In 1995, divers discovered bizarre configurations about 6 feet in diameter off the coast of Japan’s Amami-Oshima Island. They resembled crop circles. Were these underwater aliens?
The answer turned out to be a newly classified pufferfish, Torquigener albomaculosus. The “Crop Circle Fish” was among many species that received scientific names over the last year. The International Institute for Species Exploration has listed their their top 10 of nearly 18,000 newly named species.
These obscure creatures may be hidden away in environments that are not populated by people, such as the strange creatures we are discovering deep beneath the ocean. Others are known locally, but only recently noticed by the scientific community. Here are the other nine recognized on this “top 10” list:
Anzu wyliei, also known as “the Chicken From Hell,” is a 10-foot-tall birdlike dinosaur which lived around 66 million years ago in the Dakotas.
The Balanophora coralliformis is a parasitic plant found only on the southwestern slopes of Mount Mingan in the Philippines. It has a unique, coral-like appearance because of branches of above-ground tubers which have a coarse texture.
The bizarre Cebrennus rechenbergi, or cartwheeling spider, uses a strange flipping motion to propel itself over the sands of Morocco.
The so-called Bone-house wasp, Deuteragenia ossarium, from southeast China, uses corpses of ants to ward off predators by stuffing them into crevices on the outside of the nest.
The Limnonectes larvaepartus is a fanged frog from Sulawesi Island, Indonesia, that gives live birth to tadpoles that are deposited into pools of water. Other species hatch from eggs.
A Sea Slug, Phyllodesmium acanthorhinum, is a particularly beautiful variety that might be a sort of “missing link” in the sea slug world.
A Mexican plant had been used for years in “nacimientos,” or altar scenes depicting the birth of Christ, by villagers in Sierra de Tepoztlán, Tlayacapan, San José de los Laureles, and Tepoztlán. It turned out to be a species of Bromeliad previously unknown to science. It’s been dubbed Tillandsia religiosa.
These are only ten from thousands of newly classified species. As we continue to seek perhaps we’ll finally be giving scientific names to some of the legendary creatures such as Bigfoot that have eluded and fascinated seekers for centuries.
Dr. Melba Ketchum’s announcement of Zoobank accepting her proposed name for the Bigfoot species.
Dr. Melba Ketchum announced today that Zoobank has officially granted the creatures popularly known as “Bigfoot” the latin name: Homo sapiens cognatus.
Former heavyweight boxing champion-turned-Bigfoot hunter Nikolai Valuev joins host Mark Evans as they investigate the Almasty.
For those of you who have not had the chance to watch the first episode of the excellent show Bigfoot Files, you can watch it in its entirety here:
The show is well-worth watching, and is an example of the type of programming cryptozoology needs more of. Bigfoot Files takes a scientific approach to the search for answers to the mystery of Bigfoot, following genetics professor Bryan Sykes in his analysis of DNA extracted from hair samples provided to the Oxford-Lausanne Collateral Hominid Project (OLCHP).
The first episode had some pretty amazing (in my opinion) results on some supposed Yeti hairs. And while the description for Bigfoot Files: Episode 2 sounds less than enthusiastic…
…Professor Sykes reveals the results of his DNA tests on the hair samples he’s collected. Will the results confirm the Bigfootologists’ stories or will it be bad news?
…Episode 3, the finale of the three-part series, sounds much more promising. From the British Channel 4 description for Episode 3 of Bigfoot Files:
The ‘Almasty’ is Russia’s very own Bigfoot. It has been written about for over 300 years, and Russia’s Almasty hunters claim there have been over 10,000 encounters over the years.
The big theory in Russia is that it’s a surviving hominid, possibly even a Neanderthal.
Mark Evans travels to Russia and investigates one of the highest profile Bigfoot stories in the world: the tale of Zana, the so-called Wildwoman: a living Almasty said to have been found in the remote Caucasus in the 1870s.
She was alleged to have had four children by her captors over the years. Almasty hunters have tracked down her descendants and Bryan Sykes uses cutting edge tests to analyse their DNA and test the Neanderthal theory about Zana.
Mark also meets a giant among Almasty hunters, seven foot tall former heavyweight boxing champion of the world Nikolai Valuev, who is now Duma Deputy (the equivalent of an MP) for Kemerovo in Siberia.
Mark joins him as he checks out the latest hot Almasty sighting and meets the three kids who claim to have captured one on camera near a frozen lake.
Finally, in Moscow, Professor Sykes reveals the results of his DNA tests on Zana’s relatives. The results are unequivocal, extraordinary and totally unexpected (emphasis mine).
I for one, am waiting with baited breath on Professor Bryan Sykes’ announcement of what he has found in the DNA of the relatives of Zana. If we look at the description, it sounds like 1.) his results will leave no doubt as to their veracity; 2.) we know that it is not something mundane, e.g. they’re not just normal humans; and 3.) it’s not what we would expect. I would expect the results to come back either purely homo sapiens OR neandertal-human hybrid. But could it be something other?
Will Zana’s relatives be something more than either human or neandertal?
And while I think a human-bear hybrid would be totally unexpected… I don’t think that’s the case here. 😉 I guess we will just have to wait.
“The Incredible Bionic Man” makes his debut at the Washington Air and Space Museum.
A first-ever walking, talking “bionic man” built entirely out of synthetic body parts made his Washington debut on Thursday.
The robot with a human face unveiled at the Smithsonian’s National Air and Space Museum was built by London’s Shadow Robot Co to showcase medical breakthroughs in bionic body parts and artificial organs.
“This is not a gimmick. This is a real science development,” museum director John Dailey said.
I’ve always wondered when and how someone would do this: take all of the existing bionic technology we have today… artificial organs, limbs, etc… and combine it into a single walking, talking being. However, there’s one element that’s missing… the human soul.
Which is why I suspect in this video below Bertolt Meyer, the man who contributed his facial features to the robot, has such intense feelings towards the android upon first seeing it… it is essentially wearing his face. Meyers is experiencing the creepiness of “the Uncanny Valley,” that is, the point where something is close to being human but not quite there yet, which often elicits feelings of fear and repulsion.
The 6-foot-tall (1.83 meter), 170-pound (77-kg) robot is the subject of a one-hour Smithsonian Channel documentary, “The Incredible Bionic Man,” airing on Sunday.
A “bionic man” was the material of science fiction in the 1970s when the television show “The Six Million Dollar Man” showed the adventures of a character named Steve Austin, a former astronaut whose body was rebuilt using synthetic parts after he nearly died.
The robot on display at the museum cost $1 million and was made from 28 artificial body parts on loan from biomedical innovators. They include a pancreas, lungs, spleen and circulatory system, with most of the parts early prototypes.
“The whole idea of the project is to get together all of the spare parts that already exist for the human body today – one piece. If you did that, what would it look like?” said Bertolt Meyer, a social psychologist from the University of Zurich in Switzerland and host of the documentary.
The robot was modelled after Meyer, who was born without a hand and relies on an artificial limb. He showed off the bionic man by having it take a few clumsy steps and by running artificial blood through its see-through circulatory system.
Abominable Snowmen book and my mummified “Yeti” finger.
I was tipped off to this news several months ago (and again a few days ago) that Oxford University geneticist Dr. Bryan Sykes would be announcing some “unexpected results” concerning his DNA study of supposed Yeti hair samples. Well, now those results are being officially announced to the world, and I would think it’s safe to say they are not what anybody had expected, but no less amazing in my opinion.
For centuries, tales of the Yeti, an elusive but terrifying creature said to roam the inhospitable Himalayan Mountains, have enthralled curious minds.
Now, research by a leading UK geneticist may have unlocked the truth about the Yeti, or Abominable Snowman, after hair samples from two mystery animals proved to be a genetic match to an ancient polar bear.
The findings, to be explained in “Bigfoot Files,” a documentary series on Britain’s Channel 4 TV network, are the work of Bryan Sykes, a professor of human genetics at Oxford University.
He put out a worldwide call last year for people to submit hair or other tissue from “cryptids,” or previously undescribed species, and collected more than 30 samples for analysis.
Sykes’ research focused on two samples in particular, both from the Himalayas but found about 800 miles apart, one in the Ladakh region and the other in Bhutan.
To his surprise, testing found a 100% match with a polar bear jawbone from Svalbard, the northernmost part of Norway, that dates back between 40,000 and 120,000 years, according to a news release from Channel 4.
First of all, the sheer fact that, yes, the Yeti is indeed a real living “prehistoric” animal and not just the stuff of legends anymore, is enough to get excited about. So yes, I am elated to hear this news coming from an extremely reputable source like Dr. Sykes and Oxford University. If anything, it shows that there’s sometimes much more than just a grain of truth to sightings and descriptions of legendary cryptids, that they are not just some imaginary creation made up by the locals.
Second, this confirms my own suspicions about the possible identity of the Yeti, in that it may be something altogether different from Sasquatch. For years I had erroneously made the same assumption that most people do, that is, lumping the Yeti in with Bigfoot and Almas, in that I had always believed they were all some sort of related bipedal primate. That is, until I began collecting Bigfoot prints for the Museum of the Weird.
When I first received a cast made from the original Tom Slick Yeti print retrieved on one of his Nepal expeditions, I was stunned. Now I don’t proclaim to be a scientist nor am I an expert in animal tracks, but even to my layman’s eyes these did not look anything like the Bigfoot casts I had already amassed! In fact, when I first saw the Tom Slick cast, my first thought was, “this is fake.” It just didn’t look like what I thought a Yeti print should look like (which in my mind, would be like a Bigfoot print). Once I realized that, yes, what I had was indeed a copy of the actual Tom Slick Yeti print and not a phony, my second thought was, “this could be a bear.” It was an an eye-opening revelation.
Here for your consideration is a side-by-side comparison of the Tom Slick Yeti print and a Bigfoot print (one of the “Grays Harbor” casts), both on display in the Museum of the Weird.
The Bigfoot print is nearly twice the length of the Yeti print, and the Yeti print has only four visible toes.
Look at the difference in size and shape, and let us know what your thoughts are.
Photo by Thomas ShahanA research development team at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign has created a new digital camera composed of 180 individual lenses to mimic an insect’s intricate eyesight. The initial images are low resolution, but display an immense depth-of-field. It is the hopes of the research team that this new technology will eventually be used in surveillance and for endoscopic investigations of the human body. Such cameras could also be used in insect-sized aerial robots. At the moment, while complex, the imaging system is only comparable to that of an ant or beetle.
“The compound design of the fly’s eye incorporates perhaps 28,000 small eyes, or ommatidia,” explained team-member Dr Jianliang Xiao from the University of Colorado at Boulder, US. “That’s the direction we want to move in,” he told BBC News.
According to the report on BBC News, the digital “bug eye” camera is designed to reflect the structure of an insect’s corneal lens with a crystalline cone and light-sensitive organ at the base. Together these sections of the bug’s eye form a “picture” of the world pieced together from the various sensory inputs. In the robotic adaptation, microlenses are positioned above photodetectors. Proprietary software designed for the bug-eye camera is used to sync the information and piece together the signals to form a full image. The initial image is flat and then stretched over a hemispherical shape to give the impression of a 180-degree view.
“Picture the following: a palm-sized micro aerial vehicle uses an artificial faceted eye to navigate autonomously through a collapsed building while other sensors onboard scan the environment for smoke, radioactivity or even people trapped beneath rubble and debris,” the research team reported in the Nature journal article.
A little buzz-worthy news about technological advancements, I’d say!
So, as we all expected, everyone woke up from their slumber this morning. Some are safe and sound in warm beds and some are getting ready for another day at work. Both, are not worried about the world coming to it’s end… at least not yet.
So, when will the world really end. Like, reeaaallly end. Luckily for us lamen, there’s the fine folks of Discovery News to bring us the actual science behind answering these types of questions. Read on to see what they have to say and be comforted that, barring human error, the Mother Earth has many, many, maaany more years ahead of her, far beyond what we could ever hope to see.
Billions of years from now, life on Earth will be extinguished when the dying sun scorches the surface of our planet. New research has aimed to determine what the last life forms on Earth will be, and what kind of abodes they will cling to before the Earth becomes sterilized.
We are fortunate that our planet orbits a star that has a long main-sequence lifetime. However, the sun’s luminosity is gradually increasing, and in about one billion years the effects of this will start to be felt on Earth.
Surface temperatures will start to creep relentlessly upwards over the next few billion years, which will increase the amount of water vapor in the air. This will act to further increase temperatures and will thus signify the beginning of the end for life on Earth.
The rising temperatures will cause excessive amounts of rain and wind, and thus increase the weathering of silicate rocks, which will suck extra carbon from the atmosphere. (Top 10 Ways to Destroy Earth)
Ordinarily, the carbon is replaced via plate tectonics in the carbon-silicate cycle as it is released in volcanic gases. However, the oceans will start to evaporate as the temperatures continue to rise, which will probably put a stop to plate tectonics as scientists believe that water is an essential lubricant for the motion of tectonic plates on Earth. This will deplete the number of active volcanoes, and the carbon will not be replenished in the atmosphere.
The lack of carbon dioxide will effectively choke plant life on Earth, since plants require atmospheric CO2 for their respiration. The death of oxygen-producing plants will in turn lead to less oxygen in the atmosphere over a few million years. This will spell disaster for the remaining animal life on Earth, with mammals and birds being the first to become extinct. Fish, amphibians and reptiles would survive a little longer, as they need less oxygen and have a greater tolerance to heat.
The last type of animal present on the far-future Earth would likely be invertebrates. Once the insects finally succumb to the increasing temperatures, the Earth will once again be solely populated by microbial life, just as it had been for the first few billion years of our planet’s history. The last lingering life will desperately seek out niches of the planet that are still habitable, but even extremophile forms of life will find this to be a challenge.
Clear soil will help researchers track how plants and other things survive in soil.
There’s a whole world of things to learn and discover about this world, some of the unanswered questions lie right below our feet so, scientists have decided to look into and see what they can find, with clear soil!
Discovery Science writes:
The clear soil was developed by theoretical biologist Lionel Dupuy at the James Hutton Institute in Dundee, Scotland. It’s is made of a synthetic material known as Nafion. The compound can be modified to mimic the chemistry of natural soils. It’s not transparent at first, but when watered in a customized liquid solution, the particles bend light, making the solution clear.
Dupuy and his colleagues used the soil to analyze how E. coli bacteria, certain strains of which can be harmful to humans, interacts with lettuce roots. By using a genetically modified version of E. coli that carried a green fluorescent protein from jellyfish, the scientists could see through the clear soil how the bacterium formed micro-colonies in the root zone.
“If we understand better the contamination route, then we can develop strategies to limit the transfer of E. coli to the food chain,” Dupuy told Inside Science. “We don’t really understand how E. coli enters the food chain, particularly for fresh produce.”
