Mirabilis.ca

From the BBC: Charles Darwin’s evolution experiment on Ascension isle.

Two hundred years ago, Ascension Island was a barren volcanic edifice.

Today, its peaks are covered by lush tropical cloud forest.

What happened in the interim is the amazing story of how the architect of evolution, Kew Gardens and the Royal Navy conspired to build a fully functioning, but totally artificial ecosystem. [continue]

From the Ottawa Citizen: Words for ‘canoe’ point to long-lost family ties.

A new book by leading linguists has bolstered a controversial theory that the language of Canada’s Dene Nation is rooted in an ancient Asian tongue spoken today by only a few hundred people in Western Siberia.

The landmark discovery, initially proposed two years ago by U.S. researcher Edward Vajda, represents the only known link between any Old World language and the hundreds of speech systems among First Nations in the Western Hemisphere.

The collection of articles by Vajda and other experts details a multitude of clear connections — nouns, verbs and key grammatical structures — between the language spoken by the Ket people of Russia’s Yenisei River region and dozens of languages used by North American aboriginal groups. [continue]

A couple of years ago I posted that the Associated Press has gone mad. That was what most bloggers concluded when the Associated Press announced that they would charge bloggers for quoting any text from an AP article – even a few words.

Anyway, this is grand: the other day the Associated Press quoted text from the woot! blog, and woot! responded this way:

So, The AP, here we are. Just to be fair about this, we’ve used your very own pricing scheme to calculate how much you owe us. By looking through the link above, and comparing your post with our original letter, we’ve figured you owe us roughly $17.50 for the content you borrowed from our blog post, which, by the way, we worked very very hard to create. [continue]

Perfect. Applause to you, Woot!

Tags: Associated Press

From William Zinsser’s column at the American Scholar: At Ease in the Stone Age.

I think of Norman Lewis as the best travel writer of our times, and in 1995, when a travel magazine asked me to go to England to interview him, I didn’t lose any time getting on the plane. Lewis was then 87 and had just come home from a journey through three of the most hostile regions of Indonesia that concluded with a stay in a Stone Age village in the mountains of New Guinea. I wanted to catch him before he took off again. [continue]

From Discover Magazine: New Nicaraguan sign language shows how language affects thought.

In the 1970s, a group of deaf Nicaraguan schoolchildren invented a new language. The kids were the first to enrol in Nicaragua’s new wave of special education schools. At first, they struggled with the schools’ focus on Spanish and lip-reading, but they found companionship in each other. It was the first time that deaf people from all over the country could gather in large numbers and through their interactions – in the schoolyard and the bus – Nicaraguan Sign Language (NSL) spontaneously came into being.

NSL is not a direct translation of Spanish – it is a language in its own right, complete with its own grammar and vocabulary. Its child inventors created it naturally by combining and adding to gestures that they had used at home. Gradually, the language became more regular, more complex and faster. Ever since, NSL has been a goldmine for scientists, providing an unparalleled opportunity to study the emergence of a new language. And in a new study led by Jennie Pyers from Wellesley College, it even tells us how language shapes our thought.

By studying children who learned NSL at various stages of its development, Pyers has shown that the vocabulary they pick up affects the way they think. Specifically, those who learned NSL before it developed specific gestures for left and right perform more poorly on a spatial awareness test than children who grew up knowing how to sign those terms.[continue]

Today’s treasure is from the Guardian: The science of cake.

(If science in school had been about cake, I would have been a very good student indeed!)

Tags: baking, cake

Study finds chocolate has anti-depressant qualities, says abc.net.au. Well of course it does, Captain Obvious. I can’t believe anybody needs a study to find that out.

In other news, staying up all night makes you tired.

From the Ottawa Citizen: Forgotten hero saved day for Canada in 1813.

As Canada prepares to mark the bicentennial of the War of 1812, a historian is urging long-overdue recognition for a virtually unknown hero whose stunning exploits during the pivotal Battle of Stoney Creek, he says, should rank Sgt. Alexander Fraser alongside Isaac Brock and Laura Secord as a saviour of the nation.

James Elliott, an author and journalist from Hamilton, recently published the most comprehensive account so far of the June 1813 battle on the Niagara Peninsula that unexpectedly thwarted the American army’s advance through Upper Canada.

And the crucial moment in Canada’s successful defence, he argues, was a daring charge through the darkness on June 6 — 197 years ago this Sunday — by the bayonet-wielding Fraser. [continue]

Tags: Alexander Fraser

(Found here at the Hermeneutic of Continuity.)

From the Beeb: Bletchley Park WWII archive to go online.

Millions of documents stored at the World War II code-breaking centre, Bletchley Park, are set to be digitised and made available online.[continue]

From the Guardian: Gut instinct: the miracle of the parasitic hookworm.

When Jasper Lawrence heard of a radical cure for his allergies, he decided to give it a go: he went to Africa and infected himself with a blood-sucking parasite. Now he’s cured, and he believes hookworm can help people with asthma, diabetes and MS. Only one problem – he’s on the run from the law.[continue]

Tags: allergies, asthma

From the Telegraph: Hilarious web addresses revealed in new book.

The compendium of ill thought out web addresses, largely from companies who naively slurred their innocent-sounding names into a single word without noticing the resulting double entendres, lists more than 150 slurls, or slur URLs.

One example of what can go wrong when choosing web addresses is Big Al’s bowling alley in Vancouver, which presumably did not notice when naming its site that I love Big Al’s with spaces removed could equally be read as I love bi gals.

Also included in the list is the Mole Station Nursery, a business in Australia selling gardening goods which adopted the web name molestationnursery before changing it to molerivernursery.

Andy Geldman, author of Slurls: They Called Their Website What? said: In a world without spaces we mentally insert out own. And you might not stick yours where I stick mine.

Among the 150 web pages featuring in the book are [continue]

Duncan McNicholl works with Engineers Without Borders Canada in Malawi. He’s posted a remarkable set of photos on his blog, Water Wellness: Perspectives of Poverty.

We’ve all seen it: the photo of a teary-eyed African child, dressed in rags, smothered in flies, with a look of desperation that the caption all too readily points out. Some organization has made a poster that tells you about the realities of poverty, what they are doing about it, and how your donation will change things.

I reacted very strongly to these kinds of photos when I returned from Africa in 2008. I compared these photos to my own memories of Malawian friends and felt lied to. How had these photos failed so spectacularly to capture the intelligence, the laughter, the resilience, and the capabilities of so many incredible people? [continue, see photos]

Tags: Africa, photography, poverty

For all you mac fans and potential converts — here, enjoy this. From the Guardian: ‘Had it crashed? Or was it being sarcastic?’ Charlie Brooker on the iPad.

Tags: iPad

Slate recounts this remarkable story: Jesus, Jesus, Jesus.

In the late 1950s, psychologist Milton Rokeach was gripped by an eccentric plan. He gathered three psychiatric patients, each with the delusion that they were Jesus Christ, to live together for two years in Ypsilanti State Hospital to see if their beliefs would change. The early meetings were stormy. You oughta worship me, I’ll tell you that! one of the Christs yelled. I will not worship you! You’re a creature! You better live your own life and wake up to the facts! another snapped back. No two men are Jesus Christs. … I am the Good Lord! the third interjected, barely concealing his anger. [continue]

So, you know those body scanner machines at airports? Maybe they’re not so safe after all. From npr.org: Scientists Question Safety Of New Airport Scanners.

Many people will approach this as, ‘Oh, it must be safe, the government has thought about this and I’ll just submit to it,’ says David Agard, a biochemist and biophysicist at the University of California, San Francisco. But there really is no threshold of low dose being OK. Any dose of X-rays produces some potential risk.

Agard and several of his UCSF colleagues recently wrote a letter to John Holdren the president’s science adviser, asking for a more thorough look at the risks of exposing all those airline passengers to X-rays. The other signers are John Sedat, a molecular biologist and the group’s leader; Marc Shuman, a cancer specialist; and Robert Stroud, a biochemist and biophysicist.

Ionizing radiation such as the X-rays used in these scanners have the potential to induce chromosome damage, and that can lead to cancer, Agard says.

The San Francisco group thinks both the machine’s manufacturer, Rapiscan, and government officials have miscalculated the dose that the X-ray scanners deliver to the skin — where nearly all the radiation is concentrated. [continue]

From the Calgary Herald: Earliest hockey played in British Isles, not Canada.

Two hockey-history researchers from Sweden have unearthed the first seemingly unassailable evidence that Canada’s national winter sport — the subject of a long-running debate over its true birthplace — originated not in Nova Scotia or the Northwest Territories in the early 1800s, but in the British Isles decades earlier. [continue]

Tags: hockey

Gentle readers, go watch this. Crazy delightful fun.

From Spiegel Online: Germany’s First Drinking Room for Alcoholics.

In this bar, some of the costs are covered by taxpayer money from the city treasury. The Sofa is Germany’s first drinking room, a sort of crash smoking room for alcoholics. Most of the people who frequent the place are serious alcoholics and are allowed to bring their own cheap beer and sangria. The bar itself only serves soft drinks and strong coffee. (…)

So far the Kiel experiment has worked. Unemployed alcoholics who are known to the authorities, and who had previously come into conflict with citizens during their drinking binges in the city’s downtown area, have gradually moved to the more welcoming Sofa. It’s an absolute win-win situation, says Christoph Schneider of the Kiel housing office, noting that it makes it much easier to reach these people. [continue]

From nature.com: Roman ingots to shield particle detector.

Around four tonnes of ancient Roman lead was yesterday transferred from a museum on the Italian island of Sardinia to the country’s national particle physics laboratory at Gran Sasso on the mainland. Once destined to become water pipes, coins or ammunition for Roman soldiers’ slingshots, the metal will instead form part of a cutting-edge experiment to nail down the mass of neutrinos. [continue]

From the BBC: Last supper ‘has been super-sized’, say obesity experts.

The food portions depicted in paintings of the Last Supper have grown larger – in line with our own super-sizing of meals, say obesity experts.

The Cornell University team studied 52 of the most famous paintings of the Biblical scene over the millennium and scrutinised the size of the feast.

They found the main courses, bread and plates put before Jesus and his disciples have progressively grown by up to two-thirds.

This, they say, is art imitating life. [continue]

Pour me a glass of wine, darling, will you? It’s good for me. And besides, the BBC says that women who drink wine are less likely to gain weight.

It’s a happy news day.

Tags: wine

From The Telegraph: Ostrich egg patterns oldest form of art and communication.

Engraved patterns on the side of ostrich eggs dating back to the Stone Age could be the oldest form of written communication known to man, claims a new study.

The etchings, thought to be 60,000 years old, were used to mark the eggs which had been turned into water flasks by hunter gatherers in Africa.

It was so early it was before humans – or homo sapiens – left Africa to populate the rest of the world.

The four different patterns and markings are repeated and believed to convey ownership or purpose and to differentiate the eggs from each other. [continue, see photo]

From the BBC: Lost Jewish tribe ‘found in Zimbabwe’.

In many ways, the Lemba tribe of Zimbabwe and South Africa are just like their neighbours.

But in other ways their customs are remarkably similar to Jewish ones.

They do not eat pork, they practise male circumcision, they ritually slaughter their animals, some of their men wear skull caps and they put the Star of David on their gravestones.

Their oral traditions claim that their ancestors were Jews who fled the Holy Land about 2,500 years ago.

It may sound like another myth of a lost tribe of Israel, but British scientists have carried out DNA tests which confirm their Semitic origin. [continue]

From Science Daily: Water Practically Flies Off ‘Near Perfect’ Hydrophobic Surface That Refuses to Get Wet.

Engineering researchers have crafted a flat surface that refuses to get wet. Water droplets skitter across it like ball bearings tossed on ice.

Cool, hmm? The design is inspired by spiders. Spiders!

Spiders use their water-repelling hairs to stay dry or avoid drowning, with water spiders capturing air bubbles and toting them underwater to breathe. Potential applications for UF’s ultra-water-repellent surfaces are many, Sigmund said. When water scampers off the surface, it picks up and carries dirt with it, in effect making the surface self-cleaning. As such, it is ideal for some food packaging, or windows, or solar cells that must stay clean to gather sunlight, he said. Boat designers might coat hulls with it, making boats faster and more efficient.

Sigmund said he began working on the project about five years ago after picking up on the work of a colleague. Sigmund was experimenting with microscopic fibers when he turned to spiders, noted by biologists for at least a century for their water-repelling hairs. [continue]