Michael Jackson ’slept with child-sized porcelain doll in dress’

Michael Jackson slept with a child-sized porcelain doll that had a dress on, according to a report that said he spent his final days in a messy bedroom with the heating turned up.

The toy was found on the bed where the singer collapsed minutes before his death, the reports said as detectives searched the Las Vegas home and office of his doctor, Conrad Murray.

It has emerged Jackson was given a powerful, surgical anaesthetic called properol through a drip-feed to help him sleep. Authorities believe this was the ultimate cause of the singer’s death on June 25 even though his body contained a lethal cocktail of prescription drugs, including OxyContin and Demerol.

A senior police officer who went into Jackson’s rented house in Beverly Hills said clothes and other items were strewn about the singer’s bedroom, according to the Daily Star, and that handwritten notes found on the walls pointed to his troubled mental state as he prepared for 50 concerts at London’s O2 Arena.

One read: “Children are sweet,” while another said: “Children are innocent.”

The officer also claimed the singer’s staff had not been allowed upstairs to clean up his mess.

The policeman told the newspaper: “The temperature upstairs was stiflingly hot, with gas fireplaces and the heating system on high because Jackson always complained of feeling cold.

“The singer’s bedroom was a mess, with items seemingly thrown about and some 20 handwritten notes stuck on the walls. A porcelain girl doll wearing a dress was found on top of the covers of the bed where he slept.”

Dr Murray, 56, a cardiologist with practices in Las Vegas and Houston, had his Texas office and a storage unit searched last week by Drug Enforcement Agency agents. Officers in Las Vegas carried out a similar search at his home and office there on Tuesday.

Court records show the agents were investigating a possible case of manslaughter.

Police say Dr Murray is cooperating and have not labelled him a suspect….

via Michael Jackson ’slept with child-sized porcelain doll in dress’ – Telegraph.

Bigfoot creature photographed in Sierra National Forest

The Bigfoot creature may have been captured on a remote trail camera placed in the Sierra National Forest, based on photography evidence released by Sanger Paranormal Society.

Investigator Jeffrey Gonzalez said Tuesday night that multiple cameras were put in place in this remote area on Memorial Day weekend, and retreived on June 7, 2009.

Gonzalez said they did not immediately see the evidence, but upon closer inspection, noticed what appears to be the Bigfoot creature.

Gonzalez said a group returned to the site to review the exact capture spot after many theories surfaced once the original image was released in early July.

The tree stump theory was ruled out, he said, because the “dark object” is not there. Gonzalez said the bear theory does not stand up either, because the image does not have a snout on the head.

“You can see features of a human face such as the nose, mouth and chin,” Gonzalez reports.

Photo: Original image was reduced in size for this page.

“The arms on a bear, when standing, do not hang that far down. We also took measures on how high this thing was. According to the leaves and the branches that were covering the object’s face, the tape measure said it was between 8 and 9 feet tall. The same camera that took the picture of the object also took pictures of other objects such as black bear and deer, which does not resemble the object in any way.”

via Bigfoot creature photographed in Sierra National Forest.

My Take: The two photos are from slightly different angles.  In the clearest photo, there are two dark trees on either side of the man and from a view a little to the right, they may merge to make up the bigfoot shape.  Too bad the original isn’t of the same quality as the photo with the man in it. I did a quick adjustment to show the photo with the man at the same scale as the bigfoot photo:

I may be wrong about this. Is the bigfoot obscuring the lighter tree on the side of the man where his arm is out? Too bad they can’t get a shot of the guy from the exact angle at the exact time of day so the shadows are the same.

Oldest Animal Fossils Found in Lakes, Not Oceans

Image: One of the earliest multicellular organisms of the Precambrian period. This flat worm is called Dickinsonia and was found in sandstones nearly 600 million years old near Ediacara in the Flinders Ranges, South Australia. Source: Long 1995, p.15.

Conventional wisdom has it that the first animals evolved in the ocean.

Now researchers studying ancient rock samples in South China have found that the first animal fossils are preserved in ancient lake deposits, not in marine sediments as commonly assumed.

These new findings not only raise questions as to where the earliest animals were living, but what factors drove animals to evolve in the first place.

For some 3 billion years, single-celled life forms such as bacteria dominated the planet. Then, roughly 600 million years ago, the first multi-cellular animals appeared on the scene, diversifying rapidly.

The oldest known animal fossils in the world are preserved in South China’s Doushantuo Formation. These fossil beds have no adult specimens — instead, many of the fossils appear to be microscopic embryos.

“Our first unusual finding in this region was the abundance of a clay mineral called smectite,” said researcher Tom Bristow, now at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena. “In rocks of this age, smectite is normally transformed into other types of clay. The smectite in these South China rocks, however, underwent no such transformation and have a special chemistry that, for the smectite to form, requires specific conditions in the water — conditions commonly found in salty, alkaline lakes.”

The researchers collected hundreds of rock samples from several locations in South China. All their analyses suggest these rocks were not marine sediments.

… It remains possible, Kennedy noted, that animal fossils of similar or older age exist that remain to be found that are marine in origin. However, at the very least, this work suggests “that animals had already taken on the ability to deal with the environmental fluctuations one sees in lake environments,” he said. “That suggests that their evolutionary response is much more rapid that I would have supposed, and that the earliest animals were far more diverse than imagined.”

via Oldest Animal Fossils Found in Lakes, Not Oceans | LiveScience.

Because time travelers visiting Earth in the future who landed on the Earth in the past landed in a lake and they contaminated it, thus starting the evolutionary process and paradoxically creating themselves.

NASA and NOAA’S GOES-14 satellite takes first full Earth image

The latest Geostationary Operational Environmental Satellite, GOES-14, provided its first visible full disk image of Earth on July 27, at 2:00 p.m. EDT. The prime instrument on GOES, called the Imager, is taking images of Earth with a 1 kilometer (km) or 0.62 mile resolution from an altitude of 36,000 km (22,240 miles) above Earth’s surface, equivalent to taking a picture of a dime from a distance of seven football fields.

“The first GOES-14 visible full disk image shows little activity in the Atlantic Ocean and two tropical waves located in the East Pacific Ocean with a low probability of becoming a tropical cyclone. Numerous thunderstorms are seen scattered along the east coast and western Atlantic Ocean, with more significant rains and thunderstorms in the southeast Oklahoma and northeast Texas area,” remarked Thomas Renkevens, a User Services Coordinator from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s (NOAA) National Environmental Satellite, Data and Information Service, Camp Springs, Md. “NOAA will continue to follow the tropical waves and thunderstorms for possible further development.”

The GOES satellite system aids forecasters in locating severe weather events and is instrumental in providing early warnings for residents located in the surrounding areas. “Being able to predict the path of a hurricane with reasonable certainty and only evacuating the areas at risk saves communities roughly a million dollars per mile,” Renkevens stated.

“This GOES-14 image also shows a mostly cloud-free southwest United States, with a blanket of low clouds along over the Pacific Ocean off the west coast,” stated Renkevens.

The Imager was built by ITT Industries, Inc. in Fort Wayne, Ind.

via NASA and NOAA’S GOES-14 satellite takes first full disk image.

Hidden Alien, or Pareidolia?

If you had half a brain, would you know?

Scientists have discovered how a 10-year-old girl born with half a brain is able to see normally through one eye. The youngster, from Germany, has both fields of vision in one eye and is the only known case of its kind in the world.

University of Glasgow researchers used Functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (fMRI) to reveal how the girl’s brain had rewired itself in order to process information from the right and left visual fields in spite of her not having a whole brain. The right hemisphere in the girl’s brain failed to develop in the womb.

Normally, the left and right fields of vision are processed and mapped by opposite sides of the brain, but scans on the German girl showed that retinal nerve fibres that should go to the right hemisphere of the brain diverted to the left.

Further, the researchers found that within the visual cortex of the left hemisphere, which creates an internal map of the right field of vision, ‘islands’ had been formed within it to specifically deal with, and map out, the left visual field in the absence of the right hemisphere.

Dr Lars Muckli of the Centre for Cognitive Neuroimaging in the Department of Psychology, who led the study, said: “This study has revealed the surprising flexibility of the brain when it comes to self-organising mechanisms for forming visual maps.

“The brain has amazing plasticity but we were quite astonished to see just how well the single hemisphere of the brain in this girl has adapted to compensate for the missing half.

“Despite lacking one hemisphere, the girl has normal psychological function and is perfectly capable of living a normal and fulfilling life. She is witty, charming and intelligent.”

via Scientists reveal secret of girl with ‘all seeing eye’.

I found this article in a blog entry by Josh Clark. Wild.

Video: 4 year, 1 million dollar Longest Car Jump Attempted: 1 mile in a Hot Rod Lincoln

Spoiler: He lives… and fully recovers… but he doesn’t make the jump.  Here is a summary of the story behind this video from http://blogs.howstuffworks.com/:

The Devil at Your Heels is a 1981 documentary that chronicles the attempt of stuntman and daredevil Ken Carter to jump a rocket-powered car over the Saint-Laurent River–a distance of one mile, which would handily smash all existing records for jumping cars.

The documentary opens with some quick framing of the task, including footage of the ramp and the car to be used for the jump, and then chronicles how Ken Carter got his start as a daredevil, including footage of some early jumps. It then follows the ups and downs he experiences in his five-year journey to jump the river. He has a series of financial and technical obstacles. Technical problems include difficulties with the car (the fuel tank keeps blowing up) and the ramp he’s planning to jump off (it’s bumpy and not necessarily structurally sound). The financial problems are simpler; he keeps running out of money, and his backers are unhappy.

In the fifth year, everything is set, but two attempts are called off–one because of a short strike by the ground crew, and one because of weather (and perhaps because Carter loses his nerve). The backers, desperate to finish, believe that Carter has lost his nerve and call him to a meeting in another city, and then bring in another driver, Kenny Powers, to attempt the jump.

Unfortunately, the bumps in the ramp have not been fixed, and as the car accelerates, it starts to shake itself to pieces and falls apart in midair. The parachutes deploy and the car lands in shallow water–Powers survives with eight broken vertebrae (he later recovers fully). The effort to make the jump is abandoned.

The film closes with Carter vowing to continue trying. However, a few years after the movie was made, the ramp was demolished, and then Carter was killed in 1983 in Peterborough, Ontario attempting another stunt. – wiki

I met someone once who does crazy stunts like juggling chainsaws and sticking nails up his nose. It is interesting that a person would risk death to entertain others. Biologically, I don’t understand how this would be adaptive. Are people like Carter missing part of their brains?