[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hv7oxhUNrnY&version=3&hl=en_US]
Month: May 2013
MASSIVE HURRICANE ON SATURN
Thanks to NASA’s Cassini spacecraft scientists have caught the first glimpse of a hurricane 1,250 miles (2,000 kilometers) wide within an ambiguous six-sided weather pattern known as the hexagon. The eye alone is twenty times larger than any storm ever recorded on Earth with wind speeds reaching 330mph (150 meters per second), swirling around Saturn’s north pole. Scientists will be studying the storm closely in an effort to find a deeper understanding of Earth’s own hurricanes. While there is no actual body of water near to this particular storm the study will be based on the way in which Saturn’s atmosphere uses the water vapor contained within it.
Last week on the NASA website, Andrew Ingersoll, a Cassini imaging team member at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena stated, “We did a double take when we saw this vortex because it looks so much like a hurricane on Earth. But there it is at Saturn, on a much larger scale, and it is somehow getting by on the small amounts of water vapor in Saturn’s hydrogen atmosphere.”
The intense similarities between Earth’s hurricanes and the storms on Saturn are striking, even given the vast difference in the atmospheric compositions of the two planets. Saturn’s atmosphere is primarily made of the simple molecules hydrogen and helium. There is also a large quantity of sulfur, which gives the planet its yellowish hue. The storm spied by Cassini on Saturn has been in rotation since at least 2004, when the spacecraft first arrived at the planet. The hurricane appears to be stuck at the north pole. Without a major change in the atmosphere of the planet, it is anyone’s guess just how long it will remain.
For more information about Cassini and its mission, visit: http://www.nasa.gov/cassini and http://saturn.jpl.nasa.gov.
MAYAN PYRAMID BULLDOZED FOR GRAVEL
This is one of those stories that makes me cringe at the idea of such a piece of history being destroyed so carelessly. A pre-Columbian Mayan temple in Belize was bulldozed by a road construction crew on a quest for gravel for road-filler.
The Noh Mul temple was one of the country’s largest pyramids, estimated to be nearly 2,300 years old. After the destruction, only the very core of the temple remains, an epic loss for archaeological world.
“It is incredible that someone would actually have the gall to destroy this building out here,” said Dr. John Morris of the Belizean Institute of Archaeology. “There is absolutely no way that they would not know that these are Maya mounds.”
While the ruins lay on private land, under Belizean law, any pre-Hispanic ruins come under government protection. Police are investigating and possible criminal charges are to be leveled against the construction company.
BIGFOOT SHOT BY TURKEY HUNTER
The guys over at Ghost Theory spied an unusual police report siting the shooting of “Bigfoot” by a Pennsylvanian turkey hunter. The report was accompanied by a photo taken on May 14, 2013 of the footprint which led the hunter to believe that it was indeed the legendary Sasquatch. We’ll be following this report through the Pennsylvanian Bigfoot Society for updates.
MASSIVE FLORIDA PYTHON CAPTURED
One of the largest Burmese Python in recorded history was captured and killed in the Florida Everglades this week. The female snake weighed in at a whopping 128 pounds with a length of 18 feet, 8 inches. Jason Leon spied the snake in a rural area southeast of Miami-Dade County and decided to take it upon himself, with the assistance of his friend Veronica, to kill the snake using a knife.
Wildlife officials have battled the growing epidemic of wild Burmese Pythons in Florida, an unfortunate problem stemming from people releasing their pets into the wild when they are unable to care for them any longer. The snakes have begun breeding at an alarming rate, threatening the local wildlife they prey on. The Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Committee have recently sanctioned the hunting of wild pythons in the million-acre Everglades. 63 pythons were captured as 1,600 people took part in the month-long hunt. Until now, the largest recorded python measured 17 feet, 7 inches.
BRIGHT EXPLOSIONS ON THE MOON
[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IYloGuUZCFM&hl=en_US&version=3]
MINE-HUNTING HONEYBEES
Croatian researchers are training honeybees to locate the 750 landmines along the country’s borders left over from the Balkan Wars. Professor Nikola Kezic of Zagreb University has discovered a way to utilize the honeybee’s powerful sense of smell in order to hone in on mines buried in the ground. By placing a mixture of sugar and TNT near various feeding points, the bees learn to associate food with the scent of explosives. Nearly 466 square miles are thought to still contain landmines—since 1991, over 2,500 people have been killed by landmines in Croatia.
“Our basic conclusion is that the bees can clearly detect this target, and we are very satisfied,” said Kezic. The main issue in the training of honeybees resides in the mastery of the entire colony as opposed to just a few lone bees.
Kezic is also one of the leaders of a larger multimillion-euro program called “Tiramisu,” to detect land mines. Once the reliability of trained honeybees is confirmed, they will be utilized to uncover the mines otherwise missed by de-miners in an area. In the past, dogs and rats have been used. However, their bodyweight would often detonate the mines. Bees, on the other hand, are light enough to not disturb the explosives and their movements can be tracked with heat-seeking cameras.
THE MAN WITH HALF A HEAD
Carlos “Halfsy” Rodriguez is being called the new anti-drug poster boy after a horrific drug and alcohol-related car accident forced doctors to remove half of his skull.
“I was barred out on drugs. I was driving and I hit a pole and flew out the front window and landed on my head,” Carlos Rodriguez said in a new warning message on You Tube.
At the age of fourteen, Carlos Rodriguez found himself in a high-speed car chase in a stolen car with his cousin and their mutual friend. The impact of the accident caused surgeons to remove large sections of flesh and bone in order to save Rodriguez’s life. Unfortunately it seems that the grisly near-death experience has not altered his behavior. Rodriguez still partakes daily of illegal substances such as marijuana.
Well, if losing half of your head doesn’t sober you up, nothing will.
BETTY STEFLIC BUBBLE CREATURES
One adventurous nature buff at the Betty Steflic Nature Preserve in Flagler Beach, Florida spied a bizarre creature undulating within a shallow saltwater cove at low tide. What YouTuber NightfallFXANS is now calling “Bubble Creatures” resemble a cross between a jellyfish and a large amoeba.
One explanation presented was that these are actually Bryozoans. Bryozoans are a rare phylum of aquatic invertebrate commonly referred to as “moss animals.” These filter feeders are found in a wide range of environments from the poles to brackish marine waters, siphoning their food through a crown of tentacles lined with cilia. The creatures were originally called “Polyzoa”, but was renamed “Bryozans” in 1831.
However, after further research, Doug Smith from the UMass Biology Department has determined that the “Bubble Creatures” are actually single-celled algae containing gas. Now, this may seem even more innocuous than a menacing unknown species lurking in the shallows of the Floridian nature preserve, but no. According to an article on Science Daily these little creatures can be quite the players of the microbial world! Perhaps these seemingly harmless “Bubble Creatures” are up to up to no good after all? I knew those amoebas looked shifty.
I think we’ll keep our eye on these little guys for the time being, just to be on the safe side…
[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G3xir5RAdO8&version=3&hl=en_US]
INSECTS BY STORM
Several nights ago, my coworker Teebo and I were prepared for a busy night at the Museum of the Weird, when a freak electrical storm decided to strike Austin. The storm brought little rain, but remained hunkered over the central downtown area for hours where its spectacular displays of sideways lightning illuminated the skyline until the wee hours of dawn. At approximately 11pm is when the bugs began to swarm. Flying tree roaches, to be exact, demurely labeled in the South as “Palmetto Bugs.”
I returned from conducting one of the final tours of the night to find Teebo poised with the broom over one arm like she was waiting for the zombie hordes to stagger in through the front door.
Wild-eyed she exclaimed, “You missed it!”
“Missed what?” I asked, frozen in place.
“The roaches! Hundreds of them! They were coming in the door from the street in a flood,” she proclaimed. “See! There’s another one!”
Teebo swung the broom with killer efficiency, bringing about the deaths of several more flying tree roaches as I screamed like a little girl (not my finest moment).
After the adrenaline began to subside and the swarms lessened to a few dazed and confused bugs staggering as drunkenly through the door as the late-night patrons, I started to think about the cause of the sudden infestation.
There is a scientific connection between insects and electrical fields. Ants swarm around electrical lines and have been found to play house in the back of television sets, lamp sockets, and computers. I personally lost an expensive Mac in college when ants decided to have a Burning Man party in the tower. There are several theories as to why insects are attracted by the electrical frequencies put out by our human technology. Perhaps these frequencies are more attuned to the white noise of their own insect chatter and, thus, they are drawn to it, believing it to be the source of a larger hive?
One study has shown that bees use a flower’s electrical field to locate the pollen and vice versa. Flowers emit an electrical frequency designed to assist an insect’s internal navigation system. The voltage changes to signify when the nectar or pollen levels are low. This research was conducted by a team from the University of Bristol, which studied almost 200 bees collecting pollen from petunias.
In an article in the UK Daily Mail, PhD student Dominic Clark, from the University of Bristol’s School of Biological Sciences, said, “Flowers are like giant advertising billboards for bees. We have known for a long time that flowers use colour and smell to advertise to their pollinators. More recently though, it is being discovered that flowers take advantage of more and more of their pollinators’ senses to send their messages.”
It has also been proven that a bee’s buzz creates an electric current which allows them to communicate with other bees. An article in the Huffington Post quotes, “Tests show that the electric fields, which can be quite strong, deflect the bees’ antennae, which, in turn, provide signals to the brain through specialized organs at their bases.”
How do electrical fields from pollinating flowers relate to the swarming palmetto bugs? Massive, highly charged electrical storms emit frequencies far beyond an insect’s own natural frequencies or those of manmade electrical structures, charging the air and driving insects into frenzies of unnatural behavior. What we witnessed was an example of the bizarre behavior that freak electrical storms can cause in the bug world.
Of course, this is just my personal theory based on what I’ve read and observed. They could have been fleeing a psychotic ally cat, for all I know. If it ever happens again, however, Teebo and I are prepared. We’ll just whip out one of the giant Madagascar hissing cockroaches we keep to feed Torgo, the 30-pound Nile Monitor Lizard upstairs, and show these Texas bugs what a real roach looks like.