Skulls in the Stars

The past week’s Twitter #weirdscifacts, right on schedule!

522. Aug 17: Ancient Damascus swords shown to contain very state-of-the-art carbon nanotubes!  I’m planning to blog about this next week — though carbon nanotubes are relatively new to science, they were unknowingly produced in the production of Damascus swords.  (h/t @drrubidium)

523. Aug 18: Neutrons may become cubes under high enough pressure? (via @rctautz)

524. Aug 19: Thatcherization: the failure to notice massively distorted faces oriented upside down.  I’m tempted to do this with my own photos!

525. Aug 20: Mike the headless chicken, who survived 18 months after his head was mostly cut off!  Enough of Mike’s head survived to keep basic motor functions going.

526. Aug 21: c. 850 C.E., Islamic scholar Abbas Ibn Firnas is reputed to have made an attempt at flight w/ glider.  Note the use of the word “reputed”!  Like many statements about pre-renaissance science, the glider attempt is poorly documented, with only a cryptic contemporary reference and a more detailed reference only 800 years later.  Why put any faith in it at all?  After all, Archimedes was credited with a “death ray” that is widely considered apocryphal.   Unlike Archimedes, though, Firnas’ attempt at flight was reported to be a failure, which ended up giving him significant injuries!  This gives it at least the veneer of plausibility.

527. Aug 22: Archeological evidence suggests Egyptian queen Hatshepsut moisturized to death!  Hatshepsut is known to have died of cancer, and recent investigations show that she was using a skin moisturizer that included highly carcinogenic materials.  (h/t @wilsondasilva)

528. Aug 23: The shark attack victim who drove to get himself help — with the shark still attached to his leg.  @cuttlefishpoet commented: First thought: “Australian?”

Yet another week of Twitter #weirdscifacts!  Have a healthy amount of weird creatures at the end of this week’s list.

515. Aug 10: Werewolves do exist! Sort of. The very odd medical condition hypertrichosis. 

516. Aug 11: A successful treatment for leukemia — created from a modified HIV virus?  (h/t @lousycanuck)

517. Aug 12: In 1930, psychoanalyst Wilhelm Reich believed in orgone, and through it that sex could control the weather.  Albert Einstein even agreed to inspect Reich’s orgone research, and politely said that it was “inconclusive”.

518. Aug 13: Codariocalyx motorius, the world’s fastest plant — its leaf motion can be seen w/ naked eye! Of course, “fast” for a plant is relatively slow for us; check out a video here.

519. Aug 14: The ironclad beetle — so good at playing dead they’ve been adorned & sold as living jewelry! U.S. customs intercepted one such adorned beetle at the border in January 2010.

520. Aug 15: Cymothoa exigua, the parasite that replaces a fish’s tongue.  This is the only known case of a parasite functionally replacing an organ of the host.

521. Aug 16: The Harlequin filefish, the fish that pretends to be coral!  (h/t @kzelnio)

Still going with the Twitter #weirdscifacts! They’re getting much harder to find, so if you have any to suggest, please let me know!

508. Aug 03: Swede held for attempting to build nuclear reactor in his kitchen.  Note the word “attempting”.  He almost certainly wouldn’t have made a working reactor, and he seems to have had no nefarious plans.  He isn’t the first to try, though!  (h/t @sciencecomedian)

509. Aug 04: Hymenoepimecis argyraphaga — the wasp that makes zombie spiders! (classic post by @nerdychristie) This fact was inspired by the fact that the wasp/spider conflict is central to Nick Mamatas’ novel Sensation, that I recently reviewed.

510. Aug 05: Fossil find shows Velociraptor eating another dinosaur. Of course, it’s not weird that Velociraptor ate dinosaurs, but it is very unusual for it to be fossilized essentially in the act! (h/t @anatotitan)

511. Aug 06: Turning wood into bones??!!  (h/t @AndreaKuszewski)

512. Aug 07: The Vegas hotel that acts as a death ray to pool-goers!  The hotel, with its massive concave mirrored surface, acts as a crude focusing reflector.

513. Aug 08: A billion-year-old piece of North America traced back to Antarctica. (via @physorg_com)

514. Aug 09: Curious attempts to build anti-gravity devices.  Though there is no evidence of the existence of anti-gravity, much less any clear path to generating it, lots of people have made a big fuss over trying to create it.  Some have been sincere, some less so!  (by @jenlucpiquant)