Valleys and Troughs

UPDATE: Norwegian mystery light show still unexplained.

Not all that long ago we posted about the mystery light spiral that has captured (some) global attention since it appeared inexplicably in the night sky.

A blue light first appeared from behind a mountain, and created a giant spiral in the sky within seconds. Perhaps even more baffling, a green-blue beam of light appeared to shoot from the center. The entire display remained in the sky for a good ten to twelve minutes--enough time for photographers across Norway to shoot hundreds of images and capture video.

At the time it was explained away by some news agencies as a failed Russian missile test, but the Russians, who we're sure are perfectly trustworthy in situations such as these, have denied conducting any such tests. And while that's still the most likely scenario according to most opinions held by the sorts of people who sit around trying to figure these things out, other possibilities include a falling meteor or perhaps the first sign of the apocalypse. Either way, we'll continue to monitor the situation with as much attention as we can spare. Which, believe it or not, is not as much as you might think. Check out the incredibly poor-quality yet still marginally-disturbing video below for an idea of what the beginning of the end of the world will look like, when filmed with a handheld digital camera.

via popsci

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World needs to start worrying about Octopuses now, too.

We always keep a wary eye on the animal kingdom, especially that enormous portion of it that dwells in the murky depths of the sea. If there is a place on earth from which our doom will come, we feel pretty confident that it'll be the bottom of the ocean. Especially when Octopuses begin to use tools:

Humans living on the Indonesian coast frequently discard halved coconut shells in the ocean, and it turns out that their eight-legged neighbors have been making use of them. Researchers have filmed veined octopi, Amphioctopus marginatus, moving the shell halves by placing their bodies inside the hollowed-out portion, draping their legs over the edges, and bringing the shells along for the ride. When the coconut-carrying octopus feels threatened, it will pull the half shell over its body (or sometimes pulls two halves of a whole coconut over itself), and wait inside their armored home until the threat passes.

This is the first time that researchers have observed tool-use in an invertebrate species, or so the internets tell us, and we're inclined to believe them. This may seem like a trivial development, but bear in mind that it wasn't so long ago on the evolutionary timeline that we ourselves were hitting each other over the heads with rocks and probably using coconut-halves for body armor. Coupled with dolphins evolving opposable thumbs, we feel safe in saying that it is never too early to panic.

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via io9

Mystery Norway spiral really failed Russian missile test, if you're inclined to believe that sort of thing.

The explaining-away of inexplicable phenomena with euphemistic devices such as weather balloons or in this case a failed Russian Bulava missile launch entered into the realm of tired cliché long ago. Still, we have a pretty hard time swallowing the news that the above enormous, glowing spiral that appeared last night in the sky above Norway (justifiably panicking onlookers who believed it was at the very least a UFO and quite possibly a sign of the apocalypse) was simply the result of said failed Russian missile test. From the NYTimes:

"It has been established ... that the missile's first two stages worked as normal, but there was a technical malfunction at the next, third, stage of the trajectory," a Defense Ministry spokesman said.
Norwegian experts reported sighting of phenomena in the atmosphere near the White Sea, where earlier Bulava rockets were fired, the Kommersant and Vedomosti newspapers reported.

We are hard-pressed to think of a person whose excuse we're less likely to believe in this situation than a Russian Defense Ministry spokesman. Those guys have been lying to us since we invented a way to ask them what the hell was going on over there. And it's not as though news of Russia blasting nuclear-deterrent missiles into the stratosphere is entirely encouraging either. But for us it's about, as always, the possibilities. It's hard to get a sense of the face-melting awe that would accompany stepping into the street and actually seeing something like this, and we often feel that if we did, our lives would never be the same. We leave you to sift through the story as it develops, but for our part we will be keeping an anxious eye on the horizon, as always.

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photo via Discovery

Glowing prairie voles will save marriage, finally.

It's no secret that the institution of marriage is under threat in America, of all places, beset on all sides by the evils of boredom and irrelevancy and idiocy and you get the idea. And let's not forget the gays, right? Right? Just ask Hi Caliber. Anyhow, researchers at Emory University have taken some pretty bold steps toward understanding the secrets of monogamy, and it involves infusing the DNA of prairie voles with the gene that allows jellyfish to glow. Naturally. The voles were chosen because behavior-wise, they are not so dissimilar to us. They mate for life, share child-rearing duties, and even "cuddle," which is fantastic. And so:

The scientists are studying the genetic of monogamy, and voles serve as a model of human behaviors like cheating or mate competition. In this experiment, they've linked the glowing gene to a gene suspected to control their impulse to cheat on their mate. If you glow, you're not going to stray. But if you can't be seen in the dark, then the Ms. Vole might have reason to worry.

Well the possibilities here seem pretty encouraging. We've long awaited the arrival of elective genetic modification (we have yet to be presented with a compelling argument as to why this would not be the greatest thing ever. Ever wanted to dunk? Exactly). So despite the fact that scientists are hesitant to fully embrace all the implications of this research - they always are, aren't they - we feel confident that this is at least a step in the right direction, a direction in which we will all look like weird blue Avatar mutants but not cheat on each other ever again. Sounds good to us.

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[via popsci]

Elf takes matters into his own hands. Santa wins.

Nothing brings out the holiday spirit quite like the old fake-dynamite-in-the-Christmas-village routine, we're sure you'll agree. The exceedingly-stable looking fellow above is 45-year-old William C. Caldwell III (which is a great name, the kind of name you'd think one could parlay into some measure of success or at the very least mediocrity in life), who has been arrested at a mall in suburban Atlanta for allegedly dressing as an elf and threatening to blow Santa right out of the holiday equation.

Police say Caldwell got in line Wednesday evening to have his picture taken with Santa Claus. Police say when Caldwell reached the front of the line, he told Santa he had dynamite in his bag. Santa called mall security and Caldwell was arrested.

Sadly the hollow-eyed lunacy evident in the picture above would have allowed this guy to blend in pretty well with the sorts of people one would be likely to find hanging around a mall Christmas village. What really impresses us about this story though is that Santa is the one who called the police, after being threatened with a bagful of dynamite. Is there anything the old man doesn't do? Just another day at the office, really.

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via YahooNews

Update: Peruvians not butchering each other for cosmetics after all.

Not too long ago we posted a story concerning Peruvian police arresting gang members for allegedly luring peasant farmers into the jungle to murder them and sell the rendered fat from their bodies to cosmetics companies, which crime we probably don't need to say would have constituted a big-time trough. Well, turns out the farmers can rest easy, at least for the time being. It was all a hoax:

Initial doubts were compounded when police from the region where the crimes were alleged to have taken place said they knew nothing about a gang of murderers killing people for their fat.

We are as glad as just about anybody that this story turned out to be false, though the Peruvian peasant farmers may hold a slight edge on us in the general-gratitude department, the outcome of this story affecting them a bit more significantly. One theory, which we feel makes a pretty decent amount of sense, is that the local police concocted the story to conveniently explain away unsolved cases, and we sort of have to admire their inventiveness. I mean, murdering people for their body fat? That takes some brainstorming.
Anyway there are few things better than taking something that started out more than a little grim and reducing it to a farce, even if it's still in poor taste. The world, we suppose, is a slightly better place than we had previously thought. Slightly.

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via BBC

Morning Marginalia.

That is a Glass Frog, native to Venezuela, distinguished by the near-transparency of its abdominal skin. This allows the gastrointestinal organs to be seen pretty clearly, as evidenced above. Normally we'd find this kind of thing disturbing on general principle, but for some reason this just seems somehow... right. There should be see-through frogs. Cause why not, right?

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via funzu

Lightning will destroy us all.

Resolving a decade-old question as to the origin of powerful gamma rays found originating on earth (instead of in space, where they turn people into superheroes), researchers using NASA's Fermi Gamma Ray Telescope have discovered that run-of-the-mill lightning is responsible for said radiation:

Most of the gamma rays observed by Fermi and other telescopes come from the destruction of supermassive stars and other cataclysmic events far beyond the galaxy

"Probably the last place we ever expected to see gamma rays was from Earth or Earth's atmosphere," Gerald Fishman, an astrophysicist at NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Ala., told Discovery News.

The article goes on to say - and this is the truly disturbing part - that at least one of their observations revealed "an unmistakable pattern of positrons - the antimatter counterpart of electrons." From what we understand, and according to very brief research we have just now conducted, the mixture of matter and antimatter leads to the annihilation of both. We realize that lightning has been happening pretty much on and off for the duration of the earth's existence to no extraordinarily ill effect, and that this should ease public fears over its potential to destroy the fabric of our world, but then that's what lightning would want you to think, isn't it? We, at the very least, will be sleeping with one eye open.

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via DiscoveryNews

Morning Marginalia.

Giant Lungless worm found... on land:

From National Geographic, the most disturbing fauna-related news we've come across since the advent of snakehead fish (of which hideous ground-crawling aberrations if you are not aware we urge you to become so - forewarned is forearmed), a new species of "giant worm" that can mean us no goodwill:

A new amphibian species can survive on land with no nostrils, lungs, or legs, say researchers who discovered the bizarre beast.
The creature, found in Guyana, is part of the wormlike group of amphibians known as caecilians. Only one other caecilian species is known to live without lungs.

How is it that unfailingly in situations like these when researchers are asked for an explanation they inevitably say (as they do here): "...there are no real answers." Their job is to find answers. That is the whole thing they do. If we see a five-inch long ghostly worm flopping towards us, it won't take us long to come up with an answer that involves the top of said worm meeting the business end of a shoe. We're not going to get caught with our pants around our ankles on this one.

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Newest Hollywood fad: writing comics?

From io9, an article about the latest celebrity trend assaulting our peace of mind: writing for comics. We happen to be comics fans, and occasionally aspire to write some ourselves - one of these days, some afternoon perhaps, when it is warm but not too warm, bright but not oppressively so - and we are inclined to appreciate a person's attempt to do so, even if that person is only being given such an opportunity because he or she is a celebrity. Or, failing that, Tyrese Gibson.

One celebrity book just out this summer is Tyrese Gibson's Mayhem, and it exemplifies one of the darker aspects of this trend. Mayhem is a bit of a generic comic, following a masked hero who battles the gangs and drug dealers of Los Angeles, but that hasn't stopped Gibson from aggressively hawking his book across the Internet and at this past summer's Comic Con. Gibson, who is credited as one of three writers on Mayhem, tends to sell the book on the strength his recommendation as a famous person rather than its plot. And his marketing tactics — which has included calling people who criticizing his book "haters" — has induced more than a little eye-rolling and prompted Gibson's own marketing director to quit.

That's right. Tyrese Gibson, of 2 Fast 2 Furious renown, is chief among a growing list of celebrities who will be famous for writing a comic book long before we will. We'd feel more aggrieved, but then we weren't in Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen, were we?

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