Mystery of the constantly-draining jacuzzi solved as elephant is caught on camera DRINKING it

Staff at the safari park were baffled by the mystery of the disappearing whirlpool bath.

Every morning they filled the open-air bath outside one of the guest lodges, and every night it was empty – even though no leak could be found.

It was only when a guest heard a mighty slurping and went outside with a camera that the culprit was discovered in the shape of Troublesome the elephant.

The elephant – nicknamed ‘Troublesome’ – is well known to rangers at the reserve for her inquisitive nature.

But no-one realised she was behind the ‘leak’ at the Jacuzzi-style hot tub outside one of the £400-a-night lodges.

Susan Potgieter, owner of Etali Safari Lodge, in North West Province, South Africa, said elephants could drink more than 200 litres of water a day so drinking a whole whirlpool bath was no problem.

She said: ‘When I first saw the photograph of her drinking I couldn’t believe it. And then it dawned on me of course an elephant was drinking it.

‘It was something of a relief because we had been trying to work out why the pool had been draining so quickly for weeks but couldn’t find a leak anywhere.

via Mystery of the constantly-draining jacuzzi solved as elephant is caught on camera DRINKING it | Mail Online.

Photo may show moose not seen in 50 years

Is this a moose on the loose?

Otago moose hunter Ken Tustin thinks he may have snapped a photograph of a juvenile moose in southwestern Fiordland.

The hulking animals have not been officially spotted in New Zealand for more than 50 years.

The photograph was taken on March 7 in an area of Fiordland known as Herrick creek, Mr Tustin said.

It was snapped automatically by one of 13 cameras he had set up in the area.

When he retrieved the images a few days ago, he waded through thousands that showed only deer.

“But there was one photo that was strikingly different and it had me sitting back with my hair on end.”

The first sign it was different was the “horse-shaped face”, which contrasted with the dog-shaped face of a deer, he said.

But the photo did not show enough detail to be sure, and he suspected it might actually be a deer, he said.

“I think this will always be a ‘maybe’.”

It could not be a half-moose, half-deer because the two species did not interbreed, he said.

Most people regarded the last official sighting of a moose to have been from 1952, but he had documented several more sightings since then in his history of the species in New Zealand, he said.

Mr Tustin said his “absorbing, compelling interest” in all things moose had begun during a stint working as a scientist in Fiordland.

He estimated a population of 20 moose could be wandering around the area – though that was a “total guess”.

via Photo may show moose not seen in 50 years | Stuff.co.nz.

Upside-Down Crops Are Growing in Popularity

IF pests and blight are wrecking your plants, it might be time to turn your garden on its head.

Growing crops that dangle upside down from homemade or commercially available planters is growing more popular, and its adherents swear they’ll never come back down to earth.

“I’m totally converted,” said Mark McAlpine, a body piercer in Guelph, Ontario, who began growing tomatoes upside down two years ago because cutworms were ravaging the ones he planted in the ground. He made six planters out of five-gallon plastic buckets, some bought at the Home Depot and some salvaged from the trash of a local winemaker. He cut a two-inch hole in the bottom of each bucket and threaded a tomato seedling down through the opening, packing strips of newspaper around the root ball to keep it in place and to prevent dirt from falling out.

He then filled the buckets with soil mixed with compost and hung them on sturdy steel hooks bolted to the railing of his backyard deck. “Last summer was really hot so it wasn’t the best crop, but I still was able to jar enough whole tomatoes, half tomatoes, salsa and tomato sauce to last me through the winter,” said Mr. McAlpine, who plans an additional six upside-down planters this year.

via In the Garden – Upside-Down Crops Are Growing in Popularity – NYTimes.com.

Seven atom transistor sets the pace for future PCs

Researchers have shown off a transistor made from just seven atoms that could be used to create smaller, more powerful computers.

Transistors are tiny switches used as the building blocks of silicon chips.

If the new atomic transistor can be made in large numbers it could mean chips with components up to 100 times smaller than on existing processors.

The Australian creators of the transistor hope it is also a step towards a solid-state quantum computer.

The transistor is not the smallest ever created as two research groups have previously managed to produce working single-atom transistors.

However, the device is many times smaller than the components found in chips in contemporary computers. On chips where components are 22 nanometres in size, transistor gates are about 42 atoms across.

The working transistor was created by replacing seven atoms in a silicon crystal with phosphorus atoms.

“Now we have just demonstrated the world’s first electronic device in silicon systematically created on the scale of individual atoms,” said Professor Michelle Simmons, lead researcher on the project at the University of New South Wales.

Moore’s Law predicts that the amount of memory that can fit on a given area of silicon, for a fixed cost doubles every 12-18 months. The limit of this prediction is being tested as components get ever smaller and their computationally useful properties become less reliable.

If an entire chip could be made with every one of its billions of transistors made from the silicon crystals, it could mean an “exponential” leap in processing power, said Professor Simmons.

The researchers are a long way from a commercial process because the tiny transistor they created was handmade. The team used a scanning tunnelling microscope to move the phosphorus atoms into place.

The work on the tiny transistor is being carried out as part of a larger project to create a quantum computer.

The research team revealed their results in the journal Nature Nanotechnology.

via BBC News – Seven atom transistor sets the pace for future PCs.

Crop circle contains encoded math formula

When I saw the Wilton Windmill crop circle, reported on 22nd May, I was immediately struck by the possibility of a message encoded in 8-bit binary.

After transcribing the binary digits from Lucy Pringle’s photo (the photo here is by Steve Alexander), I duly translated each byte into its corresponding ASCII character, starting from the windmill and working clockwise.

The result was this:

e^(hi)pi)1=0

It looked like some kind of equation, and when I looked it up, Google asked if I meant: e^(i)pi)1=0, for which the top result was Euler’s identity: e^iπ+1=0. This has been called “the most beautiful theorem in mathematics”. No surprise that it should turn up in a crop circle then!

Now, I’m not much of a mathematician, so I don’t know anything about the odd way of writing the formula as expressed in the crop circle, and in Google, but I assumed that, for the circle-maker, it was a handy way to get around the limitations of ASCII text.

One thing bothered me though, and that was the inclusion of the anomalous ‘h’ in the message/formula. Certainly it made up the number of characters to twelve, which would make the crop circle easier to produce on the ground and more windmill-like, as well as referencing a highly symbolic number. Also, with the adjacent ‘i’, it makes ‘hi’ – an embedded message from the maker?

It was only when James Gilliland suggested in this Facebook thread that ‘h’ could be a reference to the Planck constant, that I realised what could be the full meaning of the embedded message.

Could it be a subtle joke on all the croppies who might pronounce this a ‘genuine’ crop circle as opposed to a circle made with a plank?!

This animated explanation of the 2010 Wilton Windmill crop circle design that I put together should make everything clear!

via Daily Grail Frontpage | TDG – Science, Magick, Myth and History.

Do you “leave your body” under stress?

In times of stress, and embarrassingly, when I am supposed so speak in public, I sometimes have a strange problem.  I used to think that I get “self conscious”, but today I discovered that this is not the right word for what happens.  I dissociate. From what I’ve read, mine is a fairly mild case… but still disturbing.  Once you do it once, fear of it happening again makes it worse.

What happens is I flip into observer mode and can’t speak. Like everyone else, I’m looking at and listening to myself from the outside expecting me to speak, but my brain is observing, not doing. This causes a panic experience because I realize I need to get in there and think and speak, but you can’t panic and think at the same time. I can’t be in that mode and also thinking and interacting like a normal person. Annoying.

I don’t recall any childhood abuse and have no reason to suspect it, but I was in a horrible car accident as a teenager and I did have a traumatic blank out while acting in a high school play.

Is there a doctor in the house? Is there a cure for this?

Dissociation is a partial or complete disruption of the normal integration of a person’s conscious or psychological functioning. Dissociation can be a response to trauma or drugs and perhaps allows the mind to distance itself from experiences that are too much for the psyche to process at that time. Dissociative disruptions can affect any aspect of a person’s functioning. …

The DSM-IV considers symptoms such as depersonalization, derealization and psychogenic amnesia to be core features of dissociative disorders. However, in the normal population dissociative experiences that are not clinically significant are highly prevalent, with 60% to 65% of the respondents indicating that they have had some dissociative experiences. …

Symptoms of dissociation resulting from trauma may include depersonalization, psychological numbing, disengagement, or amnesia regarding the events of the abuse. It has been hypothesized that dissociation may provide a temporarily effective defense mechanism in cases of severe trauma; however, in the long term, dissociation is associated with decreased psychological functioning and adjustment.

Child abuse, especially chronic abuse starting at early ages, has been related to high levels of dissociative symptoms in a clinical sample, including amnesia for abuse memories. … – wikipedia

Here is somewhat good news from alt.support.dissociation:

Treatment has two goals: firstly, to allow the normal functioning of
a highly dissociative person, and secondly, to treat the underlying cause
of dissociation.  These goals are generally interconnected and are dealt
with simultaneously.

Since most dissociative disorders result from extreme stress and/or
trauma, and are also exacerbated for that stress, teaching the highly
dissociative person to deal with stress is one method of treatment.
Learning to work around one's stress would seem to be essential in
reaching a plateau of functionality.

For deep-rooted trauma, hypnosis is often used to aid in the recall,
examination of, and transcendence of the past trauma.  Dealing with the
memories of abuse, for instance, is vital in the recovery process.

Regardless of the course of treatment, it is usually long-term, taking
several years to achieve what the therapist considers normality.
However, once the dissociative person enters treatment for their
dissociation (as opposed to any associated disorders they may have),
treatment is almost always successful.

Read more: http://www.faqs.org/faqs/dissoc-faq/part2/#ixzz0otwUm9lU

24 Miles Of Louisiana Is Destroyed: “Everything In It Is Dead”

After the BP oil spill last month, BP speculated that the damage was minimal, relatively speaking.

via FreakOutNation » 24 Miles Of Louisiana Is Destroyed: “Everything In It Is Dead”.

Well Hello, Cynthia. First Man-Made Cell!

Today’s Wall St. Journal carries an amazing piece about what can almost be termed “the creation of life”. Craig Venter, whose work greatly accelerated the human genome project, and his Center have come up with the following remarkable breakthrough: a synthetic cell, completely controlled by man-made genetic instructions. Scientists call the cell “Cynthia” (Synthetic Cell), following the nickname Dolly given to the first cloned sheep.

Here is what the Venter scientists discovered:

“We call it the first synthetic cell,” said genomics pioneer Craig Venter, who oversaw the project. “These are very much real cells.” Created at a cost of $40 million, this experimental one-cell organism, which can reproduce, opens the way to the manipulation of life on a previously unattainable scale, several researchers and ethics experts said. Scientists have been altering DNA piecemeal for a generation, producing a menagerie of genetically engineered plants and animals. But the ability to craft an entire organism offers a new power over life, they said. The new cell, a bacterium, was conceived solely as a demonstration project. But several biologists said they believed that the laboratory technique used to birth it would soon be applied to other strains of bacteria with commercial potential. ”I think this quickly will be applied to all the most important industrial bacteria,” said biologist Christopher Voigt at the University of California, San Francisco, who is developing microbes that help make gasoline. Several companies are already seeking to take advantage of the new field, called synthetic biology, which combines chemistry, computer science, molecular biology, genetics and cell biology to breed industrial life forms that can secrete fuels, vaccines or other commercial products.

Venter said he intends to patent the device, because “it is a human invention”. His Center funded the research, with a private investment of $30 m.

via Hello, Cynthia! First Man-Made Cell! « TIMnovate.

Builder fends off Komodo dragon by punching it in nose

An Indonesian worker freed himself from an attacking Komodo dragon by punching the reptile’s snout until it released him and ran away, a national park official.

Agustinus Jenaru, 20, was working inside an unfinished wooden bungalow on Rinca island when the 6ft 5ins (2m) lizard entered and bit onto his left hand on Saturday, said Komodo National Park official Daniel Bolu Ngongo.

Jenaru hit the jaws of the giant lizard for several seconds until it freed him. Jenaru was taken to a clinic for treatment of lacerations and a puncture wound.

Komodo dragons can be found in the wild only on the eastern Indonesian islands of Komodo, Padar and Rinca. The lizards – thought to number fewer than 4,000 – can grow longer than 10ft (3m) and weigh 150lbs (70kg).

Jenaru was the second victim bit by a giant lizard this year.

In 2007, an eight-year-old boy was killed by one of the lizards on Komodo Island.

via Builder fends off Komodo dragon by punching it in nose – Telegraph.

Hubble spots a planet-eating star

The Hubble Space Telescope has captured evidence of a Sun-like star “eating” a nearby planet.

Astronomers knew that stars were capable of swallowing planets in orbit around them, but this is the first time the event has been “seen” so clearly.

Although the planet was too far away for Hubble to photograph, scientists have created an image of it, based on analysis of the telescope’s data.

The discovery was published in the The Astrophysical Journal Letters.

The researchers say the planet, which is called Wasp-12b, may only have another 10 million years left before it is completely devoured.

It is so close to its star that it completes an orbit in 1.1 Earth days and is superheated to more than 1,500C.

Because of this proximity, the planet’s atmosphere has ballooned to nearly three times the radius of Jupiter and is spilling material on to the star.

Carole Haswell from the UK’s Open University led the research team. She explained: “We see a huge cloud of material around the planet which is escaping and will be captured by the star.”

Hubble’s detection of the cloud enabled scientists to draw conclusions about how it was generated.

Dr Haswell said: “We have identified chemical elements never before seen on planets outside our own Solar System.”

Wasp-12 is a dwarf star located approximately 600 light-years away in the constellation Auriga.

The exoplanet was first discovered by the UK’s Wide Area Search for Planets (Wasp) in 2008.

via BBC News – Hubble spots a planet-eating star.

The sun is a giant eye, the sun is a giant mouth.