As if they weren’t mean enough, now it emerges that sabertooths were probably pack animals

Sabertooths were frightening beasts. About the size of tigers (huge) and with enormous 20cm fangs these guys were mean. And if that isn’t enough, new research suggests that they were pack animals like modern lions (the Ice Age movies had it right).

How they worked that out is a little complex:

• Tar pits are spots where tar literally rises from the ground. They make excellent spots to find fossils because animals got stuck and were then well preserved
• Sabertooths are very common in tar pits. Probably because they responded to the distress calls of prey animals and themselves became stuck
• The researchers did a comparative study in Africa by playing the sounds of prey animals in distress
• They found that only pack animals (lions and hyenas) responded in any numbers

So basically, by comparing the ratios of sabertooth remains in the tar pits with the study in Africa the researchers could take an educated guess that sabertooths lived in packs.

Dresden in early 1945. Complete devastation but there are plenty of unexploded bombs down there

Here is an interesting article about a guy who has worked for 40 years as a bomb disposal expert in Germany. During World War II 1.9 million tons of bombs were dropped on Germany and a surprisingly high number of them (5 to 15 percent) didn’t explode.

After the war Germany was in such a hurry to rebuild that authorities didn’t have the time or the means to locate and dispose of the bombs. The result is that every year about 2,000 tons of munitions are found and must be safely disposed of!

There are full time teams of disposal experts who get 2 or 3 calls a day from people who have found unexploded munitions. Everything from bombs, to grenades, to mines.

Especially dangerous are delayed-action bombs which were designed to explode 2 to 146 hours after being dropped (to disrupt clearing up and to cause extra chaos). The way many of them landed meant that they have been lying just under the ground on a hair-trigger every since.

Madness to get into a job like that.

Many types of munitions are defused - including some huge bombs

Dropped more than 60 years ago, the bombs are still killing. This bulldozer set off a bomb during road works.

There is a gallery with several more pictures here.

Wired has this article on “the world’s loneliest species” which was discovered living deep (3km down) in a South African mine. This is the first ecosystem ever discovered that is comprised of only a single species. That makes it “the tidiest package of life found yet” with everything necessary for maintaining life packed into a single genome.

Nice.

The Ig Nobel awards are a parody of the Nobels for ‘improbable science’

The Ig Nobel Prizes are a parody of the Nobel Prizes that are awarded for achievements that “first make people laugh, and then make them think.” The prizes generally go out for interesting but strange research.

This year’s awards for for research including:

• Nutrition: For electronically modifying the sound of potato chips to make a person chewing them believe they are fresher than they really are.
• Archeology: For measuring how armadillos scramble dig sites thereby confusing the order to history
• Biology: For discovering that fleas living a dogs can jump higher than fleas on cats
• Medicine: For showing that high priced placebos are more effective than cheap placebos. This actually makes sense to me (I have blogged about the effect on wines)
• Economics: For showing that lap dancers make more money when they are fertile (also blogged this one before)
• Physics: For mathematically proving that a heap of string will almost certainly tangle into knots (seriously)
• Chemistry: For discovering that Coca-Cola is an effective spermicid

Very cool. Check out more detail on the winners and previous winners here.

It’s a little old by now, but this is an interesting story about how automated news crawling wiped $300m off United Airlines’ market cap. Basically this is what happened:

• Back in 2002 United Airlines was on the brink of bankruptcy - that obviously made the news
• For some reason an old story became popular on the South Florida Sun-Sentinel newspaper website - it got put back onto the front page but without a date
• Because there was no date the Google News crawler picked up the story and put it onto today’s news
• Several other news aggregators picked up the story and it “eventually headlined as a news flash on Bloomberg”
• That triggered automated trading programs to sell-sell-sell
• The selling spree wiped 1.14 billions dollars off of United’s market cap
• During the day stock recovered but ended $300 million down

Crazy stuff.

It’s a little old by now, but this is an interesting story about how automated news crawling wiped $300m off United Airlines’ market cap. Basically this is what happened:

• Back in 2002 United Airlines was on the brink of bunkruptcy - that obviously made the news
• For some reason an old story became popular on the South Florida Sun-Sentinel newspaper website - it got put back onto the front page but without a date
• Because there was no date the Google News crawler picked up the story and put it onto today’s news
• Several other news aggregators picked up the story and it “eventually headlined as a news flash on Bloomberg”
• That triggered automated trading programs to sell-sell-sell
• The selling spree wiped 1.14 billions dollars off of United’s market cap
• During the day stock recovered but ended $300 million down

Crazy stuff.

XKCD is a superb webcomic (although pretty geeky) that I follow religiously. I recently came across this one which I found funny.

I thought it was pretty random so I Googled the incident and it turns out that Jimmy Carter was indeed ‘attacked’ by a swimming swamp rabbit in 1979! Read about it in the Wikipedia article: Jimmy Carter Rabbit Incident. There are also links to more detail.

Jimmy Carter stares at the crazed swamp rabbit that he had just fought off. Carter was out fishing alone when the swamp rabbit swam towards him and tried desperately to enter the boat. Mr President was forced to fend it off with an oar. Not sure that I believe this - but it does seem to be legit…

This site shows how common your surname is around the world (actually a quick look at the FAQ reveals that only 22 countries are covered). Anyway, I pumped Pott in and found out that:

• Pott is most common in Germany with 62 people per million (pretty rare)
• In Manitoba, Canada 88 people per million have the surname Pott
• The most common first name for Potts is Lothar!

Pott is most common in Germany although there appear to be quite a few Potts in Canada too

The highest density that I could find was Murphy in Ireland with 17,080 people per million!

Those who thought that only God could create life are in for a nasty surprise. Wired has this article about a team of scientists who are close to creating life from scratch. The scientists are able to build protocells using fatty molecules (for the cell membrane) and inserting bits of nucleic acids containing ’source code’ for replication.

These guys aren’t able to get the cells to replicate properly on their own yet - only certain DNA sequences get replicated. But they are close to creating a new form of life.

Wired has this interesting article showing word clouds of the different speeches at the recent Democratic and Republican conventions. Basically words used most often are largest in word clouds - they make an interesting way of seeing what was spoken about. For instance this is a word cloud for Michelle Obama’s speech about her husband. Predictably the word ‘Barack’ is most common but the words ‘work’, ‘people’ and ‘like’ are common too.

Michelle Obama’s speech at the Democratic convention

Check out the article for the other word clouds, below I have listed the speakers and their most common words. Pretty interesting.

• Hillary Clinton: America, going, Obama
• Joe Biden: Barack, Obama, change, John
• Barack Obama: promise, America, McCain
• John McCain: country, Americans, fight
• George W. Bush: John
• Sarah Palin: America, country, McCain