Why do whales beach themselves?

Whales are the largest marine mammals in the world — the smallest species weigh in at several tons. When whales beach themselves, they can die simply from the crushing weight of their own bodies or from overheating due to their blubber, which is needed for insulation in cold ocean waters.

Strandings are of several types, said Susan Parks, a research associate in the Environmental Acoustics program in the Applied Research Laboratory at Penn State. Individual strandings often are caused by isolated incidents such as sickness, injury or old age. Said Parks, “Entanglement in fishing gear is one of the leading causes of mortality for marine mammals, many of which wash up on shore dead or injured.” The tide carries these whales into shallow water, depositing them on the beach.

Then there are multiple-species strandings, explained Parks. “This occurs when different species of marine mammals beach themselves at the same time and place, suggesting that they all died from the same cause,” she said.

Scientists have been researching possible causes of this phenomenon. One explanation involves the whale “pod” social structure. For instance, whales that travel in pods use a “strength in numbers” survival strategy, but this can backfire when the dominant whale runs aground. According to Parks, “The rest of the pod may follow a disoriented or sick whale onto shore.” Another theory is that pods may venture too close to the beach when hunting prey or evading predators and become trapped by low tides.

{ Physorg | Continue reading }

Two Federal Way, Washington women claim they’ve been sexually assaulted by ghosts. According to a police report, the two women told officers a paranormal person has been placing sensors on their bodies and having intercourse with them at their apartment in the 28600 block of 25th Place South.

One of the women said the assault began when she lived in Kent and followed them to Federal Way. The second woman said her encounters began recently.

The maintenance man in charge of the apartment complex said the women keep calling him saying the ghosts are raping them on weekend nights. He finally told them to call police. (…)

Candid questions help Ross Allison, a ghost hunter, sort the eerie from the unstable. “A lot of times you’ll find it might be medications that they’re taking or something psychological,” Allison said. He took a walk through the apartment complex where the women say a spirit has haunted them for two years. He said he would need a psychic to check for the presence of a ghost.

{ KATU | Continue reading }

photo { birdinthehand }

The Hum is a generic name for a series of phenomena involving a persistent and invasive low-frequency humming noise not audible to all people. Hums have been reported in various geographical locations. In some cases a source has been located. A well-known case was reported in Taos, New Mexico, and thus the Hum is sometimes called the Taos Hum.

Hums have been reported all over the world, especially in Europe. A “Hum” on the Big Island of Hawaii, typically related to volcanic action, is heard in locations dozens of miles apart. The Local Hawaiians also say the Hum is most often heard by men. The Hum is most often described as sounding somewhat like a distant idling diesel engine. Typically “the Hum” is difficult to detect with microphones, and its source and nature are a mystery to the listener.

{ Wikipedia | Continue reading }

If there is life on other planets, why haven’t they contacted us?

You paraphrase Fermi’s Paradox, first posed by the physicist Enrico Fermi in 1950 over lunch with some colleagues. During the same lunch, he also disproved the existence of UFOs, Sasquatch, fairies, God, and love. After that, he generally ate alone. But Fermi’s apparent logic overlooked two important probabilities: (1) the aliens are very far away and don’t believe we exist, and (2) Enrico Fermi was himself probably a space alien. I mean: Look at him.

{ Wired | Continue reading }

related { 20 Things You Didn’t Know About… Aliens }

How come there are so many people out on the street all day, seemingly not working? (…)

Because look out your window. Who are these people? At any given hour on any given workday, well, it turns out it’s not a workday at all. Not for these hordes roaming free, anyway. By rights our parks and movie theaters and stores should be minor ghost towns between 9 and 5. Instead, they’re inexplicably packed. (…)

I drove to as many parts of San Francisco as I could and interrupted as much leisure as possible to find out. (…) I didn’t approach school-age kids or obvious tourists. I didn’t approach grown-ups wearing lab coats or swinging hammers. These people are either not meant to be working, or they clearly are working. My methodology was to canvass at different hours of the day and to discount those merely on lunch breaks. Science? No. But revealing all the same.

Just visiting, said the blonde with the cappuccino outside a Starbucks. (…) “I get Wednesdays off,” said Kim Anderson, 29, an administrative assistant at an architectural firm. (…) John, 41, wasn’t in a cubicle when I spoke to him. He runs large servers for a living but is between jobs now. (…)

Going over my own findings, a surprising number of people had had something job-related happen that very day. A surprising number had called in sick.

{ San Francisco Chronicle | Continue reading }

In the deep history of our planet, there have been at least five short intervals in which the majority of living species suddenly went extinct. Biologists are used to thinking about how environmental pressures slowly select the organisms most fit for survival through natural selection, shaping life on Earth like an artist sculpting clay. However, mass extinctions are drastic examples of natural selection at its most ruthless, killing off vast numbers of species at one time in a way that is hardly typical of evolution.

In the 1980s, Nobel Prize-winning physicist Luis Alvarez and his son first hypothesized that the impact of comets or asteroids caused the mass extinctions of the past. Most scientists slowly came to accept this theory of extinction, and since then a great scar in the Earth–an impact crater–has been discovered off the coast of Mexico that dates to around the time the dinosaurs went extinct. An asteroid probably did kill off the dinosaurs, but the causes of the other four mass extinctions are still obscured beneath the accumulated weight of hundreds of millions of years, and no one has found any other credible evidence of impact craters.

But now, together with Mark Roth of the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center in Seattle, I believe we have found a possible biochemical scar, present within living animals, that links Earth’s greatest mass extinction to a single substance: hydrogen sulfide (H₂S). Hydrogen sulfide is a relatively simple molecule that gives rotten eggs their distinctive foul odor and is quite toxic–in high concentrations a single breath can kill. And it looks like that is what happened: Hundreds of millions of years ago, hydrogen sulfide probably saturated our oceans and atmosphere, poisoning nearly every creature on Earth.

Yet some creatures, like our very distant ancestors, must have somehow survived this toxic environment. What Roth has discovered is that H2S, incredibly, also has the ability to preserve and save lives. In small doses the chemical puts many animals into a state of “suspended animation,” a useful adaptation that would have allowed creatures to, in essence, hibernate through the catastrophe of mass extinction. If this idea is correct, our understanding of the deep past could lead to a dramatic medical revolution very soon.

{ Seed magazine | Continue reading }

A man reported missing from a Florida hospital was found in North Carolina dressed like a doctor and driving a stolen ambulance with a dead deer wedged in the back.

{ Sun-Sentinel/Firehouse, Sept. 2005 | Continue reading }

A man who received a heart transplant 12 years ago and later married the donor’s widow died the same way the donor did, authorities said: of a self-inflicted gunshot wound.

69-year-old Sonny Graham was found Tuesday in a utility building in his backyard with a single shotgun wound to the throat.

Graham, who was director of the Heritage golf tournament at Sea Pines from 1979 to 1983, was on the verge of congestive heart failure in 1995 when he got a call that a heart was available in Charleston.

That heart was from Terry Cottle, 33, who had shot himself, Berkeley County Coroner Glenn Rhoad said. Grateful for his new heart, Graham began writing letters to the donor’s family to thank them. In January 1997, Graham met his donor’s widow, Cheryl Cottle, then 28, in Charleston. “I felt like I had known her for years,” Graham said. “I couldn’t keep my eyes off her. I just stared.”

{ MSNBC | Continue reading }

A number of people have noticed that after getting transplants their personality changes - and not only that- their personality changes to reflect the donors personality. (…)

There is the 8-year-old girl who got the heart of a 10-year-old murder victim, according to medical reports. Plagued by nightmares of the crime after her transplant, the girl used the images in her dreams to help locate and convict her donor’s killer. (…)

Perhaps most controversial is the theory of “cellular memory” or “systemic memory” - the idea that cells, or even atoms and molecules, contain the living being’s memory and energy, which are transferred in a donated organ. Proposed by University of Arizona psychologists - who also have studied near-death experiences and spiritual mediums - the theory was developed after studying 10 heart transplant patients who reported donor-related changes, including a male UMC patient who got a woman’s heart, and soon was bothered by his new preference for the color pink and desire to wear perfumes.

{ ScienceBlogs | Continue reading }

photo { Joel Barhamand }

What it feels like to undergo an exorcism

We call it a deliverance, not an exorcism. Besides me, there were four other people in the room — two pastors and two women — praying over me and commanding the spirits to leave. One of the women, June, stayed face-to-face with me the whole time. She had the ability to sense the presence of evil — and she read my face. From what I understand, you could see it in my eyes.

I saw things. And I smelled things, too. There was a sulfuric, acidic, burning smell. When I smelled it, I looked to the right, and I saw something. I can’t even describe what it was, but it was horrible. June saw it, too. I remember freaking out and asking her, “What is that?” And she said, “It’s okay, it’s okay.” And then it left.

At times I became violent. When the pastor commanded a spirit to leave, I would feel it rise up within me, and I would want to bolt. I would want to hurt someone, want to hurt myself. I would bang my head against the floor. But it wasn’t me. I couldn’t control myself at all.

That first session started at ten in the morning and lasted until after eight at night. I had three more sessions over the next few months before God delivered me.

Before this all started, I was ornery as all get-out. But as time passed, I started to feel different. It was like my heart had a little shell around it, and we were breaking off the pieces. Still, it’s an ongoing battle. We all need deliverance, every day.

{ Esquire | Continue reading }

illustration { Your Flesh magazine }

Actress Serena Kozakura’s conviction for willful destruction of property has been overturned by the Tokyo High Court because her large breasts revealed flaws in the testimony against her.

Reconstruction during an appeal hearing of the 38-year-old actress’s alleged crime of breaking down the door in a man’s apartment showed her breasts prevented her from climbing through a door as the man testified she had done, casting doubt on his reliability.

Kozakura was charged with having kicked down the door of a man’s apartment after she had been kicked out following an argument with another woman there in November 2006. In July last year, the Tokyo District Court found her guilty of willful destruction of property, but she appealed against the conviction.

During the appeal hearing, the court heard testimony from the man and a witness who both said Kozakura had kicked a hole in the door, through which she wriggled through to re-enter the apartment.

The hole in the door was a rectangular shape 72 centimeters long by 22 centimeters wide. But Kozakura has a 101-centimeter bust and her breasts alone extend out 29 centimeters from her chest bone.

The appeal hearing conducted a reconstruction of the alleged crime and found that it would have been extremely difficult for Kozakura to squeeze through the hole in the door as witnesses testified she had. Further doubt was cast on the validity of the man’s testimony because the clothes she had been wearing at the time of the incident were not damaged as they would have been had she gone through the hole, nor did her feet show any signs of marks that would have occurred had she kicked the door.

“I lost work after being charged, but justice prevailed in the end,” she said at a news conference she held in Tokyo after the conviction was overturned. “I was always worried about being a bit fat, but this time I was glad.”

Kozakura got her break working as a presenter on a TV sales program before becoming a pin-up model and actress.

{ Mainichi }

related { The city marina of Fort Pierce, Fla., has banned a charter fishing service that offers tours with topless and bikini-clad female mates. }

A man in Italy is suspected of hypnotising supermarket checkout staff to hand over money from their cash registers. In every case, the last thing staff reportedly remember is the thief leaning over and saying: “Look into my eyes”, before finding the till empty.

In the latest incident captured on CCTV, he targeted a bank at Ancona in northern Italy, then calmly walked out. A female bank clerk reportedly handed over nearly 800 euros (£630).

The cashier who was shown the video footage has no memory of the incident, according to Italian media, and only realised what had happened when she saw the money missing.

{ BBC | Continue reading }

I’m a trained hypnotist myself, so my first reaction was skepticism. You can’t hypnotize someone that quickly and reliably. But then I put on my criminal mastermind hat and tried to figure out how this crime could be committed as described.

The trick is to hypnotize the targets well ahead of the actual day of the robbery, perhaps several times, and weed out the people who don’t instantly return to the so-called trance state upon suggestion. Then on robbing day, a simple suggestion at the store or bank can produce the instant results you need. The subjects have been pre-trained.

The hard part of this scheme is finding a way to get the right people to agree to hypnosis ahead of time. I imagine he advertised in a local publication, offering to help people quit smoking or lose weight. When people called for an appointment he would ask what sounded like standard questions, including age and occupation. If someone had the right sort of job, he set up an appointment and started the process. On any given day, he could hypnotize several new clients while testing for the most susceptible subjects who also handle money.

The next part would be a bit tricky. You can’t get a hypnotized person to do something that would violate his basic sense of right and wrong, or to put himself in danger. The brain has some sort of safety mechanism to prevent that.

In the surveillance video on the web, the hypnotist is seen taking the money from the register himself while the clerk seemed to be watching. This might be part of his workaround. The clerk wasn’t committing the crime so much as observing it. And perhaps the hypnotist said he was borrowing the money, or the manager had asked him to bring it to him in the parking lot, or some other story that obscured the ethical boundaries.

It could work. He’d need to be an excellent hypnotist, but that isn’t so rare.

{ Scott Adams/Dilbert.blog | Continue reading }

related { A 57-year-old man walking with a cane entered the Bank of America branch at Broadway and 57th Street on Tuesday afternoon and passed a note to a teller demanding money. The teller gave him a bag of cash. Officers arrested the man outside the bank as he fled with the money bag. Bank of America says it doesn’t comment on robberies. | 1010 WINS }

It has been one of the more lingering questions surrounding the shooting of Sean Bell: How can anyone sustain 19 gunshot wounds and live to tell about it?

{ NY Times | Continue reading }

related { How far can bullets travel when fired into water? The general rule is that most ordinary guns and bullets aren’t tremendously effective when fired into the water, and if you can dive below eight feet, you’re probably safe from your run-of-the mill assassins. }