Humans are dumping more plastic than ever, but not all of it is accumulating in the garbage patches of the Atlantic as expected, scientists reported.

Of the millions of metric tons of plastic produced annually, an enormous proportion ends up as tiny debris in the open ocean. The currents loosely gather it together in vast, swirling ‘garbage patches’ near the surface.

But the amount of floating plastic accumulating in the Atlantic Ocean has remained curiously static over the last two decades, in spite of the fact that plastic waste by humans has increased significantly over the same timeframe, according to a new study published in the journal Science.

“Surprisingly, over the 22-year period of the study (1986-2008) we did not observe an increase in the amount of plastic floating in the western Atlantic in the region where it is most highly concentrated,” said Kara Lavender Law of the Sea Education Association and lead author of the study.

Plastic debris has been accumulating in the world’s oceans for decades, but until recently we have had only a peripheral understanding of its extent.

A major pollutant, plastics have far reaching environmental impacts in the ocean, including entanglement of marine fauna, particle ingestion by seabirds and other organisms, dispersal of invasive species to non-native waters and the transport of organic contaminants.

The researchers discovered that while highest concentrations of plastic debris occurred in an area where ocean-surface currents converge - the North Atlantic Subtropical Gyre - over the last two decades there has not been a substantial increase in the overall amount. (…)

Marine scientist Richard Thompson of the University of Plymouth warns that “while the study clearly shows no consistent trend in the abundance of debris in the North Atlantic subtropical Gyre we should not extrapolate this to other regions. Over the same time period there are reports of plastic accumulating in remote regions including the Antarctic and in substantial quantities in the deep sea.”

{ Cosmos magazine | Continue reading }

photo { 3-ton whale died in Malaysia after ingesting a plastic bag, a rope and a bottle cap. }

{ Thanks Douglas }

Doctors and experts are baffled by an Indian hermit who claims not to have eaten or drunk anything for several decades - but is still in perfect health.

Prahlad Jani, a holy man, or fakir, who is over 70 years old, has just spent 10 days under constant observation in Sterling Hospital, in the western Indian city of Ahmedabad.

During that time, he did not consume anything and “neither did he pass urine or stool”, according to the hospital’s deputy superintendent, Dr Dinesh Desai.

Yet he is in fine mental and physical fettle, say doctors.

Most people can live without food for several weeks, with the body drawing on its fat and protein stores. But the average human can survive for only three to four days without water.

Followers of Indian holy men and ascetics have often ascribed extraordinary powers to them, but such powers are seldom subject to scientific inspection.

“A series of tests conducted on him show his body mechanism is that of a normal person,” said Dr Desai.

{ BBC | Continue reading | Thanks Douglas }

image { Joe Merrell }

{ Iamamiwhoami is the latest in intriguing mystery viral video phenomenon. … nine video music releases … Speculation has focused on artists such as Jonna Lee of Sweden,  Trent Reznor , Little Boots , The Knife , *especially Karin Dreijer Andersson , Goldfrapp, Lykke Li , Gwen Stefani , Madonna , Lady Gaga , & Immi. | Fierth | full story + videos }

Usually when you see people who have been stung by box jellyfish with that number of the tentacle contacts on their body, it’s usually in a morgue. (…) The creature didn’t just sting the 10-year-old girl. It enveloped her: Its tentacles wrapped around her limbs and wouldn’t let go. She couldn’t see or breathe. The creature, which is capable of killing an adult in four minutes, wrapped its tentacles tighter and knocked her unconscious. (…) After several weeks in the hospital Shardlow is still feeling the effects - but the fact she is feeling anything at all - let alone doing as well as she is baffles Seymour. For now, besides scarring and memory loss, she is doing well.

{ CNN | Continue reading }

related { Nomura jellyfish }

{ A teenager gave medics a surprise when he walked into casualty with a 10-inch knife stuck right through in his skull - after a row over computer games. }

If we are ever contacted by aliens, the man I’m having lunch with will be one of the first humans to know. His name is Paul Davies and he’s chair of the Seti (Search For Extraterrestrial Intelligence) Post-Detection Task Group. They’re a group of the world’s most eminent scientists and will be, come the big day, the planet’s alien welcome committee.

{ Guardian | Continue reading }

photo { Tim Barber }

In a Tampa Bay area hospice, the mystery of a man with no identity.

Here lies a man who does not exist. He is very old, and maybe a little deaf. His hair has gone white and his teeth have gone missing. He will tell you he is 95. But later he might say 94, or 93. He says he has traveled the world as a hobo. Slept under trucks, on park benches, in barns. Played football with Burt Reynolds and baseball with Fidel Castro.

But his stories shift and change, and he admits he hasn’t always been truthful. But no one knows why. He carries no identification. He swears he’s never smiled for a passport photo. He has no birth certificate, no Social Security card. No family. Just a couple of old friends. And before he dies, even they want to know: Who is Roger George?(…)

People die with secrets all the time. Secret affairs, secret pasts, secret urges. Roger George’s secrets appear to be much more fundamental. Maybe he’s entitled to those secrets, whatever they are. Or maybe he’s just a sweet old man with a foggy memory and a colorful life.

{ St. Petersburg Times | Continue reading }

“The government has been telling us the truth,” declared David Clarke, a senior lecturer in journalism at Sheffield Hallam University, who has a side interest in U.F.O.’s. “There are a lot of weird things in the sky, and some of them we can’t explain, but there’s not a shred of evidence for a single alien visitation.”

Which is, frankly, a letdown, as is the government’s prosaic explanation of why, for decades, it has meticulously documented reports of U.F.O. sightings. (…)

In the old days, the United States systematically compiled reports of U.F.O. sightings, too. But its last program, known as Project Blue Book, was closed down in 1969 after government officials concluded that if something was out there, it was not anything they wanted to investigate.

{ NY Times, 2008 | Continue reading }

previously/related { Now, just where might this Great Filter be located? }

Magic Show, a newly published catalogue to accompany a travelling exhibition of the same name, explores the relationship between art and magic. (…)

Many of the 24 contemporary artists featured (in both the show and the book) borrow directly from iconic magic tricks. Sinta Werner’s “Disjunction” plays on the idea of a disappearing act, but in this case it is the viewer who vanishes; the site-specific installation creates the effect of approaching a mirror without a reflection. Susan Hiller’s “Homage to Yves Klein” is a more upbeat take on his rather dark photo-montage, “Leap into the Void” (1960). The result is a charming play on the trick of levitation.

In other works, artists challenge the viewer’s ability to suspend disbelief—a crucial requirement of magic-show audiences.

{ More Intelligent Life | Continue reading }

related { In the Zig-Zag illusion, a magician divides his or her assistant into thirds }

My dad loved mysteries, and he wowed us all with his ability to guess whodunnit every single time.

And then when I was around, oh, I dunno, somewhere between 10 and 12, he told me just how easy his little trick was.

Here’s the thing about television mysteries. Unlike real life, somebody picks and chooses what scenes to put in a movie. Unlike real life, it costs extra money to have to film unnecessary scenes that do not advance the narrative.  Therefore, there will never be an utterly irrelevant scene, again, unlike real life.

So when, for instance, you are watching an hour long mystery and it shows the characters eating at a restaurant and then leaving and one of them goes back in because he forgot to leave a tip? That’s a clue, that is. While that might happen and mean nothing in real life, it’s only put in the television show for one of two reasons- it is significant to the narrative, or it’s a red herring.

{ The Common Room | Continue reading }

The patient was a 15-year-old girl employed in a local bar. She was admitted to hospital after a knife fight involving her, a former lover and a new boyfriend. Who stabbed whom was not quite clear but all three participants in the small war were admitted with knife injuries. (…)

Precisely 278 days later the patient was admitted again to hospital with acute, intermittent abdominal pain. Abdominal examination revealed a term pregnancy with a cephalic fetal presentation. The uterus was contracting regularly and the fetal heart was heard. Inspection of the vulva showed no vagina, only a shallow skin dimple was present below the external urethral meatus and between the labia minora. An emergency lower segment caesarean section was performed under spinal anaesthesia and a live male infant weighing 2800 g was born…

The patient was well aware of the fact that she had no vagina and she had started oral experiments after disappointing attempts at conventional intercourse. Just before she was stabbed in the abdomen she had practised fellatio with her new boyfriend and was caught in the act by her former lover. The fight with knives ensued. She had never had a period and there was no trace of lochia after the caesarean section. She had been worried about the increase in her abdominal size but could not believe she was pregnant

{ Discover | Continue reading | ABC }

artwork { The Designers Republic }

Is there life after death? Theologians can debate all they want, but radiation oncologist Dr. Jeffrey Long says if you look at the scientific evidence, the answer is unequivocally yes. Drawing on a decade’s worth of research on near-death experiences — work that includes cataloguing the stories of some 1,600 people who have gone through them — he makes the case for that controversial conclusion in a new book, Evidence of the Afterlife. (…)

Medically speaking, what is a near-death experience?
A near-death experience has two components. The person has to be near death, which means physically compromised so severely that permanent death would occur if they did not improve: they’re unconscious, or often clinically dead, with an absence of heartbeat and breathing. The second component [is that] at the time they’re having a close brush with death, they have an experience. [It is] generally lucid [and] highly organized.

{ Time | Continue reading }

illustration { Jong Myung Hwang }

Sometimes songs get ’stuck in our head’. In German, this experience is known as having an ‘earworm’ and a new study shortly to be published in the British Journal of Psychology surveyed the typical features of this common phenomenon.

What particularly struck me was that “the length of both the earworm and the earworm experience frequently exceed standard estimates of auditory memory capacity”.

What is meant by auditory memory here is our ability to consciously remember a short piece of sound or to ‘repeat something back to ourselves’ - often called the ‘phonological loop’ in a popular model of working memory.

This tells us that ‘earworms’ are probably not something getting stuck in our very short-term memory but the reason why such tunes keeping buzzing around our conscious mind is still a mystery.

{ Mind Hacks | Continue reading }

artwork { Roy Lichtenstein, The Melody Haunts My Reverie, 1965 }

Bank robbers have threatened tellers with knives, shot their way into banks and tunnelled up into vaults. But one woman in southern Russia chose a more peaceful method: Police say Galina Korzhova hypnotised a bank teller into handing over tens of thousands of dollars in what is believed to be just one in a series of daring, if non-violent, bank robberies.

Galina Korzhova was arrested, said Anton Kornoukhov, a spokesman for police in the southern city of Volgograd, on suspicion of hypnotising a bank teller in the nearby town of Volzhky into giving her more than $80,000. She is suspected of having robbed up to 30 additional banks in what Russian media have called a “grand tour” around the country.

“She met the woman on the street, saying that she would remove curses and help cure sick relatives,” said Kornoukhov in a telephone interview.

Korzhova is accused of telling the bank employee, whose name has not been released, to put the money into a plastic bag and meet her outside the state bank Sberbank, on Communist Street in the small town. There, the case goes, the teller gave Korzhova the money.

{ The Global Post | Continue reading }

Police in Italy have issued footage of a man who is suspected of hypnotising supermarket checkout staff to hand over money from their cash registers.

{ 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 }

photo { Elinor Carucci }

“This wizard has a crystal ball which unerringly reads people’s minds,” I said. “All it needs is a psychic whiff of you over the phone.”

“That’s impossible,” he said, “Show me.”

“No problem,” I said, “we can call him right now. Think of a three-digit number.”

“758,” Skep said.

I called the Wizard right away. Here’s what I said over the phone:

“Hello? Is this the Wizard?”

“Well, could I speak to him please?”

“O.K.”

“Hello, Wizard? I have someone here who wants you to guess his number.”

I handed the phone to Skep.

Skep: “Yes, you’re right. The number is 758.”

Skep’s eyebrow was twitching vigorously. “You’re obviously communicating the information in some way,” he said, “though I can’t figure out how.”

Answer.

{ NY Times | Continue reading }

The Voynich Manuscript has been dubbed “The Most Mysterious Manuscript in the World.” It is named after its discoverer, the American antique book dealer and collector, Wilfrid M. Voynich, who discovered it in 1912, amongst a collection of ancient manuscripts kept in villa Mondragone in Frascati, near Rome.

No one knows the origins of the manuscript. Experts believe it was written in between the 15th and 17th centuries. The manuscript is small, seven by ten inches, but thick, nearly 235 pages.

Its pages are filled with hand-written text and crudely drawn illustrations. The illustrations depict plants, astrological diagrams, and naked women. The women could represent creation and rebirth of consciousness.

These illustrations are strange, but much stranger is the text itself, because the manuscript is written entirely in a mysterious, unknown alphabet that has defied all attempts at translation.

It is an alphabetic script, but of an alphabet variously reckoned to have from nineteen to twenty-eight letters, none of which bear any relationship to any English or European letter system. The text has no apparent corrections. There is evidence for two different “languages” (investigated by Currier and D’Imperio) and more than one scribe, probably indicating an ambiguous coding scheme.

Apparently, Voynich wanted to have the mysterious manuscript deciphered and provided photographic copies to a number of experts. However, despite the efforts of many well known cryptologists and scholars, the book remains unread. There are some claims of decipherment, but to date, none of these can be substantiated with a complete translation. (…)

The Voynich Manuscript first appears in 1586 at the court of Rudolph II of Bohemia, who was one of the most eccentric European monarchs of that or any other period. Rudolph collected dwarfs and had a regiment of giants in his army. He was surrounded by astrologers, and he was fascinated by games and codes and music. He was typical of the occult-oriented, Protestant noblemen of this period and epitomized the liberated northern European prince. He was a patron of alchemy and supported the printing of alchemical literature. (…)

Over its recorded existence, the Voynich manuscript has been the object of intense study by many professional and amateur cryptographers, including some top American and British codebreakers of World War II fame (all of whom failed to decipher a single word). This string of failures has turned the Voynich manuscript into a famous subject of historical cryptology, but it has also given weight to the theory that the book is simply an elaborate hoax - a meaningless sequence of arbitrary symbols. (…)

By current estimates, the book originally had 272 pages in 17 quires of 16 pages each. Only about 240 vellum pages remain today, and gaps in the page numbering (which seems to be later than the text) indicate that several pages were already missing by the time that Voynich acquired it. A quill pen was used for the text and figure outlines, and colored paint was applied (somewhat crudely) to the figures, possibly at a later date.

The illustrations of the manuscript shed little light on its contents, but imply that the book consists of six “sections”, with different styles and subject matter. Except for the last section, which contains only text, almost every page contains at least one illustration. The sections, and their conventional names, are: The “herbal” section, Astronomical, Cosmological, Pharmaceutical. (…)

The text was clearly written from left to right, with a slightly ragged right margin. Longer sections are broken into paragraphs, sometimes with “bullets” on the left margin. There is no obvious punctuation. The ductus (the speed, care, and cursiveness with which the letters are written) flows smoothly, as if the scribe understood what he was writing when it was written; the manuscript does not give the impression that each character had to be calculated before being put on the page.

The text consists of over 170,000 discrete glyphs, usually separated from each other by thin gaps. Most of the glyphs are written with one or two simple pen strokes. While there is some dispute as to whether certain glyphs are distinct or not, an alphabet with 20-30 glyphs would account for virtually all of the text; the exceptions are a few dozen “weird” characters that occur only once or twice each.

Wider gaps divide the text into about 35,000 “words” of varying length. These seem to follow phonetic or orthographic laws of some sort; e.g. certain characters must appear in each word (like the vowels in English), some characters never follow others, some may be doubled but others may not.

Statistical analysis of the text reveals patterns similar to natural languages. For instance, the word frequencies follow Zipf’s law, and the word entropy (about 10 bits per word) is similar to that of English or Latin texts. Some words occur only in certain sections, or in only a few pages; others occur throughout the manuscript. There are very few repetitions among the thousand or so “labels” attached to the illustrations. In the herbal section, the first word on each page occurs only on that page, and may be the name of the plant.

On the other hand, the Voynich manuscript’s “language” is quite unlike European languages in several aspects. For example, there are practically no words with more than ten “letters”, yet there are also few one or two-letter words.

The distribution of letters within the word is also rather peculiar: some characters only occur at the beginning of a word, some only at the end, and some always in the middle section.

The text seems to be more repetitious than typical European languages; there are instances where the same common word appears up to three times in a row. Words that differ only by one letter also repeat with unusual frequency.

There are only a few words in the manuscript written in a seemingly Latin script. In the last page there are four lines of writing which are written in (rather distorted) Latin letters, except for two words in the main script. The lettering resembles European alphabets of the 15th century, but the words do not seem to make sense in any language.

Also, a series of diagrams in the “astronomical” section has the names of ten of the months (from March to December) written in Latin script, with spelling suggestive of the medieval languages of France or the Iberian Peninsula. However, it is not known whether these bits of Latin script were part of the original text, or were added at a later time. (…)

Dr. Leonell Strong, a cancer research scientist and amateur cryptographer, tried to decipher the Voynich manuscript. Strong said that the solution to the Voynich manuscript was a “peculiar double system of arithmetical progressions of a multiple alphabet”. Strong claimed that the plaintext revealed the Voynich manuscript to be written by the 16th century English author Anthony Ascham, whose works include A Little Herbal, published in 1550. Although the Voynich manuscript does contain sections resembling an herbal, the main argument against this theory is that it is unknown where Anthony would have obtained such literary and cryptographic knowledge. (…)

The first section of the book is almost certainly an herbal, but attempts to identify the plants, either with actual specimens or with the stylized drawings of contemporary herbals, have largely failed. Only a couple of plants (including a wild pansy and the maidenhair fern) can be identified with some certainty. Those “herbal” pictures that match “pharmacological” sketches appear to be “clean copies” of these, except that missing parts were completed with improbable-looking details. In fact, many of the plants seem to be composite: the roots of one species have been fastened to the leaves of another, with flowers from a third.

{ Ellie Crystal | Continue reading | Images | Wikipedia }

Its language is unknown and unreadable, though some believe it bears a message from extraterrestrials. Others say it carries knowledge of a civilisation that is thousands of years old.

But now a British academic believes he has uncovered the secret of the Voynich manuscript, an Elizabethan volume of more than 200 pages that is filled with weird figures, symbols and writing that has defied the efforts of the twentieth century’s best codebreakers and most distinguished medieval scholars.

According to computer expert Gordon Rugg of Keele University, the manuscript represents one of the strangest acts of encryption ever undertaken, one that made its creator, Edward Kelley, an Elizabethan entrepreneur, a fortune before his handiwork was lost to the world for more than 300 years. (…)

But now the computer expert and his team believe they have found the secret of the Voynich manuscript.

They have shown that its various word, which appear regularly throughout the script, could have been created using table and grille techniques. The different syllables that make up words are written in columns, and a grille - a piece of cardboard with three squares cut out in a diagonal pattern - is slid along the columns.

The three syllables exposed form a word. The grille is pushed along to expose three new syllables, and a new word is exposed.

Rugg’s conclusion is that Voynichese - the language of the Voynich manuscript - is utter gibberish, put together as random assemblies of different syllables.

{ The Guardian | Wired }

artwork { Paul Klee, Pfeil im Garten (Arrow in the Garden), 1929 | oil and tempera on canvas }

Why does the universe looks the way it does?

This seems on the one hand a very obvious question. On the other hand, it is an interestingly strange question, because we have no basis for comparison. The universe is not something that belongs to a set of many universes. We haven’t seen different kinds of universes so we can say, oh, this is an unusual universe, or this is a very typical universe. Nevertheless, we do have ideas about what we think the universe should look like if it were “natural”, as we say in physics. Over and over again it doesn’t look natural. We think this is a clue to something going on that we don’t understand.

One very classic example that people care a lot about these days is the acceleration of the universe and dark energy. In 1998 astronomers looked out at supernovae that were very distant objects in the universe and they were trying to figure out how much stuff there was in the universe, because if you have more and more stuff — if you have more matter and energy — the universe would be expanding, but ever more slowly as the stuff pulled together. What they found by looking at these distant bright objects of type 1A supernovae was that, not only is the universe expanding, but it’s accelerating. It’s moving apart faster and faster. Our best explanation for this is something called dark energy, the idea that in every cubic centimeter of space, every little region of space, if you empty it out so there are no atoms, no dark matter, no radiation, no visible matter, there is still energy there. There is energy inherent in empty spaces.

{ A Conversation with Sean Carroll | Edge | Continue reading }

artwork { Lucio Fontana, Concetto Spaziale, 1958-60 }

Aliens from outer space are already among us on earth, say Bulgarian government scientists who claim they are already in contact with extraterrestrial life.

Work on deciphering a complex set of symbols sent to them is underway, scientists from the country’s Space Research Institute said.

They claim aliens are currently answering 30 questions posed to them.

Lachezar Filipov, deputy director of the Space Research Institute of the Bulgarian Academy of Sciences, confirmed the research.

He said the centre’s researchers were analysing 150 crop circles from around the world, which they believe answer the questions.

“Aliens are currently all around us, and are watching us all the time,” Mr Filipov told Bulgarian media.

“They are not hostile towards us, rather, they want to help us but we have not grown enough in order to establish direct contact with them.”

“The human race was certainly going to have direct contact with the aliens in the next 10 to 15 years,” he said.

{ The Telegraph | Continue reading }

related { Proof of the existence of extraterrestrial life may be closer than we think, thanks to a surge of research in astrobiology. | Times Higher Education }

Attempts at lie-detection have been around ever since we first deceived - pretty much as soon as humans walked upright. Most countries outside the US have moved on from the polygraph - although prosecutors in India are now using electroencephalograms to “prove” guilt, despite the science being bitterly disputed.

So are there any reliable indicators of mendacity? Tics - fidgeting, stuttering - are mistakenly attributed to cheats across many societies (psychologist Charles Bond has noted this belief in 63 countries) without recourse to scientific proof.

Ditto the avoidance of eye contact - dropping your inquisitor’s gaze is often given anecdotally as confirmation of guilt.

“Eye contact has been proven the least accurate thing to watch for,” says Stan Walters, author of The Truth About Lying. “Most reliable cues typically come from the voice, in specific, the words.”

Professor Richard Wiseman (…) says that common sense is the lie-buster’s best weapon, and affirms that it is aural rather than visual clues that are key. (…)

“Lying taxes the mind,” Wiseman explains. “It involves thinking about what is plausible. People tend to repeat phrases, give shorter answers, and hesitate more. They will try to distance themselves from the lie, so use far more impersonal language. Liars often reduce the number of times that they say words like ‘I’, ‘me’, and ‘mine’. To detect deception, look for aural signs associated with having to think hard.”

According to the Canadian Journal of Police and Security Services, another side-effect of lying that forensic interrogators will look for is the avoidance of verbal contractions - using “I am” instead of “I’m” and so on.

Nature reported another study by Ioannis Pavlidis of Honeywell Laboratories in Minnesota. He established that many people blush when they are telling a lie - a subtle, but detectable, phenomenon.

{ Wired UK | Continue reading }