Friday Links
For your reading pleasure.Leading off, we have a link from David Gloier to one of the strangest stories I've ever read. It seems that Mick Jagger once tried to lengthen his, um, heartbreaker, by having it stung by bees:
The Rolling Stones frontman, whose "small penis" was mocked by a former lover, covered his manhood in bees in the hope that their stings would cause it to swell.
Film director Julien Temple, revealed how the ageing rocker attempted to use the ancient Amazonian marriage ritual while filming scenes for 1982 movie 'Fitzcarraldo'.
Julien, 53, told Radio 4's 'Film Programme,' "It involved putting bamboo over the male member and filling it with stinger bees so the member attained the size of the bamboo.
Actually, the reason that the bees were so angry was that Jagger had album covers of Paul McCartney's solo career drawn on his mother's little helper.
Read the full story here.
Jeff McCormick (among others) sent me a link to an article about Blizzard and what they did for a ten-year-old boy named Ezra Chatterton who has brain cancer. It's a touching story and a good deed done by Blizzard, and you can read about it here.
There's a long and interesting profile of Kerry Wood in the New York Times today. Wood pitched one of the most dominating games in baseball history as a twenty-year old, but his career has been overwhelmed by serious injuries. If you're a baseball fan (or used to be), it's an excellent read, and it's here.
From Bethanne Larson, a link to a story about sharks and virgin birth. Here's an excerpt:
Female sharks can fertilize their own eggs and give birth without sperm from males, according to a new study of the asexual reproduction of a hammerhead in a U.S. zoo.
Asexual reproduction is common in some insect species, rarer in reptiles and fish, and has never been documented in mammals. The list of animals documented as capable of the feat has grown along with the numbers being raised in captivity -- but until now, sharks were not considered a likely candidate.
Read it all here.
From Sirius, a link to an article about an ancient Chinese tomb--with a European inside. Here's an excerpt:
Human remains found in a 1,400-year-old Chinese tomb belonged to a man of European origin, DNA evidence shows.
...The burial style and multicolor reliefs found in the tomb are characteristic of Central Asia at the time, experts say.
The people pictured in the reliefs, however, have European traits, such as straight noses and deep-set eyes.
Confirmed by mitochondrial DNA analysis, in case you're wondering, and you can read about it here.
A second link from Sirius, this one to a story about how music is rooted in human speech. It's a fascinating article, and here's an excerpt:
The use of 12 tone intervals in the music of many human cultures is rooted in the physics of how our vocal anatomy produces speech, according to researchers at the Duke University Center for Cognitive Neuroscience.
...when the sounds of speech are looked at with a spectrum analyzer, the relationships between the various frequencies that a speaker uses to make vowel sounds correspond neatly with the relationships between notes of the 12-tone chromatic scale of music, Purves said.
Read the full article here.
Lastly, Todd Ballenger (and others) sent me a link to an article about Microsoft's new "surface" computing initiative. It looks like a tabletop arcade game with a touch screen, essentially, but the functionality and potential are remarkable. See a Wired report (with video) here.
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