Franklin's goal finally met

British Royal Navy officer Sir John Franklin and the 128 men of his expedition lost their lives in 1847 attempting to find a way through the Canadian Arctic from the Atlantic to the Pacific Ocean. The elusive Northwest Passage remained unbreached – except by icebreakers, tugs, and small cargo ships – until just now. The Danish-owned commercial bulk carrier Nordic Orion (IMAGE ABOVE) passed through from Vancouver, British Columbia, where it was loaded up with coal on September 6th, to Baffin Bay in the North Atlantic, which it reached early last week. The 225m 75,000-ton vessel was strengthened for the voyage and bound for Finland, where the metallurgical coal will likely be used to make steel. By bypassing the usual route through the Panama Canal, the ship was able to carry about 25% more coal and trim about 1,000 nautical miles from its journey. But as Wendy Stueck reports in The Globe and Mail, "While shipping agents in Vancouver and around the world are mulling potential implications for shipping commodities, others have voiced concerns about the lack of environmental and safety infrastructure in Canada’s North." Rather than a historic milestone, the accomplishment represents the potential for another environmental disaster.

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Pakistani pop-up

On Tuesday, the Baluchistan province of northwestern Pakistan was jarred by a 7.7 magnitude earthquake, which killed at least 350 people and left more than 100,000 homeless. The destruction occurred in minutes, and only a half hour later a new landmass had surfaced in the bay near Gwadar. "I stepped out, and was flabbergasted. I could see this grey, dome-shaped body in the distance, like a giant whale swimming near the surface. Hundreds of people had gathered to watch it in disbelief," relayed local journalist Bahram Baloch from a witness. The new island, confirmed by satellite images from NASA, arose roughly .6 miles (1 km) offshore. It stands 60' to 70' (15 to 20 m) above the water line and measures an estimated 250' to 300' (75 to 90 m) across. The rough surface is a mixture of mud, fine sand, and solid rock. The island is being visited by sightseers (IMAGE HERE), and Baloch reports that they have already left it strewn with litter...

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Honest alpinist

A young Frenchman made a discovery while climbing the Bosson glacier on the approach to the summit of Mont Blanc in the Alps. It was a tin the size of the shoebox with indications that the contents had come from India. The mountaineer was aware that wreckage sometimes surfaced from 2 Air India aircraft that had crashed years ago – one a propeller plane that crashed in 1950 resulting in the deaths of 48 passengers and crew and the other a Boeing 707 that went down in 1966 killing all 11 crew and 106 passengers. The Indian government claimed a bag of diplomatic mail which surfaced near the wreckage of the second accident and was found by 2 climbers in 2012 (IMAGE ABOVE). This recently discovered box is believed to have been on the same plane, and the French authorities have contacted their Indian counterparts to see if the owner of the contents can be found. "This was an honest young man who very quickly realised that they belonged to someone who died on the glacier," says local gendarmerie chief Sylvain Merly of the climber who immediately turned in his discovery. If the rightful owner cannot be located, the tin will be his along with the treasure trove it contains: roughly 100 precious gems including emeralds, rubies, and sapphires with an estimated value of €246,000 (£207,000, $332,000)!

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Voices

 

Like many Americans, I am deeply troubled by the violence of our culture, which only seems to increase and too often manifests itself in mass killings by people with mental health issues. American psychological anthropologist T.M. Luhrmann of Stanford University is careful to point out that the vast majority of schizophrenics never commit a violent act, but that they are significantly more likely to do so than the broader population, especially when they have auditory hallucinations. To them, the voices are real and spoken by an external, commanding authority. Luhrmann has been working with colleagues at the Schizophrenia Research Foundation in Chennai, India, to compare the voice-hearing experiences of Indians and Americans and has found that they are culturally specific. While schizophrenics in the U.S. hear voices that instruct them to do bodily harm to themselves or others, the patients in Chennai were ordered to do domestic chores like cooking and cleaning. While the schizophrenics of India sometimes describe the voices speaking in vulgar or sexual terms, one of the most disgusting commands was to drink out of the toilet. The observation that the hallucinations are shaped by local culture lends support to the recent movement that the voices can be altered through therapy to make them less frequent, less intense, and less disturbing. Luhrmann observes, "We Americans live in a society in which, when people feel threatened, they think about guns. The same cultural patterns that make it difficult to get gun violence under control may also be responsible for making these terrible auditory commands that much harsher."

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Ancient areolae

I learned something in the follow-up article about the oldest bog body yet discovered. Cashel Man (CT SCAN ABOVE), discovered in 2011 in County Laois, is now being studied at the National Museum of Ireland. Here is the sentence that intrigued me: "Because Cashel Man's chest was destroyed by the milling machine that uncovered him, the researchers are unable to examine the state of his nipples." Other bog bodies in Ireland been found with deep cuts beneath each nipple, an indication that they were sacrificed royalty. Keeper of Irish Antiquities Eamonn Kelly explains, "In the Irish tradition they could no longer serve as king if their bodies were mutilated in this way. This is a decommissioning of the king in this life and the next." The king may have been violently removed from power because he was unable to protect the animals and people of his land from disease or disaster. Even though Cashel Man was found on a border between territories and within sight of the hill where he would have been crowned, his nipples are no longer available to confirm his status during his life 500 years before Egyptian pharaoh Tutankhamun (c. 1341-c. 1323).

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Bufo bat

This unlikely image - taken by Yufani Olaya, a park ranger at Cerros de Amotape National Park in Peru - is the result of the opportunistic feeding of a cane toad (Bufo marinus) on a bat which was flying too close to the forest floor as it gorged itself on insects (SIMILAR IMAGES HERE). Olaya describes the event, “Out of nowhere the bat just flew directly into the mouth of the toad, which almost seemed to be sitting with its mouth wide open.” Unfortunately for the toad, the bat didn't make a very good meal. Unable to get it down, he finally spit it out and Olaya watched as the lucky bat recovered and flew away!

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Hummingbird assumption

Ecologist Margaret A. Rubega and her graduate assistant Alejandro Rico-Guevara of the University of Connecticut discovered in 2011 - to their surprise - that the tongue of the hummingbird does not draw up liquid by means of surface tension as had been believed since 1883. Instead, it has a most incredible makeup (IMAGE ABOVE AND VIDEO HERE). Each side of the forked tongue is lined with fleshy hair-like structures which are flattened until the bird sticks them into a flower. Called lamellae, they extend like rows of coils to trap the nectar as the tongue is pulled past the surface of the liquid and moved back into the throat. The scientists made their discovery by photographing 30 live hummingbirds (representing 10 species) with a high-speed video camera. But their research also required performing microscopic necropsies on 20 additional specimens. But when they a manipulated the tongues of the dead birds, they performed the same action! This means it requires no additional energy - a good thing, since the hummingbirds use it up buzzing from blossom to blossom thousands of times per day...

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Bottled up

In August of last year, Scottish skipper Andrew Leaper found what was then the oldest message in a bottle. He picked it out of his fishing net before it fell back into the sea, and remembers, "It was very exciting to find the bottle and I couldn't wait to open it." It turned out to be a drift bottle released in 1914 by the Glasgow School of Navigation to help map the ocean currents. Just this month, that 98-year-old record-holder has been eclipsed by a 107-year-old bottle. Battered but still sealed, it was found by beachcomber Steve Thurber on the shore of Schooner’s Cove in Tofino, Canada. From what can be seen through the glass (IMAGE HERE), the bottle was dropped over the side of a steamer sailing from San Francisco to Bellingham, Washington, by a passenger named Earl Willard, who dated his handwritten message September 29, 1906. "This is the oldest message in a bottle that I've ever heard of. The odds of finding it are astronomical," comments Lynette Miller, head of collections at the Washington State Historical Society. She explains that the bottle is Thurber's to do with what he wishes – and so far that is to decline to open it…

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Chocolate yesterday, chocolate tomorrow

"Earl of Sandwich Blended Frappes Long Before Starbucks," reads the headline about University of Leicester historian Kate Loveman's accidental discovery of the first English recipe for a frozen chocolate dessert:

"Prepare the chocolatti [to make a drink] ... and Then Putt the vessell that hath the Chocolatti in it, into a Jaraffa [a carafe] of snow stirred together with some salt, & shaike the snow together sometyme & it will putt the Chocolatti into tender Curdled Ice & soe eate it with spoons."

The instructions were noted in the 350-year-old diary of the first Earl of Sandwich (not the eponymous one, but his great-grandfather). The image above is from the same diary and depicts a cacao-grinder. While that was cutting edge in the 17th c., the makers of 3-D printers are turning their eyes toward food and - in particular - chocolate. Avi Reichentall of 3D Systems has already configured his machines to create cakes and candy, and wants them to become the next must-have appliance: "We are working on a chocolate printer. I want a chocolate printer in my kitchen. I want it to be as cool as a Keurig coffee maker."

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Attic anatomy

This mystery is deepening and has become blogworthy… In August it was reported that a German 10-year-old named Alexander Kettler had discovered a mummy in the attic of his grandmother's house in Diepholz. Although it had some of the accoutrements of ancient Egypt – a hieroglyphic-adorned sarcophagus and a canopic jar – it looked very inauthentic to me, not least of which because of the positioning of the arms (IMAGE HERE). There was speculation that the boy's grandfather (who died 12 years ago) brought a replica mummy home as an exotic souvenir from his travels to North Africa in the 1950s. Alexander's father, dentist Lutz Wolfgang Kettler, had it CT-scanned and x-rayed and the results were surprising. Beneath the probably machine-made wrappings was a fairly intact human skeleton measuring 4.9' (1.49 m), though the bones may have come from more than one person. The skull was wrapped with a metal diadem or headband (IMAGE ABOVE), and had an arrowhead lodged in one of the eye sockets. The neck vertebrae were missing, but the remaining bones had been wrapped in some kind of metal foil. The mummy has now been confiscated by authorities and will be examined by forensic experts in Hamburg for possible criminal implications. "It's a somewhat uncomfortable situation," admits 53-year-old Mr. Kettler.

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Dinofuzz

On the one hand, it has just been shown that amber does not preserve the DNA of prehistoric creatures. On the other hand, it preserves dinosaur feathers and protofeathers (a.k.a. "dinofuzz") in such detail that it can be determined whether they helped with flight or diving. A team of researchers from the University of Alberta lead by Ryan McKellar found that Late Cretaceous Canadian amber (IMAGES HERE) was best at preserving the rare filaments. The feathers in the fossilized resin match compression fossils discovered with dinosaur skeletons and even allow them to assess their color. That in the feathers depicted above ranges from translucent to near-black. The scientists write, "Because amber preserves feather structure and pigmentation in unmatched detail, these fossils provide novel insights regarding feather evolution."

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Cetacean cerumen

In science-speak, the title of this post means whale ear wax and that is, in fact, a man holding a plug of it harvested from a blue whale that washed up on the beach! Not only can its layers be counted – as in dendochronology – to determine the age of the whale, but they can be chemically analyzed – as in ice core sampling – to reconstruct the concentrations of mercury and organic pollutants the whale has been exposed to over its lifetime. Plus, they reveal hormone levels which indicate sexual maturity and stress level over the years. “For a majority of the species on the planet, lifetime profiles such as these are simply unattainable,” writes the research team, led by environmental scientist Sascha Usenko of Baylor University.

 

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Blob

The blobfish has gotten a lot of press since winning the vote as the ugliest endangered animal to become the official mascot of the Ugly Animal Preservation Society. But this is a blob of an entirely different sort. It is a human brain without any of the characteristic convolutions! People with this rare condition – known as agyria or lissencephaly – rarely survive childhood and are known to have muscle spasms, seizures, and a range of learning difficulties. This is the most profound example that neurologists have seen and would have remained unseen if not for Austin-based photographer Adam Voorhes:

"I walked into a storage closet filled with approximately one hundred human brains, none of them normal, taken from patients at the Texas State Mental Hospital. The brains sat in large jars of fluid, each labeled with a date of death or autopsy, a brief description in Latin, and a case number. These case numbers corresponded to micro film held by the State Hospital detailing medical histories. But somehow, regardless of how amazing and fascinating this collection was, it had been largely untouched, and unstudied for nearly three decades."

The symptoms of this particular patient, however, are a mystery. The label on the jar states that he or she died in 1970, notes the anomaly, but includes a reference number corresponding to a microfilm which no longer exists…

THANKS TO WENDY MUIR FOR THE LINK!

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Beetle-browed

"Beetle-browed" means having messy or bushy eyebrows, giving one a sullen or scowling appearance. That would be the definition of American radio and television journalist Andy Rooney (1919-2011), long-known as a curmudgeon. How doubly appropriate, then, that entomologists have bestowed his name on the beetle above (PHOTOGRAPHED BY SAM DROEGE IN THE SMOKY MOUNTAINS NATIONAL PARK) from the species Ripiphoridae. "It's all our staff who geek out about this stuff," explains Danielle Brigida, of the National Wildlife Federation.

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Honolulu harbor horror

The latest environmental disaster occurred a week ago today. A pipeline running from storage tanks at Hawaii’s last sugar plantation to ships heading for California leaked 233,000 gallons of molasses into a lagoon, killing thousands of fish and other marine creatures. Roger Smith, owner of Cool Blue Scuba, dove down, recorded a video, and describes what he saw:

"Usually the water has a greenish hue from the algae. But when I dove, it was brown, almost like a cola color. The molasses sunk down to the bottom, and it kind of blanketed everything. It sucks the oxygen out of the water. Every living thing is usually hiding in a hole. But every living thing came out and was gasping to live. Crabs, fish, worms, feather dusters…everything was just laying out in the bottom, just dead. The tbigger fish had died, but they had gone to float to the top. The smaller fish were just on the floor. We saw a couple of small fish that were up on the surface and they were gasping for air, but they didn't look like they were going to live, either. They were up by the surface, but because molasses sinks, they already had it in their system."

Officials have decided to let nature take its course, which will take years.

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Jaded jaw

"Some of them had jade inserts in their teeth, which we think means they were high-status members of the ruling class," says German archaeologist Nicolaus Seefeld of the remains of 24 people who had been decapitated and dismembered 1,400 years ago in the Maya city of Uxul in Campeche, Mexico. The skeletons were excavated over the last 5 years from under 6.6' (2 m) within a 344 sq. ft. (32 sq m) chamber that had been used as a water reservoir. The international team of scientists, led by Nikolai Grube of the University of Bonn, plan to test the bones for isotopes to determine whether the dead were prisoners of war from another Mayan city or deposed nobles from Uxul itself. But one thing is certain, says Dr. Grube: "[T]he discovery of the mass grave proves that the dismemberment of prisoners of war and opponents often represented in Maya art was in fact practiced."

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Hopper zipper

The image above is a close-up of a detail on the legs of an adolescent issus, a kind of planthopper insect. The structure allows the bug, which is less than 1/10 of an inch long, to synchronize the movement of its rear legs to a precision of 1/300,000 of a second. It rockets forward (VIDEO HERE), accelerating at nearly 400 g's and breaking a speed of 8 mph. British zoologist Malcolm Burrows of the University of Cambridge explains, "Jumping is one of the most rapid and powerful things an animal can do and that leads to all sorts of crazy specializations." As described in Popular Mechanics, this particular one is the first functioning gear ever to be found in a living creature!

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Turtle tears

I am certain I blogged about the discovery that moths in Madagascar drink the tears of sleeping birds, but damned if I can find the post! Now news that butterflies in the Amazon drink the tears of turtles. The butterflies are in need of the sodium, which is plentiful in the largely carnivorous diet of the turtles. So they stick their proboscises painlessly into the eyes of the turtles to suck up the salt (which is much more pleasant, I assume, than getting it from animal urine, muddy river banks, puddles, or human sweat). The newly observed phenomenon seems to have little effect on the turtles, except to possibly obscure their vision as they are covered in butterfly kisses (IMAGE ABOVE BY JEFF CREMER OF RAINFOREST EXPEDITIONS). Richard C. Vogt, a veteran researcher at the National Institute of Amazonian Research in Manaus, Brazil, has never witnessed the behavior, and neither has turtle specialist Juarez Pezzuti of Brazil's Federal University of Pará. It was spotted by Geoff Gallice, a graduate student of entomology at the Florida Museum of Natural History, and Phil Torres of Rice University and the Tambopata Research Center in Peru. Says Torres of the butterflies, "Potentially, they could be getting other resources out of those eyeballs that we don't even know about. Basically, we have to go start swabbing turtle eyeballs and see what we get."

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See-through snail

Four years ago, I blogged about hermit crabs which had taken up residence in handblown glass shells so that New Zealand researchers could better study them. Yesterday in the weird news, I read that scientists have discovered a new species of snail that grows its own clear shell! It was living 3,215' (980 m) below ground, in a chamber full of rocks and sand and fed by a small stream within the Lukina Jama–Trojama cave system in Croatia – one of the deepest in the world. Researcher Alexander M. Weigand of the Institute for Ecology at Germany's Goethe-University Frankfurt and the Croatian Biospeleological Society describes the new snail in the open access journal Subterranean Biology. Zospeum tholussum is miniature, fragile, and air-breathing, with a beautifully shaped, dome-like, translucent shell. Unfortunately, it has "lost visual orientation," so it is unable to see (or see out of) its own good looks.

 

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Bejeweled bones

I first blogged about American art historian Paul Koudounaris upon publication of his spectacular The Empire of Death. He has now sought out and photographed dozens of decked-out skeletons in some of the world's most secretive religious sanctuaries (IMAGES HERE):

"In 1578 news came of the discovery in Rome of a labyrinth of underground tombs, which were thought to hold the remains of thousands of early Christian martyrs. Skeletons of these supposed saints were subsequently sent to Catholic churches and religious houses in German-speaking Europe to replace holy relics that had been destroyed in the wake of the Protestant Reformation. The skeletons, known as “the catacomb saints,” were carefully reassembled, richly dressed in fantastic costumes, wigs, crowns, jewels, and armor, and posed in elaborate displays inside churches and shrines as reminders to the faithful of the heavenly treasures that awaited them after death."

Like his first book, Heavenly Bodies: Cult Treasures and Spectacular Saints from the Catacombs has a surprisingly affordable price.

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Van Gogh in the vernacular

In a letter he wrote in 1888, Vincent van Gogh (1853-1890) mentioned he had been to Montmajour, in Provence, France, more than 50 times to admire the view. That same year, he painted the landscape at dusk: hilly, with forests, wheat fields, and the ruins of a Benedictine abbey. The painting was owned by his brother until Theo's widow sold it to a Paris art dealer in 1901. It was purchased by a Norwegian collector in 1908, but shortly thereafter was deemed a fake. It lived in the collector's attic until he died in 1970. The current anonymous owners have just met with success on their second attempt to authenticate the painting. They have not indicated whether they intend to keep it or to auction it, though it is of course worth tens of millions of dollars. In the opinion of art historian Fred Leeman, former chief curator of the Van Gogh Museum, “Sunset at Montmajour" (IMAGE ABOVE) contributes to an alternative understanding of the artist. “We have the impression of van Gogh as a very modern painter, but here he’s working in the tradition of 19th-century landscape painting."

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Amateurism and the Arabia

Another trove, this time in a cornfield in the Midwestern United States. Treasure hunters Bob Hawley and his sons consulted 19th c. maps and the manifest of a steamboat that sunk – with no casualties – in the Missouri River in 1856. They discovered the wreck just north of Kansas City in 1987, but it was no longer underwater due to meandering. In fact, the river's silt, which had buried the Arabia within weeks, preserved its contents in an ideal oxygen-free environment. The Hawleys realized what a haul they had when they began excavating the cargo:

• 20,000 feet of lumber
• 4,000 shoes and boots
• 2 prefab homes, plus window glass, locks, and door knobs
• a sawmill, its fixtures, and tools including axes, wood planes, and nails
• pistols, rifles, and hundreds of pocket knives
• thousands of assorted buttons and innumerable Indian trade beads
• bolts of cloth
• hundreds of beaver hats, pairs of pants, and dresses
• 3,000 tallow candles and whale-oil lamps
• pots, pans, muffin tins, and skillets
• spiced pigs' feet, sardines, pie fillings, and pickles
• kegs of ale, whiskey, and a case of Otard Dupuy & Co. cognac
• castor oil, Barrell's Indian Liniment, and dozens of medicine bottles
• luxury goods including perfumes, champagne, silk cloth, brandied cherries from France, and patterned porcelain tableware from England

Despite all their labor in bringing the items to the surface, the Hawleys realized they represented a virtual time capsule, so they decided rather than sell off their treasure, they would keep it together. While the U.S. curatorial and conservation establishment pooh-poohed their amateur efforts, they received advice from labs in Sweden, Canada, and the U.K. about how to process the objects they were keeping wet in huge tubs stored in caves and restaurant freezers. Rather than hiring museum design consultants, the family studied department store design to display the Arabia's goods (and her paddlewheel and boilers) in a museum that they built without any state or federal support. Welcome to the Steamboat Arabia Museum.

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Venezuelan vestiges

The Laboratory of Paleontology at Venezuela's Institute for Scientific Research is filled with fossils recently found in oil deposits concentrated in a large area north of the Orinoco River. The crowded tables and drawers include the remains of an oversized featherless chicken, a 10' (3 m) pelican, giant sloths, a 6-ton mastodon, a car-sized armadillo and a bus-sized crocodile, and a new species of saber-toothed tiger (IMAGES HERE). The trove of 12,000 specimens discovered so far range in dates from 14,000 to 370 million years old. "Imagine a puzzle of 5,000 pieces and you have 200 pieces you are trying to interpret and draw a conclusion that might contribute something to science," says overwhelmed paleontologist Ascanio Rincon (IMAGE ABOVE).

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Brrrth

Under other circumstances, the 19-month-old baby in the image above would have been born in 1985, the 3rd child of a couple in Oregon who already had twins. Instead, he was born in 2012 to a woman in Hampton, Virginia. After 2 unsuccessful attempts at in vitro fertilization, Kelly Burke decided to adopt – not a living child, but a frozen embryo...an embryo that has been stored in dry ice for the better part of 2 decades. The adoption is an open one, so little Liam will meet his college-age siblings and any future brothers or sisters resulting from the implantation of the Oregon couple's 2 remaining frozen embryos. Burke, who happens to be a researcher at NASA, is a proud parent, happy that science has allowed her to give birth to the second oldest cryopreserved human embryo in history. "Technology is my world," she says.

 

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Holey horrors

Pictured above (tanakawho/Flickr.com) is a lotus seed head. You're not afraid of it, are you? Strangely enough, images like this are viscerally upsetting to 16% of people. In a condition known as trypophobia – well-documented anecdotally, but not studied scientifically until now – sufferers are horrified by the sight of clustered holes. Psychologists Geoff Cole and Arnold Wilkins of the Centre for Brain Science at the University of Essex studied the condition and found that photographs of venomous animals elicited the same phobic response. They speculate that the fear is an ancient biologically-driven response to danger. Cole emphasizes, “We think that everyone has trypophobic tendencies even though they may not be aware of it. We found that people who don’t have the phobia still rate trypophobic images as less comfortable to look at than other images.” Personally, I can't imagine being frightened by honeycombs, soap bubbles, or – God forbid – aerated chocolate!

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