulses. In future, the wires might control their behaviour too.

Versions of this souped-up, “cyborg” tissue have been created for neurons, muscle and blood vessels. They could be used to test drugs or as the basis for more biological versions of existing implants such as pacemakers. If signals can also be sent to the cells, cyborg tissue could be used in prosthetics or to create tiny robots.

“It allows one to effectively blur the boundary between electronic, inorganic systems and organic, biological ones,” says Charles Lieber, who leads the team behind the cyborg tissue.

Artificial tissue can already be grown on three-dimensional scaffolds made of biological materials that are not electrically active. And electrical components have been added to cultured tissue before, but not integrated into its structure, so they were only able to glean information from the surface.

Lieber’s team combined these strands of work to create electrically active scaffolds. They created 3D networks of conductive nanowires studded with silicon sensors. Crucially, the wires had to be flexible and extremely small, to avoid impeding the growth of tissue. The scaffold also contained traditional biological materials such as collagen.

The researchers were able to grow rat neurons, heart cells and muscle in these hybrid meshes. In the case of the heart cells, they started to contract just like normal cells, and the researchers used the network to read out the rate of the beats.

When they added a drug that stimulates heart cell contraction, they detected an increase in the rate, indicating the tissue was behaving like normal and that the network could sense such changes.

Lieber’s team also managed to grow an entire blood vessel about 1.5 centimetres long from human cells, with wires snaking through it. By recording electrical signals from inside and outside the vessel– something that was never possible before– the team was able to detect electrical patterns that they say could give clues to inflammation, whether tissue has undergone changes that make it prone to tumour formation or suggest impending heart disease.

FIRST MUSIC EVER PLAYED ON MARS

Pop music artist Will.i.am’s newest song “Reach For The Stars” is the first man-made made music to be broadcasted on another planet.

The Telegraph writes:

The extraordinary feat was among several astonishing achievements by US space agency’s £1.6 billion Curiosity rover, which landed on the surface of the Red Planet earlier this month.

The Black Eyed Peas rapper’s song, titled Reach for the Stars, was beamed more than 300 million miles back to Nasa’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in Pasadena, California.

The first music broadcast from another planet came after the planetary explorer beamed back incredible high-resolution, colour portrait images from Mars.

Nasa staff clapped their hands and held their arms in the air, smiling and swaying to the rhythm during the slightly less scientific use of the rover’s hi-tech equipment and communications ability.

The achievement also gave great delight to dozens of students who gathered at the laboratory to listen.

“It seems surreal,” said will.i.am, who is also an actor.

He explained how Charles Bolden, the Nasa administrator, had called him to suggest beaming a song back from Mars as part of educational outreach efforts by the US space agency.

The song, which includes lyrics “I know that Mars might be far, but baby it ain’t really that far”, involved a 40-piece orchestra including French horns, rather than a more modern electronically-generated sound.

The 37-year-old, whose real name William James Adams, told a student audience that he didn’t “want to do a song that was done on a computer,” given that it was going to be the first piece of music broadcast back to the Earth from Mars.

“I wanted to show human collaboration and have an orchestra there and something that would be timeless, and translated in different cultures, not have like a hip hop beat or a dance beat,” he said.

THE HOVER BIKE OF THE FUTURE AVAILABLE TODAY

The Aerofex hover vehicle looks a little familiar.

If we weren’t living in enough of ‘The World of the Future” as we’ve seen in novels, movies and television for your liking, it looks like someone has taken a step in the right direction… up.

Space.com writes:

A resurrected hover vehicle won’t fly through dense forests as effortlessly as the “Star Wars” speeder bikes from “Return of the Jedi,” but its intuitive controls could someday allow anyone to fly it without pilot training.

The aerial vehicle resembles ascience fiction flying bike with two ducted rotors instead of wheels, but originates from a design abandoned in the 1960s because of stability and rollover problems. Aerofex, a California-based firm, fixed the stability issue by creating a mechanical system — controlled by two control bars at knee-level — that allows the vehicle to respond to a human pilot’s leaning movements and natural sense of balance.

“Think of it as lowering the threshold of flight, down to the domain of ATV’s (all-terrain vehicles),” said Mark De Roche, an aerospace engineer and founder of Aerofex.

Such intuitive controls could allow physicians to fly future versions of the vehicle to visit rural patients in places without roads, or enable border patrol officers to go about their duties without pilot training. All of it happens mechanically without the need for electronics, let alone complicated artificial intelligence or flight software. [See Hover ‘Bike’ Fly (Video)]

“It essentially captures the translations between the two in three axis (pitch, roll and yaw), and activates the aerodynamic controls required to counter the movement — which lines the vehicle back up with the pilot,” De Roche told InnovationNewsDaily. “Since [the pilot’s] balancing movements are instinctive and constant, it plays out quite effortlessly to him.”

FOOTAGE OF THE CURIOSITY ROVER LANDING ON MARS IN HI-DEFINITION

The original, but quite shaky and hard to view, footage has been re-done in beautiful HD.

You have got to watch this:

The LA Times writes:

You may have seen video of Curiosity’s descent before, but you haven’t seen it like this — with the craters on Mars rendered in high definition, the contrast amped up, and the whole thing set to a string score by Kevin Macleod that helps heighten the grandeur, and also the loneliness, of the rover’s descent to the red planet.

(Never underestimate the importance of a soundtrack!)

Consider it the Mars Curiosity descent post-production video. It’s like the original, but better.

The video was put together by Dominic Muller, known on Reddit as Godd2, reports iO9.

On the video’s YouTube page Muller explains that he used an editing technique called frame interpolation, which allowed him to take the original choppy video released by NASA and smooth it out. He writes that it took him four straight days to put it together.

You can find a thorough and technical explanation of how Muller made this video on Reddit.

Or you can just watch this over and over again and think about how awesome Mars looks.

As one commenter wrote, “It’s weird that we’re looking at another world.”

MEET VENUS THE CHIMERA CAT WITH TWO FACES

Venus has a genetic condition that causes her face and eyes to be of different colors.

This is pretty cool! Due to a genetic condition called ‘Chimerism” Venus the cat has two complete different hair color and patterns perfectly split down the middle of her face and, due to another condition called heterochromia, she has two different colored eyes as well!

Here’s a video showing the beautiful cat just hanging out:

Daily Mail writes:

When there seems to be a new cute kitten gaining YouTube fame each week, it’s tough to stand out from the cat crowd.

But that’s certainly not a problem for Venus – the ‘two-faced’ cat who is the internet star du jour.

The feline’s face is perfectly divided in two – one half is jet black while the other is calico. And, as if this wasn’t enough, her eyes are different colours too – one is ice blue, the other is green.

Venus is known as a chimera cat because of her genetic composition and her different eye colours are caused by heterochromia.

Janus, the Roman god with two faces, would have perhaps been a more obvious deity to name the three-year-old cat after, even if she is a female.

Venus has several YouTube videos which have been seen about 154,000 times with thousands clicking the ‘like’ button.

Unsurprisingly, Venus now has her own Facebook page too where she has attracted more than 22,000 fans.

However, Venus is learning that world-wide fame has its downsides too as she has been unfavourably likened to Harvey Dent, Batman’s nemesis Two-Face.

Venus’ proud owner describes her lovingly as a ‘gentle’ and ‘perfect’ pet with a deceptively big appetite.

‘As tiny as she is she likes to pick the giant pieces of food from the dog food bowl rather than eat her cat food,’ the owner writes on Venus’ Facebook page.

Posted on August 26, 2012 by MOTW Admin

SILVER DISC SEEN FLYING OVER NEW YORK STATE

What could this be flying above Vestal, NY?

WBNG 12 ACTION NEWS Writes:

Vestal, NY (WBNG Binghamton) One viewer says he saw an unidentified flying object in the Southern Tier sky.

Brian Titus says he was at Lourdes Hospital in Binghamton, when he saw something rising behind a hill in Vestal.

In an email, Titus wrote, “It sat there for about ten seconds and then it shot up like a bullet and vanished.”

He says at least ten people saw it happen.

Minutes later when he was coming home, Titus saw the U.F.O. again.

During this second sighting, Titus snapped the picture.

Titus wrote, “I am so exited and freaked out at the same time.”

HAVE WE FOUND AMELIA EARHART’S PLANE WRECKAGE?

Researchers believe they've found the actual debris field from Amelia Earhart's legendary last flight.

The mystery of Amelia Earhart has intrigued the world ever since her disappearance on what would have been her record-breaking around-the-world flight in 1937.

Researchers, conspiracists, and just plain curious people from all over continue to investigate and could have possibly found her!

ABC News writes:

Forensic imaging specialists have found what looks like a wheel and other landing gear off the coast of Nikumaroro Island in the Pacific Ocean, right where analysts and archeologists think Amelia Earhart’s plane went down in 1937.

“We don’t know whether it’s her plane, but what we have is a debris field in a place where there should be a debris field if what we had put together based on the evidence that we had is correct,” said Ric Gillespie, executive director of The International Group for Historic Aircraft Recovery (TIGHAR), which led the $2.2 million expedition last month.

During the trip, Gillespie said he was “bummed” because they didn’t see much in the coral reef from their standard video camera. The high definition camera footage couldn’t be viewed in real time, so they had to process it and send it over to forensic analyst Jeff Glickman before they could get any answers.

“On Tuesday afternoon, he calls me and says, ‘You know, there’s stuff here. It looks like manmade debris,” Gillespie said.

So Gillespie compared the logs to his maps and said, “Whoa. What he’s seeing is right where we reasoned things should be.”

Based on the last thing Earhart ever said over the radio, she was on a navigational line called 157337, which has two other islands along it other than Howard Island, which was where Earhart was aiming to land. Although the Navy began looking for her along the route initially, the idea was forgotten until two retired Navy officers approached Gillespie in 1988.

THERE WERE NOT ONE, BUT TWO UFOS THAT CRASHED IN ROSWELL

An Air Force Colonel has come forward to state there were in fact, 2 seperate crashes in Roswell, N.M.

As if the controversy and speculation around that fateful day in Roswell, New Mexico, retired Air Force Colonel Richard French is stirring things up a bit by saying that there were 2 seperate ufos recovered.

Huffington Post writes:

The 1947 UFO controversy of Roswell, N.M. is like a bad penny: It keeps turning up.

The legend, rehashed by conspiracy theorists in countless documentaries, revolves around allegations that an unusual object fell from the sky — an object so bizarre that the U.S. Air Force issued a press release that a flying saucer had crashed.

That story was quickly recanted, creating what would become one of the greatest urban legends in American history.

Until now, most debunkers doubted that there was even one crash. Now, in an exclusive interview, retired Air Force Lt. Col. Richard French told The Huffington Post that there were actually two crashes.

This revelation is especially remarkable considering that French was known in the past to debunk UFO stories.

“There were actually two crashes at Roswell, which most people don’t know,” French told HuffPost. “The first one was shot down by an experimental U.S. airplane that was flying out of White Sands, N.M., and it shot what was effectively an electronic pulse-type weapon that disabled and took away all the controls of the UFO, and that’s why it crashed.”

French — an Air Force pilot who was in Alamagordo, N.M., in 1947, being tested in an altitude chamber, an annual requirement for rated officers — was very specific in how the military allegedly brought down what he believes was a spacecraft from another world.

“When they hit it with that electromagnetic pulse — bingo! — there goes all their electronics and, consequently, the UFO was uncontrollable,” said French, who flew hundreds of combat missions in Korea and Southeast Asia, and who held several positions working for Military Intelligence.

Another retired officer doubts French’s story.

“No chance! Zero chance!” said Army Col. John Alexander, whose own top-secret clearance gave him access in the 1980s to official documents and UFO accounts. He created a top-level group of government officials and scientists who determined that, while UFOs are real, they couldn’t find evidence of an official cover-up.

GOOD-INTENTIONED GRAFFITI GOES WRONG

A good intentioned touch-up turned out not-so great.

What started out as a good-intentioned touch-up of a 100 year old painting inside a church near Zaragoza, Spain turned out to be, to put it nicely, quite the poorly done “restoration” of the work of art feature Jesus himself.

Entertainment on Today writes:

Would you think to match your home-grown painting skills against a classical artist? Probably not, but that’s just what a well-intentioned woman in her 80s did recently in Spain.

The three photos above tell the tale. The image on the left is the original work, a century-old oil painting of Christ called “Ecce Homo (Behold the Man)” that was painted on a column inside a church near Zaragoza, Spain, by artist Elias Garcia Martinez.

Over the years, the work began to deteriorate, as shown in the second image. According to the Centre de Estudios Borjanos, the unnamed amateur artist (without permission from the church, needless to say) thought she could improve the work and set to work with paints and brushes. The third picture is the result.

The BBC reports that the woman realized her mistake and contacted Juan Maria Ojeda, a city council member in charge of cultural affairs for the area. “I think she had good intentions,” Ojeda told the BBC.

A team of art restoration experts is reportedly examining the painting, will quiz the woman on what materials she used in her attempt, and will figure out how best to proceed.

Read more at todayentertainment.today.com

Posted on August 22, 2012 by MOTW Admin

MAN FINDS 10 YEAR OLD LOST FORK… IN HIS STOMACH

The fork had remained intact inside his stomach despite lying in a pool of stomach acid for a decade. - Caters News

Apparently one meal didn’t go quite the way Lee Gardner of Cudworth, England, instead of swallowing his food, he swallowed the utensil!

BBC News writes:

Doctors operating on a man who was taken to hospital with stomach pains discovered a 9in long plastic fork that he swallowed a decade ago.

Lee Gardner was taken to Barnsley Hospital when he started vomiting blood and having cramps.

He said he was told the fork, which he swallowed 10 years ago, would pass through his system naturally so he did not think to mention it to doctors.

Surgeon Hanis Shiwani said Mr Gardner was lucky there was not more damage.

Mr Gardner, from Cudworth, Barnsley, said: “I can’t believe it. I have never had any problems with my stomach except once a couple of years ago I remember thinking I felt like something had lodged when I bent over awkwardly.

“But the advice at the time was that it would just pass through my system, and as that was so many years before I really didn’t think it could be the fork.”