Follow-ups

I have friends in town the next few days and plan to get caught up on my follow-ups as I have time. I will be adding to this post, so please keep checking back! Happy 4th!

Oil and turtles 6/30/10 A New York reporter nearly loses his nose when a snapping turtle does just that.

White elephants 6/29/10 An elephant given by Indian Prime Minister Indira Gandhi to Yugoslavia has died and been recycled.

Weightless Hawking 6/28/10 A reader passed along this link about a series of anti-gravity monuments on East Coast college campuses.

Faux fur 6/14/10 The San Diego Zoo and the Scripps Research Institute have a plan to bring back endangered animals from near-extinction.

Fireflies 6/6/10 These photos reminded my former boss about the photos of Picasso drawing with light.

Freediver 6/4/10 My Mom thought this guy and this woman would make a good couple!

Swimming the English Channel 6/2/10 An armless woman in China is highly skilled at embroidering with her feet. The TSA is slammed for their shameful treatment of amputees. Police in Jacksonville, Florida, were looking for the owner of a prosthetic leg that washed up on the beach, and were successful at finding him. A motorcyclist lost his prosthetic leg while traveling a New Hampshire highway. Doctors replace a woman's missing thumb with her big toe.

Geronimo 5/16/10 I was contacted by the makers of this film who are fundraising to get the true story of the Trail of Tears told. A reader informed me of the story of Hannah Dustin, who was captured by Indians and is commemorated with a statue showing her with a tomahawk and a fistful of scalps.

Environmental disaster 4/20/10 Video footage of oil and gas leaks from cracks in the sea floor, which may affect BP's attempts to cap the gushing oil well. BP is also responsible for polluting the atmosphere this spring. Rachel Maddow has refuted this video from Louisiana by confirming with scientists that oil cannot fall as rain. However, this video shows that BP has purported covered up oil on the beach with sand they have trucked in. The New York Times points out that the Niger Delta has been spoiled by repeated massive oil spills.

We lost another munchkin 4/11/10 A tornado ripped through New York's Oz-Stravaganza, forcing the cancellation of many events.

Stomach growls 4/6/10 I recently learned that the origins of ventriloquism lie with the ancient Greek method of divination called gastromancy, in which the sounds emanating from the diviner's stomach were believed to be caused by the undead and could be interpreted to communicate with them and forecast the future.

Dwarfs on display 3/26/10 Little people have an issue with the use of the word "midget" in the new wrestling show "Half-Pint Brawlers." The world's smallest mother shows off her 3 children.

Napoleon's hair 3/5/10 A lock of Napoleon's hair has sold at auction for $13,000.

Jacques Cousteau 2/28/10 A compilation of some of his most memorable clips on the occasion of the 100th anniversary of his birth. A Russian man has taught his dachshund to scuba dive.

Ironic deaths 2/4/10 A man in India died of a heart attack after receiving a bill for his own cremation, which supposedly had occurred the week before. A singer in Mexico was killed hours after denying reports that he had been murdered. A woman was attacked by macaques when she went to a Thai island to confront her fear of monkeys.

Ancient Egyptian finds 1/30/10 A lost tomb has been rediscovered in Memphis.

Natural arch collapse 1/26/10 An arch in a national park in Nevada has collapsed.

Vivisection 1/22/10 A cannibal in the Ukraine did unspeakable things to his living victim (caution).

Gatorland! 1/21/10 Crocodiles body surf. A 9-year-old Colorado girl wrestles alligators.

Kite-fighting 1/19/10 A man in Oregon fell off a cliff and died chasing his kite.

Sinkholes 1/12/10 A deadly tropical storm in May opened a giant sinkhole in Guatemala that swallowed a 3-story hotel -although Discovery says technically it is not a sinkhole - and prompted National Geographic to do a slideshow of the most dramatic sinkholes. Meanwhile, a 5M-wide chasm opened up in Malaysia just last night.

Recent feral children 1/10/10 The Cambodian "jungle woman" has fled back into the forest.

Anatomy art 1/8/10 Lady Gaga is working with Gunther von Hagens to display some of his plastinates on stage during her next tour.

Snakes to the rescue 1/4/10 A flythrough of a python digesting a rat. A global study has found that 8 species of snakes are in decline.

Bushmeat 12/27/09 A Mesa, Arizona, restaurant owner has outraged many (including me) by serving burgers that include real lion meat, as confirmed by a reporter who did a little more fact-finding.

Secret rooms 12/25/09 New homeowners discover a secret room only to find it is filled with moldy garbage. Here is a very clever apartment in Hong Kong.

Octopus achievement 12/15/09 Octopuses can make their boneless arms rigid to form an "elbow" to get food to their mouths.

Aquaria 11/23/09 A beluga at the Vancouver Aquarium died after its airway became blocked by a penny.

Circus animals on the lam 11/13/09 The 1959 kidnapping of a chimpanzee from the St. Louis zoo's "Monkey Show." A man is caught attempting to smuggle 8 live foxes and 50 chameleons out of Cairo in a suitcase. A tiger and 2 camels went missing when a Canadian zoo's truck was stolen, and were later found safe and sound.

Birds in fable and fact 1o/22/09 The brighter a bird's feathers, the poorer its flying abilities. Songbirds learn while they are asleep. A grebe in Madagascar has been declared extinct.

The Mary Rose 10/15/09 A harsh winter has exposed the oldest shipwreck off the coast of North Carolina.

Glasswing butterflies 10/13/09 This is a microscopic image of a butterfly wing!

Anne Frank 10/7/09 A fictional diary of the boy who lived in the same building as Frank has been published.

Dinosaur eggs 10/3/09 Fossil beds in western Canada have been identified as evidence of a mass die-off. A Tennessee couple excavating their yard for a pool found a mastodon.

WWII photographs of "The Kiss" 9/13/09 Edith Shain has died at the age of 91.

Collyer brothers 9/9/09 A woman in Atlanta has been rescued from her trash-filled house, which has been condemned. The body of a Florida woman was recovered from beneath trash in the house she shared with her daughter. A California woman was found to have 100 dead cats in her freezer.

World's heaviest insects 8/28/09 My Mom and I get a big kick out of these Orkin commercials: "Broken down," "Hot Tub," and "Delivery."

Jaws in 1916 8/8/09 Recent findings indicate that as many as half of all shark species can emit a luminescence from their bodies (pictured) that can confuse both prey and predators. On the 35th anniversary of "Jaws," an NPR reporter tracked down the mechanical shark used in the movie.

Creative cremains 7/24/09 The ashes of a Florida man will be scattered over Lake Disston by way of Sunday's fireworks display. Human ashes formed into 3D printed sculptures.

Death masks 7/19/09 A list of 20 famous death masks. An improperly labeled and packed shipment of human heads was opened by a Southwest Airlines employee in Arkansas.

Follow-ups 6/27/09 In this set of follow-ups is an 800-year-old shoe to compare to this discovery of the world's oldest shoe.

Hazards of hail 6/16/09 An article about hailstones of various sizes.

Burial shoes 5/31/09 A blogger complimented me on this post, which informed her very amusing write-up about the subject.

Vultures 5/4/09 Rare vultures in South Africa are being killed to predict the results of the World Cup. I had a Marlin Perkins moment on Thursday watching a vulture tear up and feast on a fish carcass in our front yard here in Florida. A dive-bombing buzzard is terrorizing residents of the Isle of Mull in the U.K. A vulture is spotted in Wales - thousands of miles from its natural habitat.

Chihuahuas in the weird news 5/2/09 A California woman credits her chihuahua for saving her children from attack by 2 pit bulls.

Emmett Kelly 4/25/09 A photograph confirms that a newly married couple were at Disney World at the same time as children.

Bears in the news 4/24/09 A motorcyclist and bear have collided in New Jersey with neither seriously injured. A North Carolina man who was struck by lightning a few years ago has now been attacked by a bear.

Robo-aanimals 4/9/09 A cat receives 2 remarkable bionic feet. A bionic fish has been accepted - and can be used to lead - a school of shoal.

Centenarians - and then some 3/26/09 Jacksonville, Florida cuts off power and water to the home of a 102-year-old woman.

Bird girl 3/3/09 I was contacted about this post by a woman who has photographed and blogged about Savannah's Bonaventure Cemetery, where the statue originally stood.

Taxidermy 1/24/09 A collection featuring a number of trophy heads and other mounted specimens amassed by property developer Warren Anderson were auctioned in Sydney, Australia. A Florida man called 911 when a water buffalo head fell off the wall and trapped him in his recliner. A friend pointed out this article about art from things that were once alive.

Natural mummification 1/23/09 Rather than being neglected after death, this woman was embalmed and stored at the funeral home for 10 years so that her daughters could pay her a visit every weekend. A woman in Pennsylvania was living with the exhumed bodies of her husband and twin sister. A Dutch man's mummified body has been found 4 years after retiring to his bedroom and asking not to be disturbed. A mummified man has been found in a Finnish chimney. A mummified body spotted on an abandoned boat in the Florida Keys turned out to be a mannequin.

Progeria 12/24/08 This woman does not have anorexia, but a rare form of progeria that requires her to eat up to 8,000 calories a day to maintain her body weight.

Conjoined twins 11/29/08 A twin-faced kitten born alive in West Virginia.

Follow-ups

Vivisection 1/22/10 British scientists are blowing up live pigs to study the effects of bombs. A man in Oaklan Park, Florida, performs a "coffee-table operation" on a dog he was watching and kills it. Here is a video (caution) of a seriously twisted experiment by Russian scientists.

Gatorland! 1/21/10 Scientists have determined that a shared breathing mechanism indicates that alligators and birds shared a common ancestor.

Kite-fighting 1/19/10 Friend Franck Cordes notes that there is a chapter on kite-fighting in The American Boys Handybook of Camp-lore and Woodcraft by Daniel Carter Beard (orig. 1882).

Gulp! 1/16/10 Moments after I published this post about the swallowing disorder pica, I was contacted by follower Lisa Wood, a gifted artist who collaged a series of plates based on the case histories of the swallowed objects in the very collection I mentioned. And her friend is writing a book on the same subject, due out later this year!

Disaster intensity scales 1/13/10 Here are some aerial photos of the earthquake damage in Haiti from National Geographic. As horrible as the tragedy and its aftermath is, unburied corpses do not pose much of a health risk. Scientists have identified a number of seismic zones throughout the world that are past due for an earthquake.

Mirror miscellany 1/17/10 Reader Kent Schnake points out the often overlooked observation that as long as a mirror is well-polished, we don't see it - we see what is reflected!

Sinkholes 1/12/10 Rubislaw Quarry in Aberdeen, Scotland - the largest man-made hole in Europe - has been sold.

Views from space 1/11/10 There are disputes over the ownership of a large meteorite that fell in Australia. Another meteorite fell through the roof of a doctor's office in Lorton, Virginia. Meanwhile, the Great Wall of China has been recreated in chocolate (although I don't usually link to weird chocolate).

Good cove, bad cove 1/6/10 Dolphins have taken up hydroplaning to catch the fish closest to shore. A French researchers suggests that heroic acts by animals like dolphins are more common than thought. Here is a story from this summer of a beluga whale carrying a struggling diver to the surface in China.

Snakes to the rescue 1/4/10 Federal officials have banned 9 species of constrictors from being imported into the U.S.

Parade floats 1/2/10 The plane that Capt. Sullenberger safely crash-landed in the Hudson River is for sale.

Bushmeat 12/27/09 A curious young chimp in the Congo investigates the remote video camera. The heart-wrenching tale of a humanized chimp named Jerry. A chimp is at the center of a custody battle in Sarasota, Florida.

Nipple shields 12/20/09 There is a strange time capsule in Hamilton, Ontario, Canada - a 1950s-era drugstore - and look what's on the shelf toward the end of the video!

Circus animals on the lam 11/13/09 Spanish photographer Jose Luis Rodriguez has been stripped of his title of photographer of the year because it was discovered that the wolf in his award-winning photo had been rented from a wildlife park. The hippo who escaped from the zoo in Montenegro has returned to her enclosure.

Humpback whales 11/10/09 Close encounters with beluga whales in the Arctic circle.

Odd animals 11/4/09 This strange creature that turned up in Texas has been identified as a hairless raccoon.

Engineering feats 11/1/09 A schematic drawing of the British warship H.M.S. Temeraire, built in 1793.

One man band 10/24/09 Here is a deft performance by a member of the Brooklyn-based chamber music ensemble Project Trio.

Lizard lore 10/17/09 Villagers in Indonesia are supplying Asian demand for geckos to be used in traditional medicines.

Dinosaur eggs 10/3/09 American paleontologists have announced that prehistoric velociraptors also spit venom at their prey. Australian scientists blame humans for the demise of the megafauna that lived 400,000 years ago.

Animal clarity 8/16/09 The unusual shell of the scaly-foot snail, discovered in 2003, may assist in the design of armor for soldiers and vehicles, say American researchers. Similarly, the silence of owls in flight (pictured) have inspired aircraft technology.

Jaws in 1916 8/8/09 A harrowing account of an Englishman being eaten by a shark while on holiday in Cape Town, South Africa.

Creative cremains 7/24/09 The far-flung posthumous travels of American adventurer Ralph White. Ongoing repairs at a crematorium in Coventry, U.K., are marring Sikh death rituals.

Bride and groom 6/1/09 A British teacher sacrificed himself and drowned to save his bride on their honeymoom in Egypt.

Cave paintings at Lascaux 5/27/09 Plans are afoot in Italy to breed the aurochs depicted in cave paintings back from extinction.

The art of David Teniers the Younger 5/22/09 Japanese macaques huddling together for warmth.

Chihuahuas in the weird news 5/2/09 What's a follow-up without a chihuahua story? This one was found by security staff at the Dublin airport being smuggled in a Bulgarian man's suitcase.

Emmett Kelly 4/25/09 An example and explanation of the Baader-Meinhof Phenomenon, a form of synchronicity.

Bears in the news 4/24/09 The den of a black bear hibernating in Minnesota is being monitored by a remote camera that just captured the birth of her 3 cubs!

Giants 4/17/09 A German model stands 6' 9" tall.

Centenarians 3/26/09 Here is a fantastic video of people aged 1 through 100.

Spider prey 3/7/09 Video of a giant centipede eating a bat. And watch this toad's defense when it is about to be eaten by a tarantula!

Megafishes 2/15/09 A blind British woman landed a 214lb catfish in Spain, after which she released it back into the river.

Disturbing decapitations 1/23/09 A human head and a red flower were found at the tomb of a Mexican drug lord.

Caves 1/15/09 A BBC video of the Crystal Cave of Giants in Chihuahua, Mexico.

More mammoths 1/6/09 DNA analysis of frozen soil by an international team of scientists shows that woolly mammoths existed for thousands of years longer than previously thought.

Dr. Seuss 12/25/08 A disagreement in Minnesota parallels the plot of Dr. Seuss's story The Zax.

Blizzard of 1888 12/14/08 Many wondrous photographs of ice caves around the world. A long-predicted form of stable ice has been confirmed in the lab by British scientists. Scientists have assessed that the ice in the artic Beaufort Sea is "rotten." Pioneering 19th c. images of snowflakes by American photographer Wilson A. Bentley have gone on sale. Photos and an explanation of hair ice. And a live audio feed from under the ice in Antarctica.

Conjoined twins 11/29/08 The world's oldest conjoined twins, Ronnie and Donnie Galyon of Ohio, are moving in with their brother rather than into an assisted-living facility.

Albinos 11/18/08 "White Bambi" spotted in the Italian Alps.

Oldest zoo in the world 11/10/08 A neighborhood association has stopped the Oakland Zoo from its practice of cutting down non-native trees and feeding the crunchy snacks to elephants and other animals. An Asian elephant has been born for the 1st time at the Melbourne Zoo. A Norwegian man who is trying to collect 1 million giraffes to win a bet is nearly halfway there.

Animal extinction 11/9/08 The eel population in London's River Thames have dropped precipitously (98%).

Vivisection

As I continue to read about dissection in the preparation of my next book, I learn more and more about vivisection - the dissection of live subjects. In modern times, the term is applied to many forms of animal experimentation and many organizations exist to oppose it, including the American Anti-Vivisection Society (est.1883), National Anti-Vivisection Society (est. 1929), and In Defense of Animals (campaigning since 1983). But back in the day, it was not about product testing and instead about gaining anatomical knowledge. Vivisection dates back to ancient Greece (c. 500 B.C.), when optic nerves were cut to determine their relationship to vision. In classical antiquity, apes were used because their anatomy corresponded to humans. In the Middle Ages, vivisectionists tended to use pigs, while dogs were favored in the Renaissance. The procedures were performed to show the action of the heart, the motions of respiration, and the intricacies of generation.

Greek physician working in Rome, Galen (129 A.D.-199/217 A.D.), is known as the "father of vivisection." He is depicted in a 1541 illustration vivisecting a pig (2nd image) to show that severing the laryngeal nerves renders an animal voiceless. The founder of modern human anatomy, Belgian physician Andreas Vesalius (1514-1564), vivisected animals, notably a pregnant dog. His student, Italian anatomy professor Realdo Colombo (c. 1516-1559), found the vivisection of dogs and other animals indispensible for acquiring physiologic knowledge - and sometimes performed them in his own home - but drew the line at dissecting humans. Colombo also objected to dissecting pigs, but only because they were too fat and noisy. English physician William Harvey (1578-1657) performed vivisections to accurately describe the circulation of blood by the heart, and to debunk many of Galen's beliefs.

Italian surgeon Marco Aurelio Severino (1580-1656) thought vivisection was invaluable, particularly in comparative anatomy, and established the discipline of zootomy, the dissection of animals. The belief of French philosopher Rene Descartes (1596-1650) that animals do not feel real pain influenced many vivisectionists, but by the 17th c. there were vocal objections, not only out of pity for the creatures but out of concern about the effect that their inhumane treatment had on their dissectors. Today's vivisection techniques require anesthesia and usually approval as "scientifically necessary" by an ethics review board. In biology classrooms, frogs are still vivisected to demonstrate the beating heart (click 3rd image for animation).