Woman's 'Foot Orgasm' Is First Known Case

 

A 55-year-old woman in the Netherlands visited the doctor with an unusual complaint: She experienced unwanted orgasms that started in her foot, according to a new report of her case.
The orgasmic sensations — which occurred in her left foot — were sudden, not brought on by sexual desire or thoughts, and occurred about five to six times a day, the report said. The sensation traveled up her left leg to her vagina, and she said the experience felt exactly like an orgasm achieved during sex.
These orgasms were very embarrassing and worrying to the woman, said study author Dr. Marcel D. Waldinger, who treated the woman and is a neuropsychiatrist and professor in sexual psychopharmacology at Utrecht University in the Netherlands.

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"She felt terrible about it," Waldinger said.
Magnetic resonance images (MRI scans) of the woman's brain and her foot showed no abnormalities, although another test revealed some differences between the nerves of her left and right feet, Waldinger told LiveScience. Stimulating her left foot with an electric current induced a spontaneous orgasmin that foot, he said.
The woman was treated with an injection of anesthetic into one of her spinal nerves — the nerve that receives sensory information from the foot — and the orgasms stopped completely. The woman has not had any foot orgasms for eight months now, although she might need to return for another anesthetic injection if her symptoms return, Waldinger said.
The researchers believe the phenomenon was the result of a sort of mix-up in the brain.
About a year and half before the foot orgasms started, the woman spent three weeks in an intensive care unit — part of the time, in a coma — because of a sepsis infection. When she came out of the coma, she had tingling and burning sensations in her left foot, likely as a result of damage to tiny nerve fibers in the foot, Waldingersaid.

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Interestingly, the nerve that registers sensory information from the foot enters the spinal cord at the same level as the nerve that registers sensory information from the vagina, Waldingersaid. Because of nerve damage in her foot, the woman's brain did not receive sensory information from her foot, but it did receive sensory information from the vagina.
After a year and a half, the nerve in the foot regenerated. When that happened, the researchers believe "the brain could not anymore differentiate between the foot and the vagina. So that it decided that every stimulus coming from the foot was actually coming from the vagina," Waldinger said. "And that means an orgasmic feeling," in the foot, he said.
The researchers called the woman's disorder "foot orgasm syndrome," and it is the only known case of its kind. (A foot orgasm has previously been reported in a man with a foot amputation).
Waldinger thinks there may be other people who have the condition, but are too embarrassed to talk about it. Waldinger wanted to publish the case report in part to reduce the stigma surrounding such conditions.
"It's not psychological," Waldinger said. "It’s a neurological thing — we can explain it, we can treat it."
Waldinger is hoping to hear from more people who may have a similar condition, and has made a website for people to contact him
The study was published online June 19 in the Journal of Sexual Medicine.
More From LiveScience.com:

• 50 Sultry Facts About Sex
• 6 (Other) Great Things Sex Can Do For You
• 7 Facts Women (And Men) Should Know About the Vagina

Source: news.discovery

Major resources needed for Obama Africa trip

 

When President Obama makes his first extended trip to sub-
Saharan Africa this month, the federal agencies charged with keeping him safe won’t be taking any chances.

Hundreds of U.S. Secret Service agents will be dispatched to secure facilities in Senegal, South Africa and Tanzania. A Navy aircraft carrier or amphibious ship, with a fully staffed medical trauma center, will be stationed offshore in case of an emergency.



Military cargo planes will airlift in 56 support vehicles, including 14 limousines and three trucks loaded with sheets of bullet­proof glass to cover the windows of the hotels where the first family will stay. Fighter jets will fly in shifts, giving 24-hour coverage over the president’s airspace, so they can intervene quickly if an errant plane gets too close.

The elaborate security provisions — which will cost the government tens of millions of dollars — are outlined in a confidential internal planning document obtained by The Washington Post. While the preparations appear to be in line with similar travels in the past, the document offers an unusual glimpse into the colossal efforts to protect the U.S. commander in chief on trips abroad.

Any journey by the president, such as one scheduled next week for Northern Ireland and Germany, is an immense and costly logistical challenge. But the trip to Africa is complicated by a confluence of factors that could make it one of the most expensive of Obama’s tenure, according to people familiar with the planning.

The first family is making back-to-back stops from June 26 to July 3 in three countries where U.S. officials are providing nearly all the resources, rather than depending heavily on local police forces, military authorities or hospitals for assistance.

The president and first lady had also planned to take a Tanzanian safari as part of the trip, which would have required the president’s special counterassault team to carry sniper rifles with high-caliber rounds that could neutralize cheetahs, lions or other animals if they became a threat, according to the planning document.

But officials said Thursday that the safari had been canceled in favor of a trip to Robben Island off the coast of Cape Town, South Africa, where Nelson Mandela was held as a political prisoner.

When The Post first asked White House officials about the safari last week, they said no final decision had been made. A White House official said Thursday that the cancellation was not related to The Post’s inquiries.

“We do not have a limitless supply of assets to support presidential missions, and we prioritized a visit to Robben Island over a two-hour safari in Tanzania,” said spokesman Josh Earnest. “Unfortunately, we couldn’t do both.”

Internal administration documents circulated in April show that the Obama family was scheduled to go to both Robben Island and the safari park, according to a person familiar with the plans.

Former presidents Bill Clinton and George W. Bush also made trips to multiple African nations involving similarly laborious preparations. Bush went in 2003 and 2008, bringing his wife on both occasions. Bush’s two daughters went along on the first trip, which included a safari at a game preserve on the Botswana-South Africa border.
 

Source: washingtonpost

Seth Green on Becoming a Father: "A Lot of Pressure, No Plans"

 

Even though he's set to star in the upcoming Fox show Dads, Seth Green isn't personally in any rush to become a father himself. At the Critics Choice Awards on Monday, June 10, the funnyman and his wife of three years, model/actress Clare Grant, told Us Weekly that they're in no rush to start a family just yet.

"A lot of pressure, no plans," Green told Us of parenthood. "People have just gotten used to certain cultural cycles and they can't wait for the end of them."
 

Stars and their soul mates

Added Grant: "The day we got married, people started asking when the kids were coming."

Green, 39, and Grant, 33, said "I do" in May 2010 during a Northern California ceremony after meeting in a comic book store. "And now I won't let her go!" Green told Us at the time of falling for his now-wife.
 

Who got married when Seth and Clare got married?

The duo appeared onscreen together in a 2008 episode of Green's show Robot Chicken, which is set to debut a new season this fall. Grant is currently working on a pilot for a live animation/action hybrid comedy called Teen Unicorn for Adult Swim.

Though they're both busy, however, Green admitted that at the end of the day, the pair are still in their "honeymoon phase."
 

Unforgettable celeb wedding photos

"We still like each other," he said, adding that he and Grant occasionally read scripts together "sometimes to practice. She's good for it. It's fun!"


Source: usmagazine

Man Flies Across Sea to Cape Town Using Balloons

 

A South African man on Saturday successfully flew across the sea from Nelson Mandela's apartheid island prison using helium-filled giant party balloons.

The six-kilometer (3.7-mile) crossing, to raise funds for a children's hospital named after the country's former president, was the first stunt of its kind from the historical site.

Matt Silver-Vallance, 37, took around an hour to float across the Atlantic Ocean from Robben Island while harnessed to a mass of mufti-coloured balloons in grey, drizzly conditions with low visibility.
 

How Safe are Hot Air Balloons?
Making his way wearing a wetsuit, he floated a few meters above the sea, with controls for flight including bags weighted with water and an air gun and make-shift spear to pop balloons.

"Wow, that was crazy," he said, saying he felt "unbelievable" after landing in a rubber duck around 300-400 meters (985-1,310 feet) from shore once the balloons were released.

"Don't try this at home," he quipped.

With no test run ahead of lift-off, a total of 160 balloons were inflated on the island early Saturday morning, with several popping ahead of departure.
 

Blimp-Like Craft Hauls Tons of Cargo Anywhere

Silver-Vallance popped around 35 more balloons during the trip to manage his equilibrium. A hard ground landing was ruled out as too risky.

The daring mission aimed to raise 10 million rand ($1.1 million, 852,000 euros) for the Nelson Mandela Children's Hospital which will be built in Johannesburg.

"We're trying to raise as much money (as possible) for the Nelson Mandela Children's Hospital and we really see this project as a catalyst," Silver-Vallance said ahead of take-off.

The hospital will be part of Mandela's legacy and the balloon run was a "small thing" to try to remind people of everything the 94-year-old anti-apartheid icon had done, he said.

"The risks that I'm taking are tiny compared to the risks that he took," he said, adding he was not a dare-devil.

When asked what message he had for Mandela, an emotional Silver-Vallance said: "I think like most South Africans we all love him very much," he said.

He said he hoped the flight "could bring a smile to (Mandela's) face,"

Later, after the flight, Nelson Mandela was discharged from hospital after being admitted 10 days ago for a bout of pneumonia.

There have only been 12 previous such balloon flights in the world -- two of which were fatal -- according to Silver-Vallance, who now lives in Britain.

Source: news.discovery

Why NBA Stars Are Pedaling Bikes at Night

 

In a typical night, LeBron James scores an average of 26.9 points for the Miami Heat in 38 minutes of play. Then, he often hops on his bike and rides home.

James credits cycling, in part, for the conditioning his coach calls “world-class.”

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“I want to maximize everything I can and not waste an opportunity each and every day to compete and get better as a player,” James said in The Huffington Post. “I want to be the best. You’ve got to push the button sometimes.”

Teammate and fellow cyclist Dwayne Wade agrees.

“It gave my body a different type of conditioning challenge,” Wade told Men’s Journal.

But cycling goes beyond conditioning: James, Wade, teammate Mario Chalmers and James’s girlfriend, actress Gabrielle Union, have been joining Critical Mass rides in Miami. The popular last-Friday-of-the-month mass bike rides began in San Francisco in 1992 and spread to other cities.

Spring Gear Guide: 10 Essential Gadgets and Tools for Cycling

“Ever since my first ride, I’ve been hooked,” Wade told Men’s Journal. “It’s motivating to be around bikers who are dedicated and push themselves beyond the limit.”

Although the NBA stars aren’t seeking publicity — they showed up to the Critical Mass ride unannounced, although they have Tweeted about it and were caught on YouTube — bikers are hoping that the celebrity hoopsters will lend some of their sports cred to cycling.

James says he gets recognized while riding to and from practice. ”People try to stop me, but I’m in a zone,” he told the Huffington Post.

“I got lights on my bike. I’m serious. This isn’t a joke.”

Photo: Corbis

Source: news.discovery

 

Plastic Bags Fool Turtles Into Hunting Them

 

Plastic bags in the ocean can look just like a jellyfish or other gelatinous creature, fooling loggerhead turtles into hunting them.

This case of mistaken identity, documented in the latest issue of the journal PLoS ONE, reveals how our garbage can hurt marine wildlife. Even if a turtle doesn’t ingest the bag, the effort to explore and grab it wastes the turtle’s energy and time.
 

How Turtles Got Their Shells

Tomoko Narazaki and colleagues from the University of Tokyo outfitted the loggerhead turtles with 3D loggers and crittercams, which enabled the scientists to record all of the turtle action as the animals swam in open water.

Narazaki and his team discovered that the turtles rely on sight, rather than on sound or smell, to find and move toward gelatinous prey, such as jellyfish and other organisms. That’s bad news for the turtles, because a plastic bag looks just like a jellyfish when the bags are submerged in water.

That’s hard to imagine, but the bags tend to lose their shape and take on a more tubular form when submerged. As they float downward in the water, the plastic undulates, making the bag look just like a living, moving jellyfish. I’ve seen this before myself, and the resemblance is uncanny.

The discovery also suggests that loggerhead turtles may rely on jellyfish and similarly textured prey for food more than was previously theorized. Because these squishy organisms aren’t exactly jam packed with nutrients, they serve more as a snack for the turtles. But the turtles seem to go after them quite often during their swimming trips, and particularly during oceanic migrations.

Because of their Jello-like texture, such foods are easy for the turtles to digest, not bogging them down when they have to keep moving. At other times, the turtles tend to go after hard-shelled prey, such as mollusks.

Millions of Turtles Killed Due to Bycatch
Loggerhead turtles are endangered. It’s a shame to see them, and other turtles, having to deal with our trash seemingly every minute of their lives. Watch as this turtle has to swim through all kinds of discarded waste.

We can help by choosing reusable cloth or other natural material bags instead of plastic. Certain cities around the country, such as Berkeley, already have laws in place that help to limit plastic bag use.

Other litter eventually washes into open water areas, home to species already struggling due to human hunting, habitat loss and other human-caused problems.

Source: news.discovery

Dinosaur Lineage Traced to Africa

 

Ten million years after the world's largest mass extinction, a lineage of animals thought to have led to dinosaurs took hold in Tanzania and Zambia, according to new research.

The study, published in the latest Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, reveals how the end-Permian mass extinction 252.3 million years ago permitted a significant reorganization of terrestrial animals living in the southern part of the supercontinent Pangea.

Out of this chaos emerged the dino predecessors, which likely ushered in the Dinosaur Age.

There were losers, such as fat lizard-looking Dicynodon, which sported a short tail and a turtle's head. It completely bit the dust after the huge extinction event, which led to the disappearance of 90 percent of all life on the planet.
 

 Dinosaur Feathers Found in Amber

On the winners' side were silesaurs, which were plant-eaters very closely related to dinosaurs.

"In Tanzania, the main silesaur that we find is called Asilisaurus kongwe," co-author Kenneth Angielczyk told Discovery News. "Asilisaurus was about the size of a medium dog, like a golden retriever, and they tended to have long thin limbs."

Yet another fossil find was Nyasasaurus parringtoni, a Labrador retriever-sized animal with a 5-foot-long tail.
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"Nyasasaurus is either the oldest known dinosaur or the closest known relative of dinosaurs, but we can't completely rule out either option because the material is rather fragmentary," said Angielczyk, who is Associate Curator of Paleomammalogy at the Field Museum of Natural History.

Angielczyk and his colleagues unearthed these creatures over the course of seven fossil-hunting expeditions in Tanzania, Zambia and Antarctica. The researchers created two "snapshots" of four-legged animals about 5 million years before the mass extinction event and 10 million years after it.

The cause of the great die-off remains a mystery, with intense volcanic activity, a meteorite strike and extreme global warming all being possible candidates.
 

Source: news.discovery

Navy Dolphin Finds Rare 130-Year-Old Torpedo

A Navy dolphin training to look for mines off the coast of San Diego found a museum-worthy 19th-century torpedo on the seafloor, military officials said.

The brass-coated, retro wonder of technology was one of the first self-propelled torpedoes used by the U.S. Navy. Just 50 of these so-called Howell torpedoes were made and only one other example has been recovered; it sits in the Naval Undersea Museum in Keyport, Wash., outside of Seattle.
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The 130-year-old, 11-foot-long (3.3 meters) weapon was discovered back in March during a mine-hunting exercise that the Space and Naval warfare Systems Center Pacific (SSC Pacific) was conducting with bottlenose dolphins. [Top 10 Animal Recruits in War]

"Dolphins naturally possess the most sophisticated sonar known to man. They can detect mines and other potentially dangerous objects on the ocean floor that are acoustically difficult targets to detect," operations supervisor Braden Duryee, of the SSC Pacific Biosciences Division, said in a statement.

Dolphins use their natural sonar, called echolocation, to determine the size and shape of underwater objects by sending out a series of clicks that bounce off their targets and boomerang back to them. The marine mammals can be trained to report what they have found to human handlers using certain yes or no responses. Handlers can then investigate what the dolphins find by sending the animals to mark an object's location with a weighted buoy line.

In this case, one of the dolphins indicated to its handler that it had detected a minelike target. The recovery dive team initially thought the dolphin had found an old tail section off an aerial drop mine, according to a statement from SSC Pacific, but officials soon realized they were handling a much rarer artifact.

Source: news.discovery

Earliest Evidence of French Winemaking Discovered

An ancient limestone platform dating back to 425 B.C is the oldest wine press ever discovered on French soil.

The press is the first evidence of winemaking in what is now modern-day France, according to new research published this week in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. The evidence suggests inhabitants of the region of Etruria got the ancient residents of France hooked. (Etruria covered parts of modern-day Tuscany, Latium and Umbria in Italy.)
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"Now we know that the ancient Etruscans lured the Gauls into the Mediterranean wine culture by importing wine into southern France," study researcher Patrick McGovern, who directs the Bimolecular Archaeology Laboratory for Cuisine, Fermented Beverages and Health at the University of Pennsylvania Museum, said in a statement. "This built up a demand that could only be met by establishing a native industry." In Photos: Amazing Ruins of the Ancient World

The spread of wine

Humans first domesticated the Eurasian grapevine some 9,000 years ago in the Near East, perhaps in what is now Turkey or Iran. Gradually, the intoxicating beverage spread across the Mediterranean Sea, conveyed by Phoenicians and Greeks. By 800 B.C., the Phoenicians were trading wine with the Etruscans, storing it in large jars called amphoras.

Shipwrecks from around 600 B.C. are filled with these Etruscan amphoras, suggesting that residents of the area that is now Italy were by then exporting their own wine. In the coastal town of Lattara, near modern-day Lattes, France, a merchant storage complex full of these amphoras has been found, dating back to the town's heyday of 525 B.C. to 475 B.C.

McGovern and his colleagues analyzed three of these amphoras to find out if they really contained wine. They also analyzed an odd limestone discovery shaped like a rounded platform with a spout, thought to be a press of some sort. Whether the locals used the press to smash olives or grapes was unknown.

Analyzing amphoras

The researchers followed careful standards for the artifacts they analyzed: Amphoras had to be excavated undisturbed and sealed, with their bases intact and available for analysis. They also had to be unwashed and had to contain possible residue.

Source: news.discovery

19th-Century British Shipwreck Found Off Mexico

 

Mexican underwater archaeologists have discovered the wreck of the 19th-century British paddle-steamer HMS Forth, which sank off the Yucatan Peninsula 164 years ago.

According to a statement by the National Anthropology and History Institute , the remains of the 1,900-ton ship were found at a depth of 18 meters near the Alacranes Reef, a treacherous area where dozens of ships have met their end since the 16th century.

The vessel was sailing to Bermuda when it crashed against the notorious rocks and sank on Jan. 14, 1849.

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It belonged to the Royal Mail Steam Packet Company, a British shipping company which in 1842 began carrying mail to Bermuda and the West Indies under a contract from the UK government. In 1927 the company took over the White Star Line, becoming the largest shipping group in the world.

“We sighted a large steamer on the rocks, apparently high and dry,” the HMS Dee, another Royal Mail Steam ship, reported in the British newspaper Illustrated London News on February 1849.

“As we neared her, we saw that her mizenmast was standing, her funnel over the port side, and apparently parting amid ships. We bore up for her, and found to our sorrow the Forth a total wreck,” they reported.

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Being able to reach a small island nearby, the ship’s crew was rescued a few days later, and transported to Havana.

“Not a soul was lost, and, barring a few bruises, no one sustained injury,” the Dee account stated.

Led by Helena Barba Meinecke, responsible of the Underwater Archaeology area of the Yucatan Peninsula, the INAH marine archaeologists explored the northern section of the reef. They discovered several metal items such as boilers, machinery, propellers, anchors and skegs from the HMS Forth.

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Meinecke believes other wrecks can be found scattered in the area, including the HMS Tweed, another Royal Mail Steam Packet Company ship that sank in 1847, and the Belgian vessel Charlote, which went down in 1853.

Indeed, historical research carried from 2010 to 2012 revealed references to at least 25 shipwrecks near the dangerous “Scorpions,” as the network of reefs, sand banks and small islands emerging from the bottom of the sea is known.

The archaeologists are planning other underwater expeditions to investigate the additional wrecks, INAH said.

Image: Underwater archaeologists explore the remains of the British ship HMS Forth. Credit: Helena Barba/INAH.

Source: news.discovery

Rare 'Sea Serpent' Caught on Video

The giant oarfish is the longest bony fish in the world – reaching, according to some reports, as much as 56 feet from tip to tail, although recorded lengths are somewhat more modest. Its size and its snake-like shape have led to suggestions that it may have been the source of at least some legends of sea serpents.

In Europe, it has been called the “king of herrings,” perhaps because it would sometimes be sighted near herring shoals, which some fishermen believed it guided. In Japan, the coincident appearances of oarfish that have been washed ashore before earthquakes and tsunamis have led to the fish being regarded as a bad omen.

Sea Monsters Real and Imagined: Photos

Almost all human encounters with oarfish have been ones in which the fish are dead or drying – washed onto the beach or swimming in a disoriented manner near to shore. The reason for that, simply, is that giant oarfish tend to inhabit deeper waters where human beings rarely venture.

But scientists with the appropriately-named SERPENT project (Scientific and Environmental ROV Partnership using Existing iNdustrial Technology) – a collaboration between marine researchers and the oil-and-gas industry, in which the latter provides the former with resources such as remote operated vehicles (ROVs) – have now recorded not one, not two, but five videos of the giant oarfish in its natural environment.

DNews posted part of one of the videos, complete with narration by lead researcher Mark Benfield, back in 2010; now Benfield and colleagues have compiled all the videos they took between January 2008 and August 2011 – using an ROV at depths of up to 1,600 feet in the Gulf of Mexico – and described their observations in a paper in the Journal of Fish Biology.

Interestingly, despite its long, lean form, the oarfish does not swim like a snake or an eel, but hangs almost vertically in the water. Renfield and colleagues report that the fact the fish did not immediately flee from the ROV’s bright lights suggest that they have few natural predators.

The paper’s publication generated plenty of excitement in the blogosphere, a tribute to the fish’s unusual appearance and the many mysteries that surround it. Even with this new video, most of those mysteries remain, disappearing with the oarfish into the inky blackness far below the ocean surface.

IMAGE: Screen grab of oarfish video. (Benfield et al.)

Source: news.discovery

Investments in Clean Beaches Pay Off

Southern California boasts a world-class beach culture. But who wants to show off their bikini/speedo bod on sand contaminated with pollution washed off the streets of Santa Monica and Malibu? Pollution from storm runoff causes many beach closings, which costs local businesses money.

Life on the Ocean Floor Garbage Patch

However, a 10-year-long study of 26 beaches in southern California found that beach attendance increased after systems to divert storm runoff were put into place. The research was published in Marine Pollution Bulletin.

Top 10 Beaches of 2013

“Cost has many municipalities opposed to installing storm drain diversion systems, but the data showed these investments pay off,” said study co-author Linwood Pendleton of Duke University in a press release. “Beyond their effectiveness as a tool for managing pollution in coastal waters, storm drain diversions increased attendance at individual beaches in the region by 350,000 to 860,000 annually.”

Storm water runoff diversion systems channel water into sewage treatment systems. For example, in 2007, the City of Malibu opened a storm water treatment facility capable of processing 1,400 gallons per minute of runoff. The system first screens trash and other large pollutants from the water. Then the water is filtered and disinfected with ozone, a triple-oxygen molecule capable of destroying disease-causing microorganisms, such as Escherichia coli, fecal coliform bacteria and enterococcus bacteria.

IMAGE: Santa Monica beach (Jon Sullivan, Wikimedia Commons)

Source: news.discovery

Zombie Plants Return From the Dead

 

On an annual trip to the Arctic, a Canadian scientist spotted some moss that had previously been frozen under glaciers for about 400 years. When she took the plant back to the lab, she wondered if it could be brought back to life. Yes, yes it could.
 

Plants Can Hear You!

University of Alberta biologist Catherine La Farge and her colleagues go on annual trips to the Teardrop glacier on Ellesmere Island, located in the Canadian Arctic Archipelago. In the past few years she’s watched the glacier retreat, exposing rock, mud and ancient moss that had been buried under the ice since the Little Ice Age, which lasted from 1550 to 1850, Sheila Pratt reported in the Edmonton Journal.

La Farge specializes in studying ancient moss, a type of plant called bryophytes. Usually the moss that was under the ice looks black and dead but La Farge noticed some near the glacier retreat that was still slightly greenish and decided to bring it back to the lab. She told the Edmonton Journal that on closer inspection she noticed a tiny green stem and decided to see whether the plant could be revived.

“I could see some of the stems actually had new growth of green lateral branches, and that said to me that these guys are regenerating in the field, and that blew my mind,” she told BBC News.

After being ground up and placed in petri dishes with potting soil for several weeks, some of the moss samples did indeed begin growing. A few months later the dishes were full of the zombie moss. The results of La Farge’s scientific study with her University of Alberta colleagues was just published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Science (abstract).

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These are some super special plants. Unlike most land plants we know, bryophytes lack the vascular tissue that helps pump fluids around different parts of the organism, the BBC News reported. Instead, they reproduce by cloning their cells — and all you really need to keep it going is one.

The fact that these plants could come back after being frozen for hundreds of years has some intense implications. Scientists are studying bryophytes for potential medical use and La Farge suggested we send some to Mars and see how the moss fares there.

Given the unprecedented pace of glacier retreats, what other secrets will the ice give up?

Photo: Moss grown from 400-year-old specimens that were frozen under a glacier. Credit: Shaughn Butts, Edmonton Journal.
 

Source: news.discovery

Massive Storms Brewing Rare 'Derecho' Event

 

Storm systems brewing over the upper Mississippi Valley late Wednesday afternoon may spawn the season's first so-called "derecho" storm stretching about 400 miles in length, said meteorologists with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA).

Derecho -- pronounced "de-reh-choh"  and which is Spanish for "straight" -- is a special designation for a fast-moving line of thunderstorms stretching at least 400 kilometers (249 miles) in length.  The storms typically pack tropical storm-force or higher winds.

A second system forecast for Wednesday evening over Mississippi and the Ohio Valley region could reach near-derecho proportions, with a squall line estimated to grow to about 300 kilometers (186 miles), research meteorologist Ken Pryor, with NOAA’s weather and climate prediction center in College Park, Md., told Discovery News.

Deadliest Tornadoes in U.S. History

"You can think of a derecho as analogous to a tropical cyclone over land. The impacts are very similar. There are damaging winds that cover a significant area," Pryor said.

Derechos are rare west of the Rocky Mountains and in central and south Florida. Over the Mississippi and Ohio valleys, the storms form once or twice a year, most often in June or July. The Atlantic Coast region, east of the Appalachian Mountains from southern New England to northern Florida, experiences a derecho about once every two to four years.

One of the largest derechos on record occurred in July 2011 with a squall line that stretched from the Dakotas and Nebraska in the west to Maryland and Virginia in the east.

 Can Hurricanes Do Any Good?

Wednesday's storms are expected to begin about 6 p.m. EDT and extend to about 2 a.m. on Thursday. Meteorologists are forecasting wind gusts up to 75 mph.

"It is possible that these two systems may merge, but the (computer) models are indicating that one will track over the lower Great Lakes region, from southern Wisconsin and northern Illinois across Michigan, and then the models are indicating the possible development of a new convective storm system over eastern Ohio that will track southeastward across the Appalachians," Pryor said.

"We're considering here the development of two separate storm systems, but both of those have the potential to become derechos," he added.

 Source: news.discovery

5 Ways Motherhood Has Changed Over Time

 

It's easy to take the job description of motherhood for granted: Take care of your kids, in whatever way you can. The specifics, though, are a little trickier.
In fact, the meaning and duties of being a mom have undergone great upheaval just in the last century. Should moms work outside the home or stay with the kids full time? Does letting a baby cry scar it or strengthen it? Should moms be praised just for being moms?

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The answers to these questions depend on the era in which they're asked. Throughout U.S. history, moms have been exalted, demonized and exalted again. Their instincts have been questioned and ruled sacrosanct. And they've taken the most guilt upon themselves during periods where they spend the most time with their children. [10 Scientific Tips for Raising Happy Kids]
Read on for five ways motherhood has changed in the United States.

Source: news.discovery

Neanderthals: Extinction by BBQ?

 

 Humans today eat gorillas and chimpanzees, so why would our prehistoric ancestors flinch at sitting down to a nicely roasted Neanderthal?

That's the shocking new hypothesis being raised by anthropologists in Spain, who wonder if our closest extinct relative was exterminated in the same way as 178 other large mammals, so-called megafauna, which are suspected of going at least partially by the hand of hungry human hunters.

"Except in its native Africa, in the other continents Homo sapiens can be considered as an invasive alien species," write researchers Policarp Hortolà and Bienvenido Martínez-Navarro of the Universitat Rovira i Virgili in Tarragona, Spain. They published their hypothesis in the May issue of the journal Quaternary International.
PHOTOS: Faces of Our Ancestors

Today, there are endless cases of invasive species decimating native species all over the world. So perhaps at the end of the Pliestocene, it was the same when humans spread into Europe and Asia, where Homo neanderthalensis was just another big, slow-reproducing mammal.

"We think that modern humans, who occupied a similar ecological niche as Neanderthals, but with more evolved technology, in their colonization of the new European territories directly competed with Neanderthals for the food and other natural resources," wrote Martínez-Navarro in an emailed response to Discovery News.

There are other examples of very similar species overlapping and eventually one of them getting pushed out, explained Martínez-Navarro, especially involving carnivores out of Africa.

The African species of saber-toothed tiger, for example, spread into Eurasia around 1.8 million years ago and lead to the demise of a very closely related species there. And the arrival of the African spotted hyena into Eurasia matches the extinction of the giant short-facet hyena about 800,000 years ago.

Source: news.discovery

Could Humans Be Cloned?

The news that researchers have used cloning to make human embryos for the purpose of producing stem cells may have some people wondering if it would ever be possible to clone a person.
Although it would be unethical, experts say it is likely biologically possible to clone a human being. But even putting ethics aside, the sheer amount of resources needed to do it is a significant barrier.
Since the 1950s when researchers cloned a frog, scientists have cloned dozens of animal species, including mice, cats, sheep, pigs and cows.

VIDEO: How Many Times Can You Clone a Clone?

In each case, researchers encountered problems that needed to be overcome with trial and error, said Dr. Robert Lanza, chief scientific officer at the biotech company Advanced Cell Technology, which works on cell therapies for human diseases, and has cloned animals.
With mice, researchers were able to use thousands of eggs, and conduct many experiments, to work out these problems, Lanza said. "It’s a numbers game," he said.

NEWS: Cloning Creates Human Embryonic Stem Cells

But with primates, eggs are a very precious resource, and it is not easy to acquire them to conduct experiments, Lanza said.
In addition, researchers can't simply apply what they've learned from cloning mice or cows to cloning people.
For instance, cloning an animal requires that researchers first remove the nucleus of an egg cell. When researchers do this, they also remove proteins that are essential to help cells divide, Lanza said. In mice, this isn't a problem, because the embryo that is ultimately created is able to make these proteins again. But primates aren't able to do this, and researchers think it may be one reason that attempts to clone monkeys have failed, Lanza said. (See How Stem Cell Cloning Works (Infographic))
What's more, cloned animals often have different kinds of genetic abnormalities that can prevent embryo implantation in a uterus, or cause the fetus to spontaneously abort, or the animal to die shortly after birth, Lanza said.
These abnormities are common because cloned embryos have just one parent rather than two, which means that a molecular process known as "imprinting" does not occur properly in cloned embryos, Lanza said. Imprinting takes place during embryo development, and selectively silences certain genes from one parent or the other.
Problems with imprinting can result in extremely large placentas, which ultimately leads to problems with blood flow for the fetus, Lanza said. In one experiment, Lanza and colleagues cloned a species of cattle called banteng, and it was born at twice the size of a normal banteng. It had to be euthanized, Lanza said.
The extremely high rate of death, and the risk of developmental abnormities from cloning makes cloning people unethical, Lanza said.
"It's like sending your baby up in a rocket knowing there's a 50-50 chance it's going to blow up. It's grossly unethical," Lanza said.

• Unraveling the Human Genome: 6 Molecular Milestones
• Inside Life Science: Once Upon a Stem Cell
• 7 Absolutely Evil Medical Experiments

This article originally appeared on LiveScience.com. Copyright 2013 LiveScience, a TechMediaNetwork company. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.

Source: news.discovery

Man Blames Break-In on Zombie Pursuit

 

A Florida man who used a chunk of concrete to break a window outside a hotel told police he did it to escape pursuing zombies.

According to ABC ActionNews, “David Allen Jensen, 41, used a doughnut-shaped piece of concrete to break glass outside the Hilton St. Petersburg Bayfront hotel on First Street S. He was trying to get inside, he told police, because zombies were chasing him. Security officers say they saw Jensen pulling on the handles of car doors, too, but not to avoid the undead. He told police he was trying to steal tobacco from the cars.”

Why We’re Obsessed With Zombies

This is, of course, not the first time that a person has blamed supernatural — and presumably non-existent — entities for crimes and misbehavior. Last year a man in Memphis was arrested after destroying a motel room that he believed contained demons and ghosts. The motel manager discovered the room’s furniture had been smashed and the sheetrock walls had been ripped out. A 22-year-old man arrested nearby explained to police officers that he’d simply been trying to free the demons and ghosts that were trapped in the room and its walls. He did not state whether his efforts were successful.

Sometimes such claims are made by drunks grasping at straws in an attempt to excuse the inexcusable — such as a Wisconsin man arrested for domestic violence who tried to claim that a ghost was responsible for his wife’s injuries. While it’s easy to assume that anyone who holds beliefs about zombies, ghosts, demons and the like is intoxicated or mentally ill, that is not necessarily the case.

Many people — especially religious fundamentalists — believe in the literal, physical existence of demons and devils. For these individuals such paranormal entities are not metaphorical, nor the stuff of horror movies, but instead very real and can harass, attack and even possess humans. Other people who would dismiss such talk of demons and zombies as silly are convinced they experience ghosts and unseen spirits, perhaps influenced by popular TV shows such as Ghost Hunters.

Zombies and Social Contagion

There is also an element of social contagion to such claims. When an idea or theme becomes widespread in popular culture — as zombies and ghosts have in recent years — they tend to be on people’s minds. In some rare circumstances these fears are revealed in weird ways. This is not to say that seeing TV shows and movies about zombies will necessarily make people hallucinate zombie pursuits. It’s not quite so direct or straightforward.

Apocalypse Now? Creating a Survival Plan

However psychologists know that our expectations can and do influence our perceptions and interpretations of what we see. A scary late-night encounter with a centipede in your bedroom, for example, is likely to make any stray shoelace or piece of string on the floor look like a centipede for a few days.

Earlier this year a woman was seen late at night on Ohio’s Oberlin College campus wrapped in a blanket. Because there had been recent discussions about racism on the campus, an eyewitness told police that the woman was instead a Ku Klux Klan member in full white regalia.

The current fascination with zombies will eventually fade away, and along with it the occasional reports of real-world zombies. Until then, the sightings will continue…

Photo: Corbis

Source: news.discovery

Can People Live on Only Sunlight and Water?

A woman in Seattle who believes she can live without food is trying to prove it, and promoting her claims through social media.

According to a story on Fox News, “Navenna Shine, the founder and subject of the Living on Light experiment, plans to spend the next four to six months abstaining from food of any kind and living on only light, water and tea. According to her website Livingonlight.com, Shine started the experiment in an attempt to follow a group of obscure Yogis, who for thousands of years have claimed the ability to live on light.”

The claimed ability to survive without food (and sometimes without water as well) is called inedia, and those who attempt it are called “inediates” (among other things). One common version of inedia includes a belief called breatharianism, which teaches that humans can be trained to survive just on water and sunlight.

Are You The Greatest Of All Time? Probably Not

Shine is only the latest among many alleged inediates over the years. Though the beliefs date back thousands of years, in modern times only a handful of people actually claim this amazing ability. In 2010 an 82-year-old Indian man named Prahlad Jani made news for claiming he had not had anything to eat or drink since World War II.

Psychology of Inedia

Inedia is very different from merely dieting for health, fasting as non-violent protest, or because of a psychological disorder such as anorexia nervosa. Robert Carroll, Chairman of the Philosophy Department at Sacramento City College and author of “The Skeptics Dictionary” notes that refusing to eat has strong spiritual connotations: “Fasting has long been considered a way to purify one’s body and mind. Fasting reminds us of our dependence and weakness, and links us to those who suffer hunger as part of their daily lives. Inediates strive to be spiritual beings and carry fasting to an inhuman level. If restraint, self-control, and reducing one’s intake of food and water are good, then eliminating all physical nourishment must be better.”

Man Claims to Survive Without Food

Temporary fasting is part of many religions, including Islam and Christianity; in Roman Catholic traditions, some saints are said to have lived for months or even years without food.

It’s not surprising that such claims fail when subjected to scientific tests. The human body needs both food and water to function; it’s as simple as that. Plants can create their own food through photosynthesis, but people can’t. Depending on many factors (including the health and size of an individual) the human body can live for about a month without eating, though only a few days without water. Stories of rescued accident victims who have survived for a few weeks on little or no food are not unheard of.

The 5 Most Outrageous Hoaxes

If Navenna Shine wishes to follow in the path of previous breatharians and inediates, she should be aware that many of their claims are exaggerated at best and fraudulent at worst. Several people who claimed to survive on nothing more than air and sunlight have been caught sneaking food and water. Unless a person allows himself or herself to be closely watched at all times, fraud is a real possibility. One prominent breatharian, Wiley Brooks, was seen and photographed in a fast food restaurant during his supposed fasting.

Shine has turned her experimental flirtation with starvation into something of a social media event, filming herself on web cams and creating a Facebook page so supporters (and detractors) can follow along. She seems sincere in her effort, blogging about her symptoms including nausea, her conversations with God, and the messages she receives from the universe as her body fights off delirium. If she’s not careful she may make news for a whole different, tragic reason.

Image: iStock


Source: news.discovery

Black Hole Snoozes, Not Bothered With Eating Stuff

News about black holes is usually accompanied by some fun description of them eating stuff. Stars, planets, even asteroids are on the galactic menu. But in the case of the supermassive black hole at center of NGC 253 (the Sculptor galaxy), the opposite is true. It’s not doing much at all. In fact, it appears to have taken leave from its supermassive duties of reigning gravitational terror over the matter inside its galactic core.

“Our results imply that the black hole went dormant in the past 10 years,” said Bret Lehmer of the Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, and NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, Md. “Periodic observations with both Chandra and NuSTAR should tell us unambiguously if the black hole wakes up again. If this happens in the next few years, we hope to be watching.” Lehmer is lead author of the new study published in the Astrophysical Journal.

ANALYSIS: Our Galaxy’s Black Hole Has the ‘Munchies’

Although the black hole is taking a nap, that doesn’t mean the galaxy isn’t picking up the slack. NGC 253 is one of the nearest “starburst” galaxies to the Milky Way, some 13 million light-years away, churning out newborn stars at an accelerated rate. It may seem surprising, then, that the black hole, with a mass of 5 million suns, is able to sleep through the star-forming commotion.

“Black holes feed off surrounding accretion disks of material. When they run out of this fuel, they go dormant,” said co-author Ann Hornschemeier of Goddard. “NGC 253 is somewhat unusual because the giant black hole is asleep in the midst of tremendous star-forming activity all around it.”

This apparent contradiction provides an opportunity for astronomers trying to understand the nature of starburst galaxies and the part their central black holes have to play in galactic evolution.

ANALYSIS: Black Hole Wakes Up, Torments and Eats a Planet

It is thought that the supermassive black holes that live in the hearts of the majority of galaxies grow at the same rate as their host galaxies. However, black holes are also known to extinguish star formation should they start feeding, generating a hellish environment near the galactic hub — intense radiation generated by an active black hole can cause incredible disruption.

In the case of NGC 253, astronomers cannot be sure whether the rate of star formation is increasing or decreasing, but they are keeping a close eye on the black hole.

In 2003, NGC 253′s black hole was an entirely different creature. It was highly active, generating X-ray radiation spotted by NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory, indicating it was consuming matter. But in followup studies in 2012 using Chandra and NASA’s Nuclear Spectroscopic Telescope Array (NuSTAR), the black hole had fallen silent, indicating it had stopped accreting material.

ANALYSIS: Spinning Black Hole Observed for the First Time

During these observations, Chandra and NuSTAR spotted some of the supermassive black hole’s cousins near the core of NGC 253 — but these stellar mass black holes were wide awake, snacking on their host stars, producing X-rays. These “ultraluminous X-ray sources” (ULXs) are randomly distributed and consist of a small black hole (that has formed after the collapse of a massive star) feeding off stellar material.

So, by peering deep into NGC 253 with X-ray observatories, an ecosystem of black hole science has been exposed and scientists hope to periodically check in on the snoozing supermassive monster at the core, hoping to see it start to feed once more.

Image: The Sculptor galaxy is seen in a new light, in this composite image from NASA’s Nuclear Spectroscopic Telescope Array (NuSTAR) and the European Southern Observatory in Chile. Image credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/JHU


Source: news.discovery

Why Humans Love Robots

Psychologists have been scratching their heads for years to try and fathom why humans are able to attach an emotional presence to mere machines. It partly boils down to vanity; we like our own reflection.

At an art fair recently, my friend Rose fell in love with a robot. The installation in question was a tall, dark mash of technological parts. It bore a loudspeaker for a head, its eyes formed out of the speaker cones. It beckoned us with arms built from skinny windscreen wipers. The abdomen was a slim podium that had a CD player attached to form the robot's chest. Rose has since christened the creation 'Schubert,' finding herself endeared to it by the way it appeared to interact with her, and how it seemed to fix her in its wide-eyed gaze.
NEWS: Intelligent Robots Will Overtake Humans by 2100

Her attraction to that robot, however superfluous, taps into an age-long relationship between humans and automatons. For centuries, we've been shaping technology into something that makes us feel something, infusing our creations with aesthetic qualities that build up their personality. The purpose and impact of this endeavor? That’s something that has tickled psychologists for years.

Stories of automatons have been pervasive since Grecian times, in mythologies that described armies of robot-like servants. Then came one ancient Greek engineer named Ctesibius who built water-powered clocks, decorated with little figurines in the shape of people, birds, and bells that seemed to move around unaided. In 1495, Leonardo da Vinci penned the plan for a mechanical knight, though he appears to have never actually built this moving giant. And in the 17th and 18th Centuries, the Japanese became renowned for their karakuri, courteous, exquisitely decorated dolls that were mechanized by a system of pulleys and weights to perform tricks independently, like serving tea, or writing letters for show.

That's merely a smattering, but it proves that robots, defined loosely as autonomous machines, are well steeped in history. "Hundreds of years ago, mechanical toys -- before the invention of the word ‘robot’ itself -- elicited the same emotion of excitement and wonder from the audience, as the modern robot," says Alexander Libin, a psychosocial scientist and scientific director of Simulation Education Research at the MedStar Health Research Institute.
ANALYSIS: Robots Learn to Reach, Touch Gently

And therein lies the divide. Today we build purely functional automatons, designed for military work, industrial service, or research tasks; and then there’s the murkier set we create, the social robots that we're still trying to figure out. They leave a trail of entertainment in their wake, but increasingly we use social bots to enrich other aspects of our lives. These are the robots we fit with all the trappings of humanity -- they tend to look more human, sound more like us, and behave like people do. Take C-3PO, the beloved, bumbling robot from the Star Wars films of yesteryear. Other creations are not human necessarily, but are built to be recognizable as animals, for instance -- like the cat designed as a pet companion, or an endearing dinosaur robot built to test people’s sense of empathy toward machines.

It's this "social robot" group that psychologists find intriguing, because through their interactive role with us, as entertainers, educators, assisters, and companions, these specimens provide a way of measuring human behavior. But why do like to see ourselves mirrored in the things that we invent?

That question has spawned a whole division of research called robopsychology, which Libin and his research partner and wife, Elena Libin, see as the study of compatibility between humans and artificial creatures.


Source: news.discovery

Xbox One: So That's Why 'Xbox' Sounds So Vague

 

The name “Xbox,” like “iPod,” has the wonderful power of not being too specific. Apple’s first device to bear that moniker didn’t do much more than play music, but the iPod touch is an all-purpose computer — and in the same way, the Xbox One that Microsoft unveiled Tuesday will do far more than play video games.

Don’t call it a game console. Instead, Microsoft pitches the Xbox One as an “all-in-one home entertainment system” that will let you and your TV “have a relationship.”

NEWS: Kinect Sensors Turn a House Into a Video Game

And in aiming to make this device — to go on sale later this year at an undisclosed date and price — a digital living-room hub, Microsoft has given itself a tough job.

It’s not a matter of hardware support: With an eight-core processor, Blu-ray drive, 500-gigabyte hard drive and 8 GB of memory, the One should have all of the power of a “real” computer — including the ability run more realistic games than today’s Xbox — without the usual software-maintenance issues.

With a souped-up Kinect video sensor included, the One can also go beyond the simple gestures the first version allowed to something a little closer to a Minority Report-style interface. And its voice recognition apparently surpasses what the Kinect does today; for instance, you should be able to wake it by saying “Xbox on.”

ANALYSIS: Videogame Uses Camera to Target Ads

(Having Kinect built in can enable easier Skype video chats too, which you can stage alongside TV or games in the same “snap” sidebar you see in Windows 8′s start-screen interface.)

The Xbox One’s own apps shouldn’t be a barrier either, considering that the existing model already plays Internet content from HBO Go, Netflix, Hulu Plus and YouTube, music apps like Last.fm, Rhapsody and Slacker, and sports channels like ESPN and MLB.TV.

But Microsoft also wants to present a smarter front end to the hundreds of TV channels  most of us watch today through a separate box. Instead of seeing the same old endless program grid, the One will provide personalized recommendations and allow you to control the TV and the DVR with voice commands or a remote-control app on your phone or tablet.

The idea is that you’d run one HDMI cable from your cable or satellite box to the One, then run another one from there to your TV. The One, in turn, would use the Kinect’s IR sensor to send commands to the cable or satellite box.

ANALYSIS: Laptop Uses Sound for Gesture Control

This part may sound familiar and should seem tricky: Google promised some of the same things when it launched Google TV in 2010. But that software couldn’t cope with the overwhelming diversity of proprietary TV hardware; at some point in my testing, I always had to resort to a cable box’s remote to finish a task.

Microsoft can’t add a tuner for cable or satellite TV to the Xbox One because no standard exists for third-party hardware to tune in those services–well, at least not in the United States.

(That, in turn, helps explain why Apple limited the Apple TV to playing Web media — and why I think the persistent “Apple will make a television” rumors are nonsense.)

Even the lesser task of just providing a better remote control for existing video gear still thwarts the makers of general-purpose gadgets.

Microsoft could ease its job by only supporting major cable and satellite operators, but it says it wants to “enable live TV through Xbox One in every way that it is delivered throughout the world.”

That’s a tall order. Meanwhile, many of you — especially those who have ditched cable or satellite TV — may already have something close to an all-in-one home entertainment system: the tablet or laptop on the coffee table.

Source: news.discovery

Making Babies After Death: Is It Ethical?

Is it ethical to use a dead man's sperm to father a child? Experts are calling for a consensus on policies surrounding this question, which currently vary widely across the country.

It has been possible for a few decades to obtain a man’s sperm after his death and use it to fertilize an egg. Today, requests for postmortem sperm retrieval (PMSR) are growing, yet the United States has no guidelines governing the retrieval of sperm from deceased men, said Dr. Larry Lipshultz, a urologist at Baylor College of Medicine in Texas.

In the absence of government regulations, medical institutions should come up with their own rules so they can handle the time-sensitive and ethically questionable procedures, Lipshultz argued in an editorial published June 5 in the journal Fertility and Sterility.

Requests for PMSR can come from the wife or parents of a young man who suddenly died in an accident before having a chance to leave a child, and requests can also come from living, terminally ill men who wish to preserve sperm to be used after death.

But the institutions trying to draft a protocol for these situations face a number of ethical concerns. For example, has the deceased consented to have his sperm used for reproduction after he’s gone? Could just anybody request to obtain his sperm? Is it in the best interest of the child to be brought into the world without having a father?

What everyone seems to agree on is that the man’s wishes should be clear. "The core principle is not to reproduce anyone without their permission," said Arthur Caplan,head of the division of medical ethics at NYU Langone Medical Center in New York. (He was not involved in the editorial published in Fertility and Sterility).

Some institutions follow this principle strictly, and require written, informed consent from the deceased before they will retrieve sperm cells. However, many of the requests come in cases in which a man died unexpectedly, without ever having thought about giving explicit consent.

In the absence of written consent, some institutions may still honor the request if there is evidence that sperm retrieval may have been the wish of the deceased. For example, if a couple had been trying to conceive or had talked about it with friends and family, it can imply consent, Lipshultz told LiveScience.

 

Source: news.discovery

England target semi-final berth

Match Facts

June 13, 2013, The Oval
Start time 1pm (1200 GMT) 

 

The Big Picture

England were too rigid, too slow and too one-dimensional at Edgbaston - probably why they thumped Australia by 48 runs. The familiar concerns over England's shortcomings were rolled out at lunch on Saturday, only to be wheeled away at the close. England have a knack for getting it right on the night, particularly in ODIs at home, and should they get the job done against Sri Lanka, they will be in the semi-finals.

The scaremongering will emerge again over England's batting - how will they survive Lasith Malinga's toe-crushers? How will they find a way to score from Rangana Herath, who put England in a spin last March? They've never seen Sachithra Senanayake before. Their blasters with the bat are no good against slow bowling. You can see it is quite easy to descend into debilitating nervousness about the England line up.

But England have their plans, England know their game and, more often than not, have been able to put in a performance with the bat. Anyone who left for the bar at Edgbaston after 40 overs of the first innings on Saturday would have been after a stiff measure to numb the pain of the previous 20 overs. By the interval, a response to England's total of 269 would have included pleasant surprise and bewilderment at how they got there after their middle order was so quickly shot down.

  

'We must rethink our strategies' - Mathews

England found a way. Ravi Bopara played a great hand and his performances at Trent Bridge and Edgbaston were just what he was picked for: a handy few late-order runs and a tricky spell of slippery overs. Bopara balances England quite nicely and looking at the wickets from the opening Champions Trophy matches, pace off the ball is a good weapon.

Sri Lanka needed more of it against New Zealand. Angelo Mathews admitted his selection was wrong in Cardiff. A second spinner would have forced New Zealand into doing more than drop-and-run and use the pace of the quicker men to nudge their way to the target. More of a threat then Tillakaratne Dilshan was needed. It was a bizarre oversight; especially considering New Zealand played two spinners.

They were left relying on Malinga and even his best ideally needs more than 139 to work with. Sri Lanka's dealing with the new balls - which haven't done as much as might have been expected - and more pertinently, reverse swing, could decide the match. 

View the original article here

These Dazzling 3D Chalk Drawings Will Blow Your Mind

No you’re not imagining things, you’re just experiencing a series of illusions of gigantic proportions.

If you hadn’t already guessed, we’re big fans of street art here at SBSG, but today we really wanted to crank things up a notch and what better way than bringing you some of the finest 3D chalk drawings from around the world?

Some are so realistic, it’s hard to differentiate between reality and art. You’ll find yourself doing a double take or worse, worrying about falling in. Created by different talented artists right around the world, here’s 19 of the very best to astound, entertain and leave you as equally perplexed as we are.

View the original source here

Dear Jony, The Future of Design Is More than Making Apple iOS Flat

Frankly, the reductionist view of design began with the dramatic Jobs vs. Ive framing and narrative around the Attack on Skeulandia: Steve Jobs, the liberal arts-y humanist, supposedly wanted the faux leather, felt, and wood-textured treatments of real-world objects applied to virtual ones. Jony Ive, the art-school modernist, supposedly didn’t want any of it.

Not only is this framing overly simplified, it’s also irrelevant to design discourse. It misses the key point that design is really about unlocking the possibilities that lie within multiple perspectives. That design is about solving a complex problem with multiple constraints. At their core, both Ive and Jobs understood this: Ive noted yesterday that design is “so much more than the way something looks,” and Jobs too has noted that design is about “how it works.”

Design, like many disciplines, is about a diversity of approaches as soft solutions rather than hard truths. It’s a spectrum, not an either-or decision about whether to skeu or not to skeu.

But our understanding of this spectrum is further complicated because both sides claim simplicity is on their side. The anti-Skeus say they are removing unwanted clutter (Ive himself noted that simplicity is about “much more than just the absence of clutter and ornamentation” and really about “bringing order to complexity”). Meanwhile, the pro-Skeus say they are restoring an emotional connection, and what could be more simple than that? (Jobs had always known this, so Apple strived for the emotional connection that good design can create.)

For my part, I have always believed that simplicity is about doing both: subtracting the obvious, and adding the meaningful. The question, of course, is what is meaningful? — and the answer indeed depends on the cultural context and constraints of the decision being made or product being rendered.

View the original article here

New Human Body Part Discovered

The newest addition to human anatomy is just 15 microns thick, but its discovery will make eye surgery safer and simpler. Harminder Dua, a professor at the University of Nottingham, recently found a new layer in the human cornea, and he's calling it (can you guess?) Dua's layer.

Dua's layer sits at the back of the cornea, which previously had only five known layers. Dua and his colleagues discovered the new body part by injecting air into the corneas of eyes that had been donated for research and using an electron microscope to scan each separated layer.

The researchers now believe that a tear in Dua's layer is the cause of corneal hydrops, a disorder that leads to fluid buildup in the cornea. According to Dua, knowledge of the new layer could dramatically improve outcomes for patients undergoing corneal grafts and transplants.

“This is a major discovery that will mean that ophthalmology textbooks will literally need to be re-written," Dua says. “From a clinical perspective, there are many diseases that affect the back of the cornea which clinicians across the world are already beginning to relate to the presence, absence or tear in this layer.”

The study appears in the journal Ophthalmology.

View the original article here

Priyanka Chopra's father dies

Around noon, a pall of gloom descended on Raj Classic, the building where Priyanka Chopra resides with her family.

News of her father, Dr Ashok Chopra's death had reached the neighbors and preparations for the funeral were being made.
While a stream of star visitors like Rakesh Roshan and Hrithik Roshan rushed to the hospital to offer condolences to the actress, the police came to the building to supervise the security arrangements.
                                                      
                                                                                              View the original article here