Fossils

Remember this post about rocks?

Barb-Harmony Art Mom (of Outdoor Hour fame) suggested in the comments that a rock that we thought was just a pretty painted rock, might be a rock with shell fossils embedded in it.

And she was right!

I finally got around to having a closer look at the rock, and you can clearly see that those white circles are little shells - like pipi or cockle shells.


I found a good New Zealand shellfish identification guide, here. It's hard to tell what sort of shellfish these are, since the outer surface isn't really visible - the ones which would have been on the outside have broken, leaving only the outline shape of the shell. We are not going to break it open to see more!

So that's pretty cool. We now officially have fossils in our rock collection!

The only downside is that we found this rock in our garden, quite clearly placed there by the previous owners of the house (now both deceased), so we have absolutely no idea where it was collected from. It would have been nice to be able to 'complete the paperwork' for this specimen, but we're pretty happy just to have seen it and to know that it is possible to find them ourselves.

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Tree grows inside man's lung

This article caught my eye a couple of weeks ago and has been waiting for an opportunity to be blogged. There's actually a picture of the wee fir tree inside the lung, if you follow the link to the news story.

Tree grows inside man's lung

A Russian man who was being operated on for a suspected tumour ended up having a fir tree removed from one of his lungs.

The 5cm tree, was discovered by surgeons when they opened up Artyom Sidorkin, 28, according to Russian newspaper Komsomolskaya Gazeta.

It is believed Mr Sidorkin inhaled a seed, which then sprouted into a small fir tree inside his lung...

The article continues...

He went to doctors complaining of extreme chest pain and coughing up blood.

Surgeon Vladimir Kamashev told the newspaper he was sure it was cancer.

"We did X-rays and found what looked exactly like a tumour. I had seen hundreds before, so we decided on surgery."

The tree was discovered when surgeons took a biopsy before removing the major part of the man's lung.

"I thought I was hallucinating," said Dr Kamashev.

"I blinked three times as I was sure I was seeing things."

"It was very painful. But to be honest I did not feel any foreign object inside me," a relieved Mr Sidorkin told the paper.

Craziness. And I always thought that those stories of not eating seeds because they'd sprout inside you were utter wives' tales. Turns out that, if you're a bit woolly on the difference between swallowing and inhaling, the old wives might not be so wrong after all. Read more...

Science on the Brain

Science on the Brain is a site we've spent a bit of time at lately. Miss4 loves watching the videos, and although we've never actually gone ahead with any of his suggested further experiments, I've filed them away in my head for future reference.

Marshall Brain is also the creator of the How Stuff Works website, a father of four, and an enthusiast for how technology works and what science can mean in every day life. Science on the Brain is a collection of short videos (about 5 minutes) aimed at primary school kids, giving demonstrations of scientific principles and offering suggestions for further exploration.

Topics include measurement (your own height, lung capacity, jump height etc), insulation, why you need salt to make ice cream, what yeast eats, how far is a lightyear and a bunch of other stuff.

Highly recommended.
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something i didn't know about flies

caution, not for those with weak stomachs

Flesh fly. Sarcophaga spp. Image from wiki entry

Miss4 was on a fly hunt today. The warmer weather has brought a few of them inside and she is an excellent fly swatter (what passes for hand-eye-coordination training around here).

Today, she swatted a fly and decided to do a little investigating. After all, we do encourage an 'enquiry based, learner directed approach' donchernow, so despite my own qualms about the grossness I remained silent as she proceeded.

Taking a wooden block, she carefully squished the fly on the windowsill to see what she would see.

What she saw was live young! How cool is that?? I didn't know that flies could lay live maggots - I thought they all laid eggs that went through the usual egg, larvae, pupae, fly process.

After ascertaining for certain that we were indeed seeing what we were seeing, I sent her off to thoroughly wash her hands and the wooden block while I got rid of the fly and maggots.

I've just done some investigating online and found that it must have been a flesh fly. Some species of flesh fly lay live young (try saying that 6 times fast) and thus are useful to forensic entomologists (people who look at the insect colonisation of dead bodies to determine time of death etc). I like their scientific name Sarcophagidae - meaning 'flesh eater'.

There's a you-tube of someone doing the exact same thing if you really want to see it. Some people will put anything on youtube, won't they? I didn't watch the whole thing, it was too gross to see twice...

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ig nobels 2008

The Ig Nobels are in for this year.

Although the coca-cola and exotic-dancing research subjects have, predictably, caught the imagination of the media, I personally liked the Peace Prize. Imagine needing to dish up a salad while preserving the dignity of the ingredients...

Here there are in full, from the Improbable Research website.

NUTRITION PRIZE. Massimiliano Zampini of the University of Trento, Italy and Charles Spence of Oxford University, UK, for electronically modifying the sound of a potato chip to make the person chewing the chip believe it to be crisper and fresher than it really is.

PEACE PRIZE. The Swiss Federal Ethics Committee on Non-Human Biotechnology (ECNH) and the citizens of Switzerland for adopting the legal principle that plants have dignity.

ARCHAEOLOGY PRIZE. Astolfo G. Mello Araujo and José Carlos Marcelino of Universidade de São Paulo, Brazil, for measuring how the course of history, or at least the contents of an archaeological dig site, can be scrambled by the actions of a live armadillo.

BIOLOGY PRIZE. Marie-Christine Cadiergues, Christel Joubert, and Michel Franc of Ecole Nationale Veterinaire de Toulouse, France for discovering that the fleas that live on a dog can jump higher than the fleas that live on a cat.

MEDICINE PRIZE. Dan Ariely of Duke University (USA), Rebecca L. Waber of MIT (USA), Baba Shiv of Stanford University (USA), and Ziv Carmon of INSEAD (Singapore) for demonstrating that high-priced fake medicine is more effective than low-priced fake medicine..

COGNITIVE SCIENCE PRIZE. Toshiyuki Nakagaki of Hokkaido University, Japan, Hiroyasu Yamada of Nagoya, Japan, Ryo Kobayashi of Hiroshima University, Atsushi Tero of Presto JST, Akio Ishiguro of Tohoku University, and Ágotá Tóth of the University of Szeged, Hungary, for discovering that slime molds can solve puzzles.

ECONOMICS PRIZE. Geoffrey Miller, Joshua Tybur and Brent Jordan of the University of New Mexico, USA, for discovering that a professional lap dancer's ovulatory cycle affects her tip earnings.

PHYSICS PRIZE. Dorian Raymer of the Ocean Observatories Initiative at Scripps Institution of Oceanography, USA, and Douglas Smith of the University of California, San Diego, USA, for proving mathematically that heaps of string or hair or almost anything else will inevitably tangle themselves up in knots.

CHEMISTRY PRIZE. Sharee A. Umpierre of the University of Puerto Rico, Joseph A. Hill of The Fertility Centers of New England (USA), Deborah J. Anderson of Boston University School of Medicine and Harvard Medical School (USA), for discovering that Coca-Cola is an effective spermicide, and to Chuang-Ye Hong of Taipei Medical University (Taiwan), C.C. Shieh, P. Wu, and B.N. Chiang (all of Taiwan) for discovering that it is not.

LITERATURE PRIZE. David Sims of Cass Business School. London, UK, for his lovingly written study "You Bastard: A Narrative Exploration of the Experience of Indignation within Organizations." Read more...

Dinosaur found - still with its skin on

This is too cool.

"Scientists today announced the discovery of an extraordinarily preserved "dinosaur mummy" with much of its tissues and bones still encased in an uncollapsed envelope of skin."
From National Geographic.

Do we ever get over our childhood fascination for dinosaurs? Read more...