>Polish Yeti caught on film

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Yeti experts are heading to Poland after a local man filmed a “monstrous, hairy creature” while on holiday in the Tatra mountains.

There have been rumours of a Polish Yeti in the area for centuries but this is the first time one of the strange creatures has been captured on film.

Piotr Kowalski, 27, from Warsaw was on a walking holiday in the Tatra mountains in Poland when he saw a mountain goat on one of the slopes. As he started filming, his attention was suddenly grabbed by the Yeti creature emerging from behind some rocks.

“I saw this huge ape-like form hiding behind the rocks. When I saw it it was like being struck by a thunderbolt,” he told the daily Superexpress.

“Coming from Warsaw, I never really believed the local stories of a wild mountain ape-man roaming the slopes. But, now I do.”

The film has been handed over for examination to the Nautilus Foundation, which deals with unexplained phenomena.

“The film clearly shows ‘something’ that moves on two legs and is bigger than a normal man,” says Foundation President Robert Bernatowicz.

“But because the camera shakes so much it is difficult to say what it is exactly. We need to go to the site and see what traces, if any, were left.”

via Polish Yeti caught on film – Around the World – Austrian Times.

Is the “Austrian Times” reliable? Another story on the site says “Police are investigating claims an alien peed on a German man’s sun lounger while being chased by German fighter planes.”

This Yeti story is also on other sites:  examiner | shortnews | inquisitr | romainiantimes (same owner as the “Austrian times”?) The Sun also has this same story:

Here is the video. Moves like a human in a costume. That’s my first impression. Perhaps time will tell.

What I want to know is… why is this Yeti wearing shorts and a backpack?

>Conjoined rattlesnakes OK after separation surgery

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A veterinarian at the Arizona-Sonora Desert Museum was successfully able to separate a pair of conjoined rattlesnakes, an official said Friday.

“They both appear to be stable,” Craig Ivanyi, the museum’s associate executive director for living collections, said of the western diamondbacks, who were born connected at the neck. “We continue to be optimistic.”

The rattlers were found two weeks ago at a north side construction site and brought to the museum.

Experts determined the snakes needed to be separated in order to survive. Keeping them attached, Ivanyi said, would have caused one of the two to become highly stressed due to the other becoming dominant.

If left in the wild, Ivanyi said, the snakes would likely have not been able to feed properly and would have been picked off by predators.

The surgery was performed Thursday by Dr. Jim Jarchow, a veterinarian the museum consults with on issues related to reptiles and amphibians, Ivanyi said.

via Conjoined rattlesnakes OK after separation surgery | www.azstarnet.com ®.

>Standing broom in Prattville sweeps in paranormal researchers and the curious

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A broom mysteriously stands on its own at what will be the Vintage Blu consignment shop when it opens on Main Street in Prattville, Ala., Tuesday, August 25, 2009, as owner Christy Burdett makes a call to find out some of the history of the building. The phenomenon has been studied by paranormal researchers.

via Standing broom in Prattville sweeps in paranormal researchers and the curious – Breaking News from the Press-Register – al.com.

This is not mysterious. My broom will do this. You just have to have the right angle and bristles. Here are a few more pictures (okay, the first two may be the same broom.) Many different brooms will work. I first saw this at the”Trees of Mystery, Mystery Spot”  when I was a kid, which I think is where the yellow broom below was photographed.

>Lightning helps create artificial blood vessels

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Regrowing skin, bones and even organs might seem like something out of a mad scientist’s lab, but the reality isn’t so crazy. Jorge Ribas finds out how tissue engineering could help the sick and injured. … –discovery

Lightning bolts could help create artificial organs, according to new research by scientists at Texas A&M University.

An electrically charged block of plastic gives way to a series of tunnel-carving lightning bolts when a nail is driven into it. Adding human blood vessel cells to the tunnels could create a template upon which an artificial organ could grow.

“One of the biggest problems in tissue engineering is how to create a vascular network to feed the growing tissue,” said Arul Jayaraman, a professor at Texas A&M who, along with his colleague Victor Ugaz, co-authored the study that appears in the journal Advanced Materials. “The structure of these networks closely resembles the human vasculature.”

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The artificial organs begin as clear blocks of biodegradable plastic about the size of an inch-thick stack of Post-It notes. An electron beam fills the block with electricity, then the scientists drive nails into either end of the plastic block.

With each strike of the hammer, lightning streaks through the block and exits through the nail, leaving tiny tunnels in its wake. “It’s pretty spectacular,” said Jayaraman. “It looks just like lightning bolts.”

… “If you took kidneys from five different people and sliced them open, you would not see the exact same vascular pattern, at the microscopic level,” said Hunziker, “even though the overall structure would be the same.”

Creating a block of what resembles frozen lightning is only a first step to growing new organs.

via Lightning helps create artificial blood vessels – Discovery.com- msnbc.com.

>Milk drinking started around 7,500 years ago in central Europe

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The ability to digest the milk sugar lactose first evolved in dairy farming communities in central Europe, not in more northern groups as was previously thought, finds a new study led by UCL (University College London) scientists published in the journal PLoS Computational Biology. The genetic change that enabled early Europeans to drink milk without getting sick has been mapped to dairying farmers who lived around 7,500 years ago in a region between the central Balkans and central Europe. Previously, it was thought that natural selection favoured milk drinkers only in more northern regions because of their greater need for vitamin D in their diet. People living in most parts of the world make vitamin D when sunlight hits the skin, but in northern latitudes there isn’t enough sunlight to do this for most of the year.

In the collaborative study, the team used a computer simulation model to explore the spread of lactase persistence, dairy farming, other food gathering practices and genes in Europe. The model integrated genetic and archaeological data using newly developed statistical approaches.

Professor Mark Thomas, UCL Genetics, Evolution and Environment, says: “Most adults worldwide do not produce the enzyme lactase and so are unable to digest the milk sugar lactose. However, most Europeans continue to produce lactase throughout their life, a characteristic known as lactase persistence. In Europe, a single genetic change (13,910*T) is strongly associated with lactase persistence and appears to have given people with it a big survival advantage. Since adult consumption of fresh milk was only possible after the domestication of animals, it is likely that lactase persistence co-evolved with the cultural practice of dairying, although it was not known when it first arose in Europe or what factors drove its rapid spread.

via Milk drinking started around 7,500 years ago in central Europe.

>’Crystal Palace Puma’ is a panther, big cat expert says

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A big cat researcher claims to have solved the mystery of the “Palace Puma”.

Neil Arnold said a large wild cat spotted by a woman in a woods in Crystal Palace two weeks ago is in fact a black leopard or panther.

The author of Mystery Animals of the British Isles said decades of sightings across southeast London are a result of a number of large exotic cats being released into the wild by their owners in 1976, when it was deemed necessary to buy expensive licences to keep them.

Mr Arnold said sightings of big cats such as that by Helen Barrett in woodland at Fox Hill on Saturday, August 8, were of the offspring of these “pets”.

In last week’s Streatham Guardian Mrs Barrett described how she had seen a 5ft puma or panther on a pathway between Church Road and Auckland Road.

Police searched for the animal but could find no trace of it.

Mr Arnold said the animals “are no threat to humans”.

via ‘Crystal Palace Puma’ is a panther, big cat expert says (From Croydon Guardian).

>Devon river team’s piranha shock

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A “killer” fish native to South America has been found in a Devon river.

The Environment Agency said its staff were amazed to find a dead piranha in the East Okement tributary of the River Torridge.

The piranha, which has razor-sharp teeth, is generally considered to be the most ferocious freshwater fish in the world.

The 35cm (14in) fish was spotted by Bob Collett, Dave Hoskin and Eddie Stevens during a sampling trip on the river.

Among the species the team would have expected to find in the river were salmon, brown trout, bullheads, stone loach and minnow.

“What we actually discovered was something we would not expect to find in our wildest dreams – we could hardly believe our eyes,” Mr Stevens said.

“After completing 20m of the survey, a large tail emerged from the undercut bank on the far side of the river.

“Our first thought was that a sea trout had become lodged in amongst the rocks and debris collected under the bank, but when it was removed from the river we were speechless to find it was a piranha.”

Tests carried out on the dead piranha revealed it had been eating sweet corn, which proved it must have been kept as a pet.

via BBC NEWS | UK | England | Devon | Devon river team’s piranha shock.

>Wind, current combined to raise E Coast sea level

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Folks living along the East Coast were in higher water early this summer thanks to a change in the wind and current flow.

The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration said Monday the higher than normal sea levels were caused by persistent winds from the northeast — pushing water toward shore — and a weakening of the Florida current that feeds water into the Gulf Stream.

Water levels ranged from six inches to two feet above normal in areas from Maine to Florida during June and July, the agency said.

While the ocean varies and unusual conditions do occur, Mike Szabados, director of NOAA’s Center for Operational Oceanographic Products and Services, said in a statement, “What made this event unique was its breadth, intensity and duration.”

The high water was intensified in June by a strong spring tide, officials added.

While it wasn’t a record for northeasterly winds or for the decline in the Florida current, the combination of the two helped raise sea levels all along the coast.

via Wind, current combined to raise E Coast sea level – Yahoo! News.

>Two "odds of dying" charts

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… The graphic (directly above) is based on 2003 figures from the National Safety Council, a nonprofit group that puts together tables of this stuff based on data from the CDC and the Census Bureau. You can see newer figures and lots more causes of death on the NSC Web site.

Your chances of dying by being “confined to or trapped in a low-oxygen environment,” for example, are one in 271,315. Far more likely (1 in 75,968) is death by “threat to breathing due to cave-in, falling earth and other substances.” Then there are the biggies we write about all the time: heart disease (1 in 5), cancer (1 in 7) and stroke (1 in 24). – wsj

The 2005 odds are here.

>And before the big bang?

>How did we get here? What was here “before”?  No one knows. We know some things, however.

We can observe is that the universe is expanding, and we can determine that 13.73 billion years ago, all of the “stuff” outside of the Earth that we can now observe or infer was concentrated.

What about 50 billion years ago? No one knows.

PAUL DAVIES, a theoretical physicist and professor of natural philosophy, has this to say in his interesting article, “What happened before the big bang?”

… there is very good evidence that the universe did come into existence in a big bang, about fifteen billion years ago.

The effects of that primeval explosion are clearly detectable today-in the fact that the universe is still expanding, and is filled with an afterglow of radiant heat.

So we are faced with the problem of what happened beforehand to trigger the big bang. Journalists love to taunt scientists with this question when they complain about the money being spent on science. Actually, the answer (in my opinion) was spotted a long time ago, by one Augustine of Hippo, a Christian saint who lived in the fifth century. In those days before science, cosmology was a branch of theology, and the taunt came not from journalists, but from pagans: “What was God doing before he made the universe?” they asked. “Busy creating Hell for the likes of you!” was the standard reply.

But Augustine was more subtle. The world, he claimed, was made “not in time, but simultaneously with time.” In other words, the origin of the universe-what we now call the big bang-was not simply the sudden appearance of matter in an eternally preexisting void, but the coming into being of time itself. Time began with the cosmic origin. There was no “before,” no endless ocean of time for a god, or a physical process, to wear itself out in infinite preparation.

Remarkably, modern science has arrived at more or less the same conclusion as Augustine, based on what we now know about the nature of space, time, and gravitation. It was Albert Einstein who taught us that time and space are not merely an immutable arena in which the great cosmic drama is acted out, but are part of the cast-part of the physical universe. As physical entities, time and space can change- suffer distortions-as a result of gravitational processes. Gravitational theory predicts that under the extreme conditions that prevailed in the early universe, space and time may have been so distorted that there existed a boundary, or “singularity,” at which the distortion of space-time was infinite, and therefore through which space and time cannot have continued. Thus, physics predicts that time was indeed bounded in the past as Augustine claimed. It did not stretch back for all eternity.

If the big bang was the beginning of time itself, then any discussion about what happened before the big bang, or what caused it-in the usual sense of physical causation-is simply meaningless. Unfortunately, many children, and adults, too, regard this answer as disingenuous. There must be more to it than that, they object.

Indeed there is. After all, why should time suddenly “switch on”? What explanation can be given for such a singular event? Until recently, it seemed that any explanation of the initial “singularity” that marked the origin of time would have to lie beyond the scope of science. However, it all depends on what is meant by “explanation.” As I remarked, all children have a good idea of the notion of cause and effect, and usually an explanation of an event entails finding something that caused it. It turns out, however, that there are physical events which do not have well-defined causes in the manner of the everyday world. These events belong to a weird branch of scientific inquiry called quantum physics.

Mostly, quantum events occur at the atomic level; we don’t experience them in daily life. On the scale of atoms and molecules, the usual commonsense rules of cause and effect are suspended. The rule of law is replaced by a sort of anarchy or chaos, and things happen spontaneously-for no particular reason. Particles of matter may simply pop into existence without warning, and then equally abruptly disappear again. Or a particle in one place may suddenly materialize in another place, or reverse its direction of motion. Again, these are real effects occurring on an atomic scale, and they can be demonstrated experimentally.

A typical quantum process is the decay of a radioactive nucleus. If you ask why a given nucleus decayed at one particular moment rather than some other, there is no answer. The event “just happened” at that moment, that’s all. You cannot predict these occurrences. All you can do is give the probability-there is a fifty-fifty chance that a given nucleus will decay in, say, one hour. This uncertainty is not simply a result of our ignorance of all the little forces and influences that try to make the nucleus decay; it is inherent in nature itself, a basic part of quantum reality.

The lesson of quantum physics is this: Something that “just happens” need not actually violate the laws of physics. The abrupt and uncaused appearance of something can occur within the scope of scientific law, once quantum laws have been taken into account. Nature apparently has the capacity for genuine spontaneity.

In other words, time was created with the big bang, and before that, some strange quantum universe existed  without time. This idea matches observations we have made in this Time-Universe such as: At the speed of light, time does not exist. And sub atomic particles move instantly from one place to another. And spooky action at a distance of particles that are joined (entangled).

Evidence for the age of the universe:

The earliest and most direct kinds of observational evidence are the Hubble-type expansion seen in the redshifts of galaxies, the detailed measurements of the cosmic microwave background, and the abundance of light elements (see Big Bang nucleosynthesis). These are sometimes called the three pillars of the big bang theory. Many other lines of evidence now support the picture, notably various properties of the large-scale structure of the cosmos^[38] which are predicted to occur due to gravitational growth of structure in the standard Big Bang theory.  – wiki

If the Universe is only 13.73 billion years old, it seems still possible that some billion-year-old advanced intelligent alien civilizations exist out there. If we last long enough, we may be lucky enough to meet them and work on the bigger problem the entire universe faces: running out of energy.

After all the black holes have evaporated, (and after all the ordinary matter made of protons has disintegrated, if protons are unstable), the universe will be nearly empty. Photons, neutrinos, electrons and positrons will fly from place to place, hardly ever encountering each other. It will be cold, and dark, and there is no known process which will ever change things. – rit.edu

In a googol years (10 to the power of 100) which is “ten billion, billion, billion, billion, billion, billion, billion, billion, billion, billion, billion” years, the entire universe will be dead.

So. There it is. The universe, birth to death. No observable parents. No children left to bury it.

Can we have your liver then?