Kazuhiro Watanabe at Washington Square Park in New York
Some people will go to great lengths to have their own little piece of human history. This fashion designer from Japan felt that 3 feet and 8.6 inches was the length he needed to go to get his, and it worked!
The Huffington Post writes:
It took three cans of hairspray, one large bottle of gel — and, of course, 15 years to grow it out — but Kazuhiro Watanabe has made history.
The Japanese designer has shattered the Guinness World Record by more than a foot with his 3-foot, 8.6-inch mohawk.
You can ask why he did it, but the answer is just too obvious: “I really wanted to be in the Guinness World Record book,” he told The Huffington Post through a translator.
Watanabe and a hairdresser were in New York’s Washington Square Park today to launch the Guinness World Records 2013edition.
“I considered trying to set the record for drinking most tabasco sauce,” said the 5-foot-7 Watanabe, who usually wears clips to keep his hair down.
This is the world’s first gyroscopically stabilized cycle and can't fall over.
Here’s a weird little guy that might be changing the face of transportation forever.
Tech Crunch writes:
The recent influx of both high- and low-end EVs and electric motorcycles have shown promise, but current battery technology is still limiting, and the cost of entry is far too high with the benefits of switching from petrol-powered vehicles not being quite as obvious or apparent in the near term.
Now imagine a vehicle that’s smaller than a Smart Car, nearly a third of the price of a Nissan Leaf ($32,500), safer than a motorcycle with a range capacity that just lets you drive and won’t ever tip over? What you get is Lit Motors‘ C-1, the world’s first gyroscopically stabilized, two-wheeled all-electric vehicle, which launched at TechCrunch Disrupt in San Francisco today. Oh, and it will talk to your smartphone and the cloud. Did I mention that you can’t tip this thing over? (I’ve tried.)
Founder, President, and CTO Danny Kim and his team at Lit Motors have built and approached the C-1 much differently than others have with their respective EVs. Instead of Frankensteining existing technologies, the C-1 has been designed, machined, and built by hand from the ground up in San Francisco. They’ve not only created something unique based on proprietary technology, but have also put together a package that appeals to the “cool kids” and the price-conscious in both America and abroad.
“We aim to be the future of personal transportation,” Kim told me. “By taking our vehicles to the mass market quickly and internationally, we will ease traffic congestion, decrease fuel use, reduce CO2 emissions, create 2,000 to 10,000 green jobs, and allow people to get around quickly and efficiently.”
Seems like everyone is on the Zombie bandwagon these days, even FEMA is getting together an emergency plan for the fabled z-day. You know, just in case.
The Bellingham Herald writes:
No one in emergency preparedness circles really believes the dead will rise and come looking for living people to devour — that weird face-eating incident in Florida aside.
But they do see zombies — the moaning, flesh-eating stars of a plethora of horror novels, comics and movies — as a brain-grabbing way to get people to think about preparing for large-scale disasters.
The Federal Emergency Management Agency became the latest federal government agency to shamble onto the zombie bandwagon, following in the footsteps of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the agency that captured the hearts of internet geeks everywhere when it unveiled its “Zombie Apocalypse” preparedness page and social media campaign last year.
“We need something that gets their attention, so I applaud that,” said Richland Fire Chief Grant Baynes, who is involved in local disaster planning.
Baynes likened getting the public engaged in emergency planning to “trying to sell an umbrella on a sunny day.”
In a place that’s relatively disaster-free — the Tri-Cities doesn’t get catastrophic hurricanes, tornadoes, earthquakes or floods as other parts of the United States — residents can become complacent and forget that a flu pandemic or some other disaster might be around the corner.
Baynes said it’s good that people feel safe, but he’d also like them to be mindful that life is unpredictable.
“Preparedness isn’t just a technical thing,” he said. “It’s mental. It’s an attitude. It’s that same attitude that says, ‘I know there is that potential, so I’ll buy this umbrella now while I have the opportunity.’ “
The mysteries surrounding one of the most famous pharaoh’s death are a constant facet of investigation by archeologists and historians from around the world and this time, they turned up with some new information!
New Scientist writes:
TUTANKHAMUN’S mysterious death as a teenager may finally have been explained. And the condition that cut short his life may also have triggered the earliest monotheistic religion, suggests a new review of his family history.
But all of these theories have missed one vital point, says Hutan Ashrafian, a surgeon with an interest in medical history at Imperial College London. Tutankhamun died young with a feminised physique, and so did his immediate predecessors.
Paintings and sculptures show that Smenkhkare, an enigmatic pharaoh who may have been Tutankhamun’s uncle or older brother, and Akhenaten, thought to have been the boy king’s father, both had feminised figures, with unusually large breasts and wide hips. Two pharaohs that came before Akhenaten – Amenhotep III and Tuthmosis IV – seem to have had similar physiques. All of these kings died young and mysteriously, says Ashrafian. “There are so many theories, but they’ve focused on each pharaoh individually.”
Ashrafian found that each pharaoh died at a slightly younger age than his predecessor, which suggests an inherited disorder, he says. Historical accounts associated with the individuals hint at what that disorder may have been.
“It’s significant that two [of the five related pharaohs] had stories of religious visions associated with them,” says Ashrafian. People with a form of epilepsy in which seizures begin in the brain’s temporal lobe are known to experience hallucinations and religious visions, particularly after exposure to sunlight. It’s likely that the family of pharaohs had a heritable form of temporal lobe epilepsy, he says.
This diagnosis would also account for the feminine features. The temporal lobe is connected to parts of the brain involved in the release of hormones, and epileptic seizures are known to alter the levels of hormones involved in sexual development. This might explain the development of the pharaohs’ large breasts. A seizure might also be to blame for Tutankhamun’s fractured leg, says Ashrafian (Epilepsy & Behavior, doi.org/h8s).
Ancient warriors have been found frozen in a bog for 2,000 years.
What seems like a cool set-up for an action-horror movie “An ancient army of warriors has been uncovered, frozen in time in a bog of Denmark with weapons and shields intact” except unlike what would happen in the movies, the skeletons lie in their graves silently, only offering a wealth of knowledge and a rare glimpse into our past.Ah… oh well, maybe the next army found buried underground will be a bit more scary.
Discovery News writes:
The remains of hundreds of warriors have resurfaced from a Danish bog, suggesting that a violent event took place at the site about 2,000 years ago.
Discovered in the Alken Enge wetlands near Lake Mossø in East Jutland, Denmark, the skeletal remains tell the story of an entire army’s apparent sacrifice.
Following work done in 2009, archaeologists have so far unearthed the hacked bones of more than 200 individuals.
Skeletal remains include a fractured skull and a sliced thighbone. An abundance of well preserved axes, spears, clubs and shields have been also unearthed.
“It’s clear that this must have been a quite far-reaching and dramatic event that must have had profound effect on the society of the time,” project manager Mads Kähler Holst, professor of archaeology at Aarhus University, said.
Showing distinct weapon marks, the Iron Age bones can be found all over a large area.
“We’ve done small test digs at different places in a 40-hectare (100-acre) wetlands area, and new finds keep emerging,” Ejvind Hertz of Skanderborg Museum, who is directing the dig, said.
In fact, the find is so massive that the archaeologists aren’t counting on being able to excavate all of it.
A simple setup and this roach can be accurately remote-controlled.
I feel like whenever a big giant roach crosses my path, it comes right at me as if it’s being remotely controlled by someone who has learned my deepest, darkest fears and is using them to torment and ‘bug’ me. Well, it seems I may be right!
Scientists from North Carolina have developed remotely-controlled roaches, not to torment me, more like to help find and save survivors of natural disasters.
National Geographic writes:
The sight of a cockroach scuttling across the floor makes most of us shudder, but in a disaster, roaches might prove to be our new best friends.
Cockroaches that are surgically transformed into remote-controlled “biobots” could help locate earthquake survivors in hard-to-access areas. This new video from North Carolina State University’s iBionics Laboratory shows how the lab’s enhanced roaches can be steered with surprising precision.
To learn more, Amanda Fiegl spoke to assistant professor of engineering Alper Bozkurt, who led the roach biobot project.
What exactly is a biobot? Is it like a cyborg, a combination of a living organism and a robot?
“Biobot” is short for “biological robot.” It is the first stage of creating what we would call an insectcyborg.
Currently, we can steer these roaches remotely and make them stop, go, and turn. If we can have them interact independently with the technologies we’ve surgically implanted in them, then they will become true cyborgs.
Is it hard to perform surgery on a cockroach?
No, it’s quite simple. Insects can be anesthetized by putting them in the fridge for a few hours—the cold basically makes them hibernate, so they don’t move. Then you just need tweezers and a microscope.
We do a simple surgery to insert the electrodes in the roaches’ antennae and cerci [rear sensors]. We also use medical-grade epoxy to glue tiny magnets to their backs, so that we can just snap on the backpack containing the wireless control system.
Your paper mentions that these biobots could help rescue earthquake survivors. How, exactly?
Their backpacks can carry a locator beacon and a tiny microphone to pick up cries for help. Of course, a human operator or computer still has to be listening and steering them. Our biobots are basically just beasts of burden. They could also carry a camera or any other kind of miniaturized sensor one can imagine.
These experiments were done in a very controlled laboratory environment, on a flat surface, so we are now in the process of building test-beds that mimic some real-life scenarios. I don’t think it will be very long before we can deploy them to actually help rescue people.
Natasha, shown above, has a wide range of abilities her average chimp-mates do not.
The gap between man and monkey seems to be growing smaller all the time, whether the humans are getting dumber or the apes are getting smarter has still yet to be decided.
Discovery News writes:
Certain apes appear to be much smarter than others, with at least one chimpanzee now called “exceptional” when compared to other chimps.
The standout chimp, an adult female in her 20s named Natasha, scored off the charts in a battery of tests. The findings, published in the latest Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B, suggest that geniuses exist among non-humans, but that no one attribute constitutes intelligence.
Instead, a perfect storm of abilities seems to come together to create the Einsteins of the animal kingdom. Natasha’s keepers at the Ngamba Island chimpanzee sanctuary in Uganda knew she was special even before the latest study.
“The caretakers named Natasha as the smartest chimpanzee, precisely the same chimpanzee that our tests had revealed to be exceptional,” study authors Esther Herrmann and Josep Call of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology wrote.
“All three of the most experienced caretakers included Natasha in their lists (of the most intelligent chimps),” they added.
Natasha has made headlines over the months for her attention-grabbing antics. For instance, she repeatedly escaped her former enclosure, surrounded by an electric fence. She did this by tossing branches at the fence until she didn’t see a spark, letting her know that the power was off.
She also learned how to tease humans, beckoning them to throw food her way, only to spray the unsuspecting person with water.
A skydiver survived falling 13,000ft without a working parachute.
Still not sure if skydiving is something you want to do? Well, you can read this story and know that even if your ‘chute doesn’t open, you can still survive the few thousand feet drop like this man did in New Zealand just the other day1
The Telegraph writes:
Liam Dunne, 35, who is a father of two, broke his back after dramatically crashing into the ground at high speed and landing in the soft, waterlogged area.
His reserve parachute opened at the last moment on the horrifying descent at a festival in Moteuko, New Zealand, but it was still too late to prevent him suffering serious injury.
Mr Dunne, originally from St Annes, Lancashire, was treated at the scene by medics and taken to a specialist spinal unit in Christchurch where doctors have advised him he should walk again.
Since the accident two weeks ago, he has astonished doctors with his recovery after undergoing surgery to insert metal pins into his shattered spine.
Speaking from his hospital bed, Mr Dunne said: “Those last 1,000 feet it was like ‘here we go, this is it’. It wasn’t nice. But that said, it was a one in a million accident and a one in a million save.
“Skydiving is an awesome sport, and I’ve done 4,000 jumps and never had a problem.”
Mr Dunne, who now lives in Taupo, said his canopy opened normally after he jumped from 3,900m at a festival. But he went into an unrecoverable spin, had to ditch his main chute, and couldn’t find the reserve canopy’s handle.
It finally opened just 228m from the ground.
He said: “As my reserve chute was coming out I realised it was too late, so I just braced for the impact.
“Luckily I hit the softest patch of ground on the whole airfield. I bounced hard and my whole left side went numb.
“It felt like I had broken every bone in my body, and I couldn’t breathe. I was just sitting there dying. But my friend landed next to me, and she said ‘you’re all right, you can breathe’.
“She looked at my leg and said ‘look, it’s still there, it’s not deformed or anything’.
“She was with me the whole time. Then the ambulance came and filled me full of drugs.
“I probably ought to be dead the speed I hit. Twelve weeks of spinal rehab and I’ll be fine.
Seems like one of this’s years presidential candidates is full of huge ideas for those not currently being spoken for, although lacking in a few areas, mainly having a pulse, Mr A. Zombie believes he has a fighting, or should I say “biting” chance to come out on top in 2012.
The Telegraph writes:
After being helped into a NASCAR uniform the zombie candidate was lifted into a race car and taken on a few laps around Charlotte’s Speedway track.
Mr A. Zombie and his wife are part of a promotional stunt by American network AMC to get their post-apocalyptic television series The Walking Dead on the Dish Network, that dropped the show after a contract dispute.
“My husband is running for president, because he could have taken a certain issue issue lying down, well, because he was already lying down, but he decided to stand up and pledge to fight for equal viewing opportunities for all,” Ms Morgan-Zombie said.
She added her husband was working tirelessly to improve the lives of his fellow zombies and get them more jobs.
“He has vowed to increase the workforce for every zombie out there,” she said.
Some of the remains belong to well known ice age creatures, some have yet to be identified.
While building a new wastewater treatment plant near Mexico City, workers discovered the largest cache of ice age animal bones ever.
The Telegraph writes:
The bones could be between 10,000 and 12,000 years old and may include a human tooth from the late Pleistocene period, Mexico‘s National Institute of Anthropology and History said on Thursday.
Tusks, skulls, jawbones, horns, ribs, vertebrae and shells were discovered 65 feet deep in Atotonilco de Tula, a town in the state of Hidalgo, as workers built a drain, the institute said.
These remains belong to a range of species including mastodons, mammoths, camels, horses, deer and glyptodons, the armadillo’s ancestor. Some bones may belong to bison, while others have not been identified.
Archeologists have worked for the past five months to recover the bones.
“It is the largest and most varied discovery of extinct megafauna found together in the Mexico basin,” archeologist Alicia Bonfil Olivera said in a statement.
