Friday Links!
It's the end of your productivity for today. Begin clicking and enjoy your two-and-a-half day weekend.From Jacob Flanagan, a link to a story about a bear--who served in WWII. He was known as the Soldier Bear, and it's a crazy, crazy story. Here's an excerpt:
The soldiers who were stationed with him say that he was easy to get along with.
"He was just like a dog - nobody was scared of him," said Polish veteran Augustyn Karolewski, who still lives near the site of the camp.
"He liked a cigarette, he liked a bottle of beer - he drank a bottle of beer like any man."
From Mike Kolar, my favorite link this week: dramatic lemur.
From Edwin Garcia, the weekly hat trick. First, a link to the 19 best ads, and they're all ingenious. Also, a link to The FAIL Blog, and if you take a look, be sure to find the picture of the gull, which is one of the funniest pictures I've seen in a long time. Then there's a link to a story about a jack-up barge, which is a ship with six legs. Here's an excerpt:
Extending to a length of 48m from the bottom of the ship, and penetrating up to 5m into the sea bed, the "legs" of these ships provide a stable "ground" in a place where there is only roiling water.
Next, Wilson Leong sent in a link to a video of the Japanese giant hornet, a killing machine that can kill a thousand honeybees an hour. What's interesting, though, is that certain kinds of honeybees have an amazing defense.
From Sirius, a link to a remarkable article about a transplant patient who has taken on the immune system of her donor. It's an incredible story, and here's an excerpt:
Demi-Lee Brennan had a liver transplant after she suffered liver failure. Nine months later, doctors at Sydney's Westmead Children's Hospital were amazed to find the teenager's blood group had changed to the donor's blood type.
Further tests revealed the stem cells from the donor liver had penetrated her bone marrow.
Dr Michael Stormon says he and his colleagues were even more surprised when they found the girl's immune system had almost totally been replaced by that of the donor, meaning she no longer had to take anti-rejection drugs.
It's apparently the first time this has ever happened, and you can read about it here.
Also from Sirius, a link to a story about how blind fish see. Blind cavefish have light-sensitive organs in their brains that can detect light.
And Sirius for the hat trick, with a link to a timeline of Lego history. Legos are 50 years old this week, and I can't imagine living in a world without them.
From Geoff Engelstein, a link to a story about scientists building an entire microbial chromosome. Here's an excerpt:
Venter's team started by determining the precise order of all 580,076 base pairs, or "letters" of DNA code, inside one of the simplest microbes known to science: Mycoplasma genitalium, a bacterium that can infect the human genital tract. The scientists bought small pieces of DNA, then perfected painstaking methods to stitch them together inside bacteria and yeast cells in exactly the right order.
The final product -- 582,970 base pairs in all -- is a near-exact replica of M. genitalium's genome, with a few intentional differences. The team omitted a DNA snippet that allows the microbe to infect other cells, for example, and added extra DNA as "watermarks" to differentiate their construct from the naturally occurring variety.
From Jesse Leimkuehler, a link to a hi-res image of Victoria crater. It takes a while to download, but it's one of the most spectacular images I've ever seen. Also from Jesse, a link to a story about the tools astronauts use in outer space.
From Daniel Quock, a link to Peyton Manning's infamous "public service announcement" when he hosted Saturday Night Live. This is borderline NSFW, but it's really, really funny.
Robert sent me a link to some spectacular pictures of a great white shark attacking seals. I actually linked to this a few months ago, but they're so incredible that I'm doing it again.
Here's a story about hummingbirds who sing with their tail feathers, and here's an excerpt:
By selectively removing feathers, researchers have shown that a species of hummingbird produces loud chirps non-vocally by rapidly fluttering its tail.
Though ornithologists have suspected that a diverse array of birds make mechanicals sounds called 'sonations', this is the first time the mechanism has been proven.
Similar to a reed in a saxophone, the tail-feathers of male Anna's hummingbirds (Calypte anna) can be made to vibrate to produce a loud chirping sound when courting females. (Right click and download a wav file of the sound here.)
I may have listed this story last, but believe me, it's one of the most interesting links of the week.
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