From the Science Desk: Virus Snuffing Out Sea Stars Identified

"Identifying what virus is to blame is particularly difficult because a drop of seawater contains about 10 million viruses."

That's what scientists had to sort through in order to find the virus that's responsible for sea star wasting syndrome, the awful infection that's been causing sea stars (that's starfish) to lose limbs and in extreme cases, simply dissolve, along the West Coast of the North America for a few years.

But now that we've identified the culprit, how do we stop it? Or do we stop it? Many of the sea stars the virus affects are alpha predators within their specific ecosystem. That is, they're in the highest reaches of the food chain and help keep the population of prey animals under control.

Yet some say the virus may be nature's way of culling a population of sea stars that's become too large for sustainability, so we let it work itself out.

Read the PBS/News Hour story: "Scientists solve mystery of West Coast starfish plague"

Or be a lazy sod and watch this video:

Naked Came the Sasquatch

Bigfoot's about as scary as Bela Lugosi's bunion cream, but as lasting bit of folklore and the poster beast of cryptozoology, the hairy bastard's charm is irresistible.

Therefore, it's entirely possible that the news of an "explanation" for the Yeti, aka the Abominable Snowman, has already made it's way to you.

The diet version of the tale is that a bit of fur, thought to be sloughed off from the Snowsquatch, is probably that of a rare polar bear that once wandered the Himalayas, the mountainous region of Asia that gave rise to the legend of the Yeti. Read all about that here.

But a far more interesting bit of Sasquatch news broke this past week as well, and didn't stir up nearly the attention that it should have.

A naked 20-year-old man attacked a 58-year-old man with a rock in the backwoods of Oregon and it took police 90 minutes to find the victim and his attacker. All the while, the victim held the dude in the nude at bay with his hunting rifle.

The cherry on this sundae? The clothing-optional assailant claimed he was descended from Sasquatch. Despite his self-proclaimed lineage, he was still arrested like any other human who strips and assaults people in the forest.

Your Dead Are Safe Until Winter

The corpse-eating fly, thought to be extinct, and possibly apocryphal, is alive ... and hungry.

Oh Honey, We're Ridiculous

As the solstice approaches and each day we eagerly rise and pad down to the TMI corporate p-patch to see if the artichoke is still alive, we try to encourage all Typing Monkey staffers to take a moment and let the amazing wonder of the natural world grab hold.

That's not difficult, since most of them are drunk and/or high most of the time, but if that makes them more suggestible to the precise beauty of those pale-green spiders that climb nimbly over the stones in the fake river-bed, so be it.

After all, it doesn't matter that you've risen later than intended and are watching fast-talking dames on Turner Classic Movies via the break room television while you eat leftovers for breakfast. What matters is that you saw a hummingbird pause by the window and be-damned if the emerald beauty didn't seem like he stopped to look back at you.

With all that in mind, take a look at this list from Wikipedia of the crop plants that bees pollinate. (Bats get a few nods too in the non-bee items.)

Bees of the honey, bumble, solitary, and stingless variety all come into play, and if we could, we'd high-five them or send them a thank-you note because we eat most of the items on that list.

Oh, and the word for what those bees are doing? Entomophily.

[Image courtesy of PD Photo]

The Elder Moss, Pink Slugs and Cannibal Snails

A University of Alberta biologist has grown fresh moss from a 400-year-old specimen found after Arctic ice melted away. We repeat: Moss, buried under polar ice for centuries, was ground up and placed in fresh soil. Seven out of 24 samples grew green and new moss.

Yes, the polar ice is melting and that’s horrible. We are not here to diminish the wailing of the klaxons that herald the end of humanity’s “dominion” over this planet.

Having recently read H.P. Lovecraft’s excellent novella At the Mountains of Madness, and then this article from the Edmonton Journal about Catherine La Farge’s resuscitation of dormant moss, the immediate, and we feel, appropriate, question is: What else is under the ice caps?

We don’t doubt the tenacity of moss. Cockroaches and rats have nothing on moss, lichens and fungus, in terms of survival skill. No animal will ever best a plant in that department, until the skies rain ammonia. Then we’re all done for.

But if moss can creep out from beneath the thaw, it’s only a matter of time before somebody accidentally wakes up a shoggoth.

La Farge herself says: “’Now we have to think there may be populations of land plants that survived that freezing. It makes you wonder what’s under the big ice caps in the Arctic and Antarctic and alpine glaciers.’”

She goes on to call glacial ice an “`Unrecognized genetic reservoir ... We really have not examined all the biological systems that exist in the world; we don’t know it all.’"

While we’re on the topic of slimy things that lurk in dark, little-explored corners of the globe, we direct your attention to New South Wales, Australia.

From the misty heights of Mount Kaputar, a rainforest peak and National Park amidst New South Wales’ generally dry landscape, comes news of new species of invertebrates once only rumored to exist.

One of the confirmed new creatures is a retina-frying pink slug that feeds on moss and mold while the world sleeps. It’s a pretty thing with the kind of coloring we’d expect to come from Laffy Taffy.

The other big discovery at Kaputar is a snail that feeds on other snails, particularly snails that follow a strict vegetarian diet. And if bumper stickers have taught us anything, it’s that vegetarians taste better. Good work, cannibal snail.

[Incantations of ancient thank-yous to Edmonton Journal, The Age, and Pahko]

Do Blind People See Ghosts?

Smithsonian.com attempts to answer that very question with a video, some links and anecdotes. It's funny and interesting.

tl;dr

The Typing Monkey may re-use that headline (and tag) anytime we post links to articles on the web that actually qualify as articles.

What qualifies us to decide what qualifies as an "article"? Any piece we read that reaches a certain tipping point of the tl;dr factor. To save you a trip to Urban Dictionary, that weird abbreviation stands for "too long; didn't read" and is often used jokingly in comments under articles on the Web.

But it's just as often typed in earnest, because attention for reading web articles drops exponentially after certain word counts. The numbers vary depending on which study you read, but the advice is the same: the shorter the better. Which loosely means, anything that can't be read "above the fold" -- read without the user having to scroll further down the page -- is least likely to be read.

Why does this happen? Again, search around the Web and read up on studies, statistics and opinions, but the fact that it happens bugs us. It bugs us even more when we catch ourselves doing it. Never mind that this very blog posts two- and three-page scrollers all the time. We just can't shut up and that's another issue entirely.

So in defense of long-form journalism, criticism and other types of information delivery through the written word, we'll put "tl;dr" right there in the headline to let you know that what we're linking to, when we're recommending it, is more than one "page down" button's worth of reading but worth the time and attention.

To the links!

First up is "Wikipedia's Women Problem" from science writer James Gleick for The New York Review of Books. If you've been following the story at all, Wikipedia has slowly moved all of the women from the category "American novelists" into a sub-category specific to their gender. While this sort of OCD categorizing isn't weird on it's own, it's a problem because they didn't call the other category "male American novelists." Gleick goes deep. Hold on.

Take a break, drink some juice and then dig into Christopher Riley's love letter to Richard Feynman from The Telegraph. Riley's piece is secretly hyping the film version of his love letter to Feynman, but that doesn't reduce the appeal of his writing.

And perhaps most interesting to all of us at TMI, is a Wilson Quarterly article by Tom Vanderbilt called "Star Wars." Vanderbilt examines the value of "user review" critical opinions that dominate and influence our behavior on the Web and in the real world of commerce.

Yelp, Amazon and other giants of this format really do shape opinions, but Vanderbilt asks whether there's any real worth in these arbitrary and generally anonymous voices. Plus he asks what we bring to these opinions in contrast to what we might bring to the critical writing of that dying species: the paid, published critic.

For us, Vanderbilt's article is the most interesting, but all are worth a dive.

You'll be seeing mention of Arts & Letters Daily frequently for the tl;dr items, because that's where we go most often to grow our brains. Thank you A&L.

Sexy Astronomers of History [No. 4]

Collect 'em all!

Carl Edward Sagan
(Nov 9, 1934 – Dec 20, 1996)
Birthplace:  (Brookly, NY, United States)
Culture-shaping contribution:  Made astronomy, astrophysics and cosmology appealing to the masses via his unequalled educational television series Cosmos, based on his book of the same name. Is also responsible for the Baloney Detection Kit, an invaluable guide to testing arguments.
Fun fact:  Wrote an essay on the benefits of smoking cannabis for a 1971 book Marihuana Reconsidered. Sagan, using the pseudonym "Mr. X", claimed his use of the drug had not only enhanced sensual and intellectual experiences but had also inspired some of his works. Mr. X's true identity was revealed shortly after Sagan's death.

The Inscrutable Charm of "Fact or Faked: Paranormal Files"

In 2010, the Syfy network premiered a reality program that combined the nerds-blowing-stuff-up charm of Discovery's Mythbusters with the ludicrous phantom chasing of the network's own Ghosthunters.

Fact of Faked: Paranormal Files is reality television at it's best and worst -- both illuminating and frustratingly stagy and convinced of it's own authenticity. It's also supremely addictive to viewers willing to let go and enjoy the show's Law & Order-esque predictability.

The premise of Fact of Faked is simple: Six experts in disparate fields team up to investigate allegedly supernatural events caught on film, with the goal of trying to recreate those events and thus expose them as hoaxes.

That's where the Mythbusters angle plays in. In each episode, the cast members/investigators split into two teams, with each taking apart the details of footage they've screened, and attempting to reverse engineer what they've seen.

Many viewers probably disregard the major message of Fact or Faked. That is: Just about every alleged sighting of a cryptid, UFO or supernatural apparition is either an accidental misidentification of something horribly mundane, or a big fat fake. And those fakes look surprisingly easy to construct based on what the stars of the show manage to pull off with average resources.

To sate those viewers, and because this is a product of the Syfy network, the showrunners frequently add a third act to each segment in which the teams consider the possibility that the footage or pictures they're scrutinizing depict actual supernatural occurrences.

That portion of the investigation is posited as a control aspect to their experiments, but really it's a way to fill a few minutes with unnecessarily amped-up tension that rarely results in anything notable.

As soon as they switch to night-vision -- Fact or Faked's shorthand for spooky time -- is when any sliver of legitimacy disappears. All they ever get out of the control test is an agreement that those who recorded the video believe they saw something extraordinary.

Fact or Faked does much better when, in those instances where they've made clear that the footage was a hoax, they confront those responsible and try to get them to admit the hornswoggling. It's never mean spirited or hammy. These "c'mon dude" moments instead come off like a school teacher trying to elicit a confession from the kid who made fart noises during a math test.

That the six people cast in this show do it all with such conviction is enough of a hook. Theirs is a universe where irony doesn't exist and the kooks get as much airtime as the sane. Why not?

The first episode of season three airs April 17, 2012. Older episodes are online via Syfy.com.

How Long the Teenage?

Alison Gopnik's Wall Street Journal article "What's Wrong With the Teenage Mind?" was published a month ago, but you should still read it.

The piece touches on numerous recent research in developmental psychology, neuroscience, and other cognitive studies that indicate an increase in the length of human adolescence. That is, puberty starts earlier and adulthood arrives slower than your bus.

Gopnik's piece isn't a unified theory of why 30-year-olds still live with their parents, but she makes an interesting case for a gradual shift in our culture that has triggered a shift in our brains.

[A sincere shrug and heartfelt "whatever" to Arts & Letters Daily]

From the Fortean News Desk: Science Gives Middle Finger to Yeti Finger

"The finger was taken from the monastery by Bigfoot researcher Peter Byrne and was smuggled out of the country, so the story goes, by beloved Hollywood actor Jimmy Stewart, who hid it amid his wife's lingerie."

Oggity-oggity-oggity! Though the finger was not a lopped-off digit from a snomwan, abominable or otherwise, the story still titilates and fascinates.

Read it all.

Remnants of Revenants

An archaeological dig in Kilteasheen, Ireland unearthed two bodies buried in a ritualistic manner that suggests the locals were worried the two men might rise from their graves.

What's remarkable about the find is that the circa 700 A.D. preparation of the bodies predates records of when Europeans started documenting how to keep a questionable corpse in the ground. Read all the details about it here.

Shrunken Heads Are For Real

May got off to such a promising start. Traveling off the grid put us in strange states where the ghost of Howard Hughes danced on the wing of The Spruce Goose to a lopsided Mexican shuffle played by a laughing band of weirdos. And on a hot Saturday morning, Typing Monkey publisher S.L. Kreighton left a bit of himself in a hotel parking lot. We were all so frightened and entertained.

Never mind. We merge back onto the information superhighway's increasingly neglected backroads in order to bring you this piece about scientists analyzing the DNA of an alleged shrunken head, proving that said noggin is no longer alleged. It's an actual human head that's been shrunk.

As if we ever doubted it. For the time-strapped, here's a quotation from Gila Kahila Bar-Gal, one of the scientists who conducted the DNA examination:

"'During spiritual ceremonies, enemies' heads were carefully reduced through boiling and heating, in the attempt to lock the enemy's spirit and protect the killers from spiritual revenge.'"


[Photo is not the head they tested, but one kept in the Pitt Rivers Museum in Oxford. Photo by Narayan k28, via WikiCommons.]

From the Math & Science Desk

Twenty days without a peep from anyone at The Typing Monkey and now this, two links to the hard work of others. But oh! What links!

First up is a piece from The Economist, discussing a mathematical rules of war. The formula: (T_n = T₁n^-b) results in what mathemiticians call a "progressive curve." Basically, we get better at killing each other as conflicts between tribes/nations/neighbors escalate. And like most math we learn, nobody's quite sure what to do with the knowledge. It's a predictor of aggression, but we aren't very good at using it to stop war.

Now go to The Boston Globe for Leon Neyfakh's article about famed social biologist/ant researcher E.O. Wilson's enthusiasm for a new theory on the nature of altruism. Yes, it bugs us that they keep insisting altruism is a "human" trait because, since when? However, "group selection" as Wilson calls it, knocks the accepted "kin theory" of altruism over because he's found little to support kin selection and that group selection simply makes more sense.

Wilson's always been an interesting scientist to read and read about. He's nearly alone in his confidence about group selection. Perhaps, as the article says, in a few decades we'll look back at his assertions and realize how right he was.

[Thank you Arts & Letters Daily]

From the Science & Technology Desk

The first item is mainly for the amazing picture from National Geographic, an x-ray image of a bolt of lightning. You can read about how it was done and some speculation on what it means, but shouldn't you have clicked by now in order to see an x-ray image of lightning?

Second comes a report with editorial (new journalism is nearly the only journalism now) from Slate. The article heralds a piece of audio hardware that allegedly makes those compressed, tinny MP3 files you downloaded sound all analog warm.

The USB-DAC could be the gold-coated CD of the 2000-teens or it could be the next stereo component you actually need.

Go science!

What Could Possibly Go Wrong?

Science is terrific. No really. The scientfic method -- great stuff. Our thirst for knowledge is humanity's blessing and curse. So we're filing this one in the "curse" pile because, well here, you read it.

[Those are bacteria colonies. But yes, they're looking right through you.]

Ooo-Wah-Gow-Ah

The journal Nature published a story on June 24, 2009 regarding a discovery made in September 2008 of what is believed to be the earliest handmade musical instrument. The tiny flute was carved from a mammoth tusk some 35,000 years ago, and was discovered in the same cave in Germany where the same team found a tiny ivory carving of a naked woman. Say what you will about our primitive ancestors, but they used the media available to them for the same basic purposes most of us use the Web. Read more about -- and listen to -- the flute here.

[Still from Toot Whistle Plunk and Boom courtesy of The Ward-O-Matic]

Through the magic of media synergy, PBS aired the program The Music Instinct the same night that Nature published its report. And through the magic of channel surfing, The Typing Monkey managed to see Instinct, and enjoyed it immensely. They put Jarvis Cocker in an MRI and mapped his brain while he sang, talked to a man who accompanies songbirds with his clarinet, and discussed research both sound and dubious regarding the human urge to play and listen to music. Check your local listings, as the show is worth catching.

Thinking about the origins of music and its ability to stir our emotions so deeply and effectively, reminded The Typing Monkey of a Disney cartoon short called Toot Whistle Plunk and Boom. Directed by the great Ward Kimball and Charles A. Nichols, the 1953 short not only won an Oscar, but is also the first cartoon to be filmed in CinemaScope. Toot is as reductive as a 10-minute cartoon aimed at teaching kids the basics of music history needs to be. But the Jim Flora-inspired artwork and sweet music make it entertaining.

Enjoy.


[Courtesy of thelostdisney]