Kākāpō

The kākāpō (Strigops habroptilus), a bird native to New Zealand that is being brought back from the brink of extinction (there are only 126 left), is described as "eccentric." It doesn't fly, and its tail feathers often become worn from dragging on the ground. Its call can be incredibly loud (being carried by the wind up to 3mi). And it has a distinctive musty odor, as well as a keen sense of smell. Mark Carwardine of the BBC describes some of its peculiarities:

"Strangely, not only has it forgotten how to fly, it also seems to have forgotten that it has forgotten how to fly. Legend has it that a seriously worried kakapo will sometimes run up a tree and jump out of it, whereupon it flies like a brick and lands in a graceless heap on the ground. It may also be the longest-lived bird in the world, with a suspected life expectancy of about 90 years. None of the kakapos known to scientists have yet died of old age and the chances are that some of the youngsters will out-live the people who are studying them. Perhaps this is because they seem to do everything more slowly than other birds: they are the Amazonian manatees of the bird world."

Also called an owl parrot or a night parrot (it is nocturnal), the kākāpō camouflages itself with its moss-green feathers, which are exceptionally soft. Although both sexes are robust (despite being vegetarian), females are smaller than males, which can weigh up to 9lbs. It has a mating behavior unique among parrots, but the object of its affections can be a human's head as easily as another bird's nether regions: "Saving the kakapo faced several hurdles – the slow-breeding bird was often hand-reared and sometimes tried to mate with their handlers – forcing rangers to wear rubber  helmets dotted with dimples to try to collect kakapo sperm."  This I had to see! And here's the example I found:

"Shagged by a rare parrot"

Last Chance To See

BBC

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Selected previous posts about birds:

Sings with wings

An owl for each

Pale penguins

Whoopers grounded

Hummingbirds

Vultures

Rolled out

When I was researching hikers who fell into crevasses and were not recovered, for my book Modern Mummies, someone put me on to Dr. Edda Amspach of the Institut für Gerichtliche Medizin der Medizinischen Universität, Innsbruck, Austria,as the expert on glacier bodies. Dr. Amsach has studied the sites where accidents happened in relation to where the bodies surfaced (sometimes decades later) and explained it by the natural movement of the glacier. She writes, "Generally, fatal casualties on glaciers remain in firn and glacier ice for many years. They are moved along the flow lines from the site of the accidents to the site of discovery." Basically, the body gets sucked under by the ice and moves with it from the accumulation area to the ablation area, sometimes getting churned up and other times getting perfectly preserved. For practical purposes, investigators can reconstruct an accidental fall if a body turns up. All of this is a preamble to the weird news story that piqued my interest yesterday:

The photo above was taken on Monday as a 5-member team investigated an aircraft accident on the Colony Glacier in Alaska. The accident happened on Nov. 22, 1952. A total of 52 people (41 passengers and 11 crew members) on board an Air Force C-124A Globemaster (see example here) were killed when the transport plane en route from Washington state hit Mt. Gannett and exploded. The aircraft was covered by the snow as the weather hampered rescue operations at the time. The wreckage was spotted earlier this month by the Alaska National Guard during a helicopter training mission.  The bones that were recovered will be processed for DNA and will likely identify the remains of 21-year-old Isaac Anderson, whose 41-year-old granddaughter began researching the wreck 12 years ago. "The ice gives up what it wants to give up when it wants to give it up. It's really in control," said Army Capt. Jamie Dobson.

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Related posts:

Yosemite firefall

Rainbow igloo

Snowplow flambé

Olympics deaths

Eskimo snow

Brazilian base burns

Ice finger of death

Death of Payne Stewart

Airplane crashes

Alive!

A woman, a cow, and a chatelaine

"I don't think I'll find anything as significant as this again in my lifetime."

~Dr. Duncan Sayer, University of Central Lancashire

Woman
Just outside Cambridge, U.K., in Oakington, students from Manchester Metropolitan University are working with Dr. Faye Simpson and staff from the University of Central Lancashire and Oxford Archaeology East to excavate a 1400-year-old Anglo-Saxon graveyard. They had unearthed 100 graves, with an estimated 50-60 remaining, when one of the students - Kate Smith, 19 - discovered the burial of a woman of much greater status than the other occupants. "She is almost certainly a regional elite - a matriarchal figure buried with the objects that describe her identity to the people who attended her funeral," said co-director of the excavation Dr. Duncan Sayer.

Cow
The biggest such sign of the woman's wealth and power was the adjacent skeleton of a cow. Animal burials are extremely rare - only 31 men have been found buried with horses in Britain - but the discovery of a woman buried with a cow is unprecedented. Simpson commented, "A cow is a big thing to give up. It's a source of food and something that would have been very expensive to keep, so to sacrifice it would be a big decision. They would have wanted to give her something really important to show respect and they wouldn't have done that for just anybody." This is the 1st find of its kind in Europe.

Chatelaine
Aside from the cow, grave goods include brooches and hundreds of amber and decorated glass beads. Said Dr. Sayer, "It's also incredibly early to find any grave of a woman buried with such obvious wealth." Another symbol of her position within the community is the chatelaine she was found with. I was unfamiliar with this word, defined only as a keychain, and found a more thorough explanation:

"The word 'chatelaine' derives from the Latin word for castle. It refers to the lady who, in the Medieval times, was in charge of the day-to-day castle functions. The chatelaine ordered supplies, did the bookkeeping and supervised the servants. She also taught the children who lived in the castle and served as a guide to the guests. One of her most important responsibilities was to keep the keys to the castle."

The keys and other useful items like scissors were hung from a chain around her waist, an assemblage that came to be known itself as a chatelaine (examples here) and was worn into Victorian times.

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Earlier posts about skeletons:

Skeletal affection

Topsy-turvy

Swedish house (and its secret) for sale

Fostering compassion

Fortune's bones

Skin and bones

Shaman burials

Plague pits and potter's fields

Femur scepter

Skellies

Kutna Hora Ossuary

Scattered ashes

Acquiring quite a reputation for aggressively patting down children (including those with disabilities) and the elderly; objecting to breast pumps and breaking medical equipment; failing to keep their own equipment staffed and operating; and kicking babies off planes, the TSA has reached yet a new low. Here's what happened to Indianapolis resident John Gross at the Orlando International Airport, in his own words:

"They opened up my bag, and I told them, 'Please, be careful. These are my grandpa's ashes.' She picked up the jar. She opened it up. I was told later on that she had no right to even open it, that they could have used other devices, like an X-ray machine. So she opened it up. She used her finger and was sifting through it. And then she accidentally spilled it. She didn't apologize. She started laughing. I was on my hands and knees picking up bone fragments. I couldn't pick up all, everything that was lost. I mean, there was a long line behind me.I want an apology. I want an apology from TSA. I want an apology from the lady who opened the jar and laughed at me. I want them to help me understand where they get off treating people like this."

Between a quarter and a third of Gross's share of the cremated remains of Mario Mark Marcaletti remained on the floor and were presumably stepped on and later swept away by janitorial staff - despite TSA rules stating that crematory containers in carry-on baggage must pass through the X-ray machine, but under no circumstances are to be opened. Shameful.

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Previous posts about travel:

Zoo review

Going down with the ship

Chilly churches

Rubbish!

Cello passenger...

Death by misadventure

Unscheduled stop

Phylactery

Italy itinerary

Airport security?

Animal obituaries

Patriarch
(1st image) 

"Lonesome" George, well-known centenarian and confirmed bachelor, has died at his home on Santa Cruz Island in Ecuador. The cause of his death is believed to have been a heart attack. "He was in good condition....There was nothing to suggest that this would occur," said his physician Washington Tapia.With no offspring and no known relatives to survive him, George (video here) was the last of his line. He was a bit of a loner, despite several female companions over the years. He was known to have a fondness for his longtime caretaker Fausto Llerena, who called him "special" and "complex in his behavior." An international workshop on a cause important to George - management strategies for restoring tortoise populations - will be convened in his honor next month.

Matriarch
(2nd image)

Duchess, a longtime resident of Phoenix, Arizona, died at her home of lymphatic cancer. She was 52. Born in Borneo, she emigrated to the U.S. as an orphan at the early age of 2. Duchess enjoyed painting and people-watching. She lived with her daughter Bess and her 6-year-old granddaughter Kasih (photos here) and is survived by another 6 children, 5 grandchildren, and a great-grandchild. “We have been grateful for the outpouring of memories and stories about Duchess through our social media outlets over the past week. It has been a joy to see all of the lives she has touched throughout our community and beyond. She will be deeply missed,” remarked her guardian Bert Castro. Duchess will be honored at a "Celebration of Life" on Saturday (calling hours 7am to 2pm). Memories and thoughts about Duchess are being collected at www.facebook.com/phoenixzoo.

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Related posts:

A peculiar gig

Lowland gorillas and an orangutan

Ancient animals

Crittercam

Turtles in the weird news

Tortoise cold, tortoise hot

Time for tortoises!

Turtles returned

John the Baptist

Carlo Dolci, "Salomé con la cabeza del Bautista," 1655-1670

Almost 2,000 years after his death at the hands of Herod and the presentation of his head to Salome (image above), John the Baptist is in the news for 2 reasons. First, as the patron saint of Aliaga, Nueva Ecija, Philippines, he was honored over the weekend by villagers and pilgrims at the annual “Taong Putik” [Mud People] festival (slideshow here). Second, a team of Bulgarian archaeologists led by Professor Kazimir Popkonstantinov have presented evidence to support the claim made in August 2010 to have found the remains of the saint. Several relics of John the Baptist are already enshrined around the world (Egypt, Syria, Italy, Greece, Germany, France, and Turkey), but additional fragments of his skull, jaw, and arm were found on a Bulgarian island embedded in an altar in the ruins of an ancient monastery. The remains, which include a tooth,were inside a stone urn that references the saint's birth date of June 24th. At the time of the discovery, they were uncertain how the relics ended up in Bulgaria and how old they are. Oxford University archaeologists led by Professor Tom Higham carried out the carbon dating tests and now concludes, "The result from the metacarpal hand bone is clearly consistent with someone who lived in the early first century A.D." Dr. Hannes Schroeder of the University of Copenhagen analyzed the DNA of the relics and found that they came from a single individual - probably male - from what is now the Middle East, and comments, “Of course, this does not prove that these were the remains of John the Baptist but nor does it refute that theory.” Another Oxford researcher Christopher Ramsey has found documents that suggest that the island monastery may have received the relics in the 5th or early 6th c. Higham cautions, "Whether that person is John the Baptist is a question that we cannot yet definitely answer and probably never will."

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Related posts:

Relic thefts

St. Vitalis

St. Catherine of Siena

Head of Henry IV

St. Paul stares back

Relics of John Paul II

Two fingers

Le sang d'un roi

Kumbh Mela

Festival of the Shrouds

River baptism

Cooking the encroachers

One of the Miami chefs above - Brad Herron, chef de cuisine at Michael's Genuine (1st image); Timon Balloo, executive chef at Sugarcane Raw Bar & Grill (2nd image); or Todd Erickson, executive chef at Haven (3rd image) - was crowned "Best Invasivore Chef" last night. With "invasivore" being one who eats invasive species and with the location being south Florida, on the menu were lion fish, snakehead fish, wild boar (subject of a 2010 post), and python (subject of a 2012 post). The event was held at Villa 221 and VIP tickets bought you a taste of all 9 "exotic tapas" featuring the locally abundant species and organic ingredients from South Florida farms. Chef Balloo reports, "We were all winners, but I was lucky enough to win best overall & best boar!" The proceeds benefited local sustainable agriculture and the environment through the Fertile Earth Foundation. “If the animals are considered a viable food source and people want them, then something good can come out of it,” said Chef Erickson. As the National Invasive Species Council suggests, "If you can't beat 'em, eat 'em!" (some recipes here).

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Plenty of food in the Cabinet!

Peacock poultry

Delicious dresses

Bento boxes

Caveman cuisine

They both eat badger

Heart-shaped potatoes

Dog dishes

What the ancient Romans ate

Audubon ate 'em

Poularde de bresse en vessie

Salt: The good, the bad, and the tasty

Fiddlehead ferns

Squid ink

Poisonous plants

Breastless chest

 

I get many questions about the mastectomy tattoo featured in April 2009, which I found on ScottBruceDuncan.com:

"This tattoo was collaboratively designed by Inga Duncan Thornell and Tina Bafaro, her tattooist, to cover the scars from Inga’s bilateral mastectomy. It took one Sunday a month over 2 1/2 years to complete."

A cool idea, an alternative to rebuilding the breasts, and very empowering. So is posing for a photo shoot. About her subject Takami Yao (3rd image), who had a double mastectomy in 1998, artist Trix Rosen writes:

"Takami’s photographs depict a woman who bravely explores the physical and emotional contours of her new form. These portraits can be viewed as a narrative about her life and also as a defining moment of change. Bald, breast-less and scarred, she is as she appears to be - fearless and beautiful, essentially and eternally female."

But what if a woman chooses to go au naturel after surgery? She no longer has nipples or tissue (1st image) , yet is still obligated to cover up her chest by virtue of her gender.* She can probably get away with it at the beach without comment (see here and here), but at a public pool she is obligated to ask permission or face censure. A Seattle resident has done just that. Cancer survivor Jodi Jaecks (2nd image), 45, asked that she be allowed to swim without the top half of her bathing suit, since it is painful against her scars. She argues (video here),

"If I called myself a man and walked into that pool they would have no problem with my body. But if I am a woman who had breast cancer, with the exact same body, and I go in there, then it's offensive and inappropriate."

She has been granted an exemption from the dress policy and now has the right to swim topless in Seattle’s public pools (only during adult lap sessions). Similar exceptions will be made case-by-case, which doesn't satisfy Jaecks. As she says, "It's going to be harder for a more reserved, self-conscious woman to have the guts to stand out and be different."

*Something strangely similar is true of androgenous Andrej Pejic, who has received criticism for baring his chest even though he is male modeling female fashion.

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Related posts:

Nipple shields

Ladyparts (or lack thereof)

Wandering womb

The vapors

Placentas and more

Sings with wings

These are the special feathers that allow the club-winged manakin (Machaeropterus deliciosus) to play its wing like a violin! Happily, this little bird, which resides in the cloud forest of the Andes in South America, is not threatened with extinction and is free to play its song (listen here). The male does that by rubbing a specialized feather with a stiff tip bent at a 45° angle (the 4th feather in the image above) against another feather that has 7 separate ridges (3rd feather above) to produce a mating call. As a graduate student at Yale University in 1997, Kim Bostwick theorized that the birds knock their wings above their backs to create sound, but it is only recently - with a portable high-speed camera that she and her colleagues were able to confirm that club-winged manakins knock their wings together more than 100 times per second in order to sing as a courtship display. Now curator of birds and mammals at the Cornell University Museum of Vertebrates, Bostwick describes:

"I recorded males making this sound in the Ecuadorian Andes using a digital high-speed video camera. By examining the video at slower speeds, I could see that the males were knocking a pair of modified wing feathers together over their back at a very high rate - more than 100 cycles per second - twice as fast as an average hummingbird flaps its wings."

Their probability of procreating is directly proportional to the accomplishment of this "on-board violin" (more here, including a video).

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Select previous posts about birds:

Beaky bird

An owl for each

The boy and the egg

Birds and bombs

Sam Adams the owl

Bird moment

Bouler's birds

Bowers

Birds in fable and fact

Hummingbirds

Elusive animals

Vultures

Prehistoric procreation

The release of volcanic gases in an ancient lake caught turtle couples in the act - that act. Over the past 30 years, 9 male-female pairs of turtles have been unearthed at the fossil-rich Messel Pit near Darmstadt, Germany (see slideshow of other Messel fossils here). The 20cm animals were locked in embrace and floating 47 million years ago when they were overcome by poisons absorbed through their skin and sank into the mud. Most of the turtle couples of this extinct species - Allaeochelys crassesculpta, an ancestor of today's pig-nosed turtle - were discovered in contact with each other, and 2 of the males even had their tails characteristically tucked under the tails of their partners. There are numerous examples in the scientific literature of copulating insects being caught in amber, but this is believed to be the only example in the fossil record of vertebrates being preserved in the act of having sex. Lead author of the paper describing the find (read it in full in Biology Letters), Dr. Walter Joyce of the University of Tübingen, explains, "People had long speculated they might have died while mating, but that's quite different from actually showing it. We've demonstrated quite clearly that each pair is a male and a female, and not, for example, just two males that might have died in combat. This fact combined with the observation that their back ends are always orientated toward one another, and the two pairs with tails in the position of mating - that's a smoking gun in our view."

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Related posts:

Fossil sex

Fossil fish fooled around

Messel pit

X-raying fossils

Fossils!

Hitchhiker!

This remarkable series of photographs (more here) was captured a week ago off the Greek island of Kálamos (Κάλαμος,) by Joan Gonzalvo, who heads the Ionian Dolphin Project. That is an octopus clinging to the bottlenose dolphin's underside. Gonsalvo titles his blogpost “Naughty octopus” because the beast had latched onto the dolphin's genital slit.* He and his team had spotted the "unexpected guest" when one of the dolphins they were watching suddenly leapt out of the water, but weren't able to identify it until they saw the photos. “I have never seen anything like this. My hypothesis is that the dolphin might have attacked – tried to prey on the octopus – and somehow to avoid it the octopus just attached to the dolphin’s belly,” says Gonsalvo, who reasons that the dolphin was jumping in an attempt to free itself of the octopus. It succeeded and took off as if nothing had happened.

*The reproductive organs of both male and female dolphins are hidden within, contrary to what the headlines would lead you to believe.

Thanks to my sister for bringing this to my attention even before I saw it in the weird news!

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Previous posts about one of my favorite creatures:

Octopus with attitude

Octopi at it again!

Find-a-fish

Squirt

Octopus achievement

Octopus fossils

Blue-ringed octopus

Role reversal

Carnivorous plants go vegan!

The carnivorous common sundew (Drosera rotundifolia) traps insects by attracting them with its bright red color, getting them stuck to the glistening drops of mucilage on its leaves, and then curling around them (see it in action here and magnified here) and dissolving them with enzymes. Because it lives in habitats that are poor in nutrients, it has to eat bugs to supplement its diet. But Dr. Jonathan Millett of Loughborough University in Leicestershire, UK, has determined that pollution has caused the sundew to lose its appetite for meat. "If you've got enough food in the fridge, you don't go to the shops to buy some more," the plant ecologist analogizes. He studied the sundews growing in the bogs of Sweden and has found that, due to the burning of fossil fuels, the rain that falls now contains enough nitrogen to sustain the plants without catching flies and midges. Millett and coauthors have published their study in New Phytologist, showing that plants in lightly-polluted areas got 57% of their nitrogen from their insect prey, while those in more heavily-polluted areas got only 22% from insects. How do they shift their diet? When they absorb the nitrogen through their roots, they make their leaves less sticky, trapping fewer prey, and they tone down their bright color, so fewer bugs are drawn to them. How did the scientists identify the sources of the nitrogen in the plants' diet? They did an isotopic analysis of the sundews, the insects, and the moss growing in the area, which allowed them to work out the proportions, since nitrogen of biological origin (bugs) has a different atomic weight than nitrogen deposited in the rain. Although the ability to make this change in their diet allows the sundews to take advantage of the artificial rain of fertilizer that has disturbed their specialized ecosystem, it does not spare them possible extinction. Carnivorous plants have to spend lots of energy on their specialized equipment, so even if they are using the adaptations less, "...they still have to bear the residual costs of being carnivorous, and other plants without these will be better able to survive. So it’s quite likely we’ll see less abundance and perhaps local extinctions from carnivorous species. The individual plants get bigger and fitter, but the species as a whole is less well adapted to high-nitrogen environments and will lose out over time,” explains Millett. Because sundew is so widespread it is unlikely to be killed off by nitrogen pollution, but the same cannot be said of other carnivorous plants existing in smaller populations.

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Previous posts about plants:

Seed bombing

Pleistocene plant

New carnivorous plant

Geocarpy a.k.a. genuflecting

Leafsnap

Svalbard Global Seed Vault

Unlikely bat roost

Linnaeus' little insult

Poisonous plants

A few female firsts

Liu Yang, 1st female Chinese Astronaut (1st image)
Air force pilot Liu Yang, 33, joined mission commander Jing Haipeng, 45, and crew mate Liu Wang, 43, in a rocket launched from the Gobi desert over the weekend to become China's 1st female astronaut. Their Shenzhou 9 capsule just docked with the country's module Tiangong 1 (they are excluded from the ISS), where they will spend the next 10 days orbiting, performing medical tests, conducting experiments, and preparing for a 60-ton permanent space station China hopes to launch in 2020. "Thank you for the confidence put in my by the motherland and the people, for giving me this chance to represent China's millions of women by going into space," Liu later told reporters at the launch center. She has been praised in state media for her nerves of steel, and the story is told of how she safely landed her fighter jet after a bird strike that left the cockpit glass covered with blood.

Sarah West, 1st female warship commander in Britain's Royal Navy (2nd image)
Lt. Commander Sarah West, 40, has taken command of the HMS Portland and its crew of 185, and hopes to achieve the rank of admiral. Armed with degrees in math and law, she earned the appointment by showing "leadership, confidence, moral courage, sound judgment and excellent people skills." West joined the navy in 1995 and trained on HMS Battleaxe before commanding 4 smaller vessels. She has earned praise for mastery of ships' weapons systems and skilled work on mine clearance off Iraq, and says, “Taking command of HMS Portland is definitely the highlight of my 16 years in the Navy. It is a challenge that I am fully ready to undertake."

Inger Klein Olsen, 1st female captain of the Cunard line (3rd image)
Inger Klein Olsen, 43, assumed command of Queen Victoria in 2010, the 1st woman to captain a ship for the company in 170 years. Olsen had joined Cunard in 1997 as first officer on board Caronia, and had served on a number of ships within the Carnival Corporation group in the interim. Cunard's president Petesr Shanks commented, “While we are far from being the first shipping company to have a female Captain, it is nonetheless noteworthy when such a long-established British institution as Cunard makes a break with its ncaptaincy tradition. But as Mark Twain drily observed, 'The folks at Cunard wouldn't appoint Noah himself as Captain until he had worked his way up through the ranks.' Inger has certainly done that, and we are delighted to welcome her as our 1st woman driver.”

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More fearsome females in the Cabinet:

Gladiatrix

Madam's pins

The Afghan girl

Jackie and Jerri

Aung San Suu Kyi

Golden (Eagle) girl

Migrant mother

Deadwood Dick and Stagecoach Mary

Art thefts

Pablo Picasso, "Femme au Chignon" [woman with bun]," 1957 lithograph

A week ago, Greg Atamaniuk was walking in the Edenvale neighborhood of San Jose, California, when he was puzzled to find a Picasso print leaning against the entrance to a trail. It wasn't a dog-eared poster from an art student's wall or a reproduction put out with the trash when a room was redecorated - it was an original (from the series above), worth an estimated $30,000! "It's something that you don't find usually on your morning hikes," said Atamaniuk, who turned it over to police. The artwork had been hanging in the 9-bedroom, 19,500 sq. ft. house of former Ukrainian Prime Minister Pavlo Lazarenko. The mansion is 70 miles away in Novato, but its owner is 350 miles away in a federal prison near Los Angeles. While Lazarenko was doing time for money laundering, some teenagers apparently took the opportunity to party on his property. More than 100 of them held a party on May 27th and fled after the caretaker called police. After 3 more were chased out of the backyard the following day, the caretaker noticed the Picasso missing, along with $5,000 worth of silver candlesticks, leather coats, and laptop computers. Officials assume the print was intentionally left where it would be found.

A valuable painting was also left behind at a home invasion in Sweden, it was reported on Friday. The homeowner was bound and threatened with a knife by 2 men who forced their way into his house in Stockholm. They stole 3 paintings, but abandoned them. Two were found in a dumpster nearby, but the 3rd - an 1877 work by Carl Larsson, ”Clair-Obscur” ["Light-Shadow"], believed to be worth more than half a million dollars - was too big (130 × 102.5 cm) to fit in their getaway car! “I was standing 10m from where they ran out. They tried to get the painting in the car, but it was too big. They threw it aside when we came,” said a witness, adding that they almost ran it over in their hurry to get away.

Meanwhile, a $5 million reward has been offered for information leading to the recovery of paintings - by masters including Rembrandt, Degas, and Vermeer - stolen in 1990 from Boston’s Isabella Stewart Garner Museum (more here), but only $5,000 is being offered for information on a collection including drawings, prints, and paintings by Joseph Beuys and his contemporaries (more here).

Thanks for the link that sparked this post, Melissa!

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Previous posts about art and artifacts destroyed or stolen:

Puzzled

Soils spoils

Indoor poaching

Lost art

The art of David Teniers the Younger

Cultural losses on 9/11

Checking on Charla

Time to check in on Charla Nash, who has undergone numerous surgeries since the pet chimpanzee of a friend attacked her in February 2009, leaving her without her nose, an eyelid, her lips, and both hands. Doctors took out her eyes when they became infected. She received a double-hand transplant, but they had to be removed when she contracted pneumonia, which affected her circulation. Surgeons have had more luck with her face, though it's required numerous operations. Nash, now 58, can speak, smell, and she can eat (a good thing, because doctors want her to gain weight). She is in physical rehabilitation (video here) and has someone with her when she walks. She will require long-term care and will take medication for the rest of her life. She is building up her strength to sustain the weight of new hands, but also to express her emotions. "Every day my muscles get better. I can smile,"she says. The June 2011 photograph above shows her exercising, and the series below documents her progress from the initial injuries to the remarkable improvements leading up to and following her 4th face transplant last year.

FEBRUARY 2009

MARCH 2010

AUGUST 2011

NOVEMBER 2011

FEBRUARY 2012

MARCH 2012

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Previous posts about animal attacks:

Bear bites butt

Suicide by animal

Leopard lynching

Zookeeper deaths

Killer squid

Harar hyenas

Of two minds about wolves

Fatal coyote attack

Jaws in 1916

Fatal tiger maulings

A cave so enormous...

 

 

...it has a jungle inside! National Geographic's Mark Jenkins describes:

"An enormous shaft of sunlight plunges into the cave like a waterfall. The hole in the ceiling through which the light cascades is unbelievably large, at least 300' across. The light, penetrating deep into the cave, reveals for the first time the mind-blowing proportions of Hang Son Doong. The passage is perhaps 300' wide, the ceiling nearly 800' tall: room enough for an entire New York City block of 40-story buildings. There are actually wispy clouds up near the ceiling."

Hang Sơn Đoòng ["Mountain River cave"] was found in 1991 by local Vietnamese man Ho Khanh. Located in Phong Nha-Kẻ Bàng National Park on Vietnam's border with Laos - a 6-hour hike from the nearest road - the cavern (photos here, videos here) is the largest in the world (pictured above, note size scale of explorer in 3rd image). It was surveyed in 2009 (interactive graphic here) and contains not only a forest of 30m-tall trees, but an underground river, a 61m wall of calcite, cave pearls, stalagmites more than 70m tall, gigantic skylights in the limestone ceiling, and a chamber 5km long, 200m high, and 150m wide.

The cave remained so well-hidden that even Khanh forgot where he had found it 20 years earlier as a young boy. Adam Spillane of the British Cave Research Association explains, "The terrain in that area of Vietnam is very difficult. The cave is very far out of the way. It's totally covered in jungle, and you can't see anything on Google Earth. You've got to be very close to the cave to find it. Certainly, on previous expeditions, people have passed within a few hundred meters of the entrance without finding it."

Official website: http://www.sondoongcave.org/
Coordinates: 17°27'25.88"N 106°17'15.36"E

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Some previous posts about caves:

Caves

Cheddar man

Coal mining and caving

Cave paintings at Lascaux

Hermits - 2 scenarios

Big

Stone Age studio

Piss-prophets

Reproduction of "A Doctor Examining Urine" by Trophime Bigot (1579-1649/50)

 Reproduction of "The Urine Examination" by Joos van Craesbeeck (c. 1605/06– c.1660)

"The Doctor's Visit" by Jan Steen (1658-1662)

The expression "piss-prophet" was 1st used in print in the 17th c., during which the images above were originally painted. It referred to a physician who diagnosed illness by inspecting a patient's urine. The inspection could be visual, or the doctor could employ the other senses. It was English physician Thomas Willis (1621-1675) who was the 1st to observe that the urine of those later termed diabetics tasted "wonderfully sweet as if it were imbued with honey or sugar." The urine was swirled around in (and sipped from) a matula, a round-bottomed flask made out of clear glass whose shape approximated that of the human bladder. Uroscopy was very much in vogue at the time, although it had been relied on for centuries. Hippocrates (460-377 B.C.) had noticed that fever changes the smell of a patient's urine and Galen (131-201 A.D.) stated that evaluating the urine was the best way to see whether or not the body's 4 humours (blood, phlegm, yellow bile, and black bile) were in balance. "Due to the influence of Arabian teachings, the uroscopy eventually became an important part of medical diagnosis in the Middle Ages. Indeed, looking at the urine of a patient, inspecting the quantity and quality, the smell, taste, colour and cloudiness of it became such an important task of the medieval doctor that he is usually depicted with the uroscopy flask in art," writes blogger Sandra Schwab. In addition to being used to diagnose illness, these means were also used to determine pregnancy. A 1552 text cited by RandomHistory.com described the pee of pregnant women as “clear pale lemon color leaning toward off-white, having a cloud on its surface.” In subsequent centuries more empirical methods like chemistry replaced the old "swirl-and-taste" methods. The urologist or nephrologist replaced the outdated "piss-prophet" and the word came to mean a quack.

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Plenty of past posts about paintings:

Magritte's mermaid

Giverny

American Gothic

Arnolfini wedding portrait

Scullery maids

Portrait of Queen Elizabeth I

Pig butchering

Rene Magritte

Maps featured in paintings

Dissection paintings

The art of David Teniers the Younger

Emile Friant

Diagnosing the canvas

Vanitas paintings

Giuseppe Arcimboldo

The Raft of the Medusa

Brothers

Gabrielle d'Estrées