CGI Godzilla from Always 2
We revealed there was a CGI Godzilla in the Japanese film Always 2, and here he is!
Enjoy!
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Arthroleptidae is frog for Wolverine
We got frogs with retractable claws now. Just think about that! These frogs have the potential to make a cool horror film, and it can be scientifically accurate! SciFi Channel, take note. This is another example of how there are many cool things still out there waiting to be discovered. And then exploited by mad scientists like I, for I am currently working on a way to incorporate these giant clawed frogs into an army to use to take over swampland worldwide. Then I will sell the swampland in bogus real estate deals, making millions! MuHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!!!!
By Lauren Cahoon
ScienceNOW Daily News
28 May 2008
X-Men fans rejoice: Wolverine has come to life, as a frog. When the comic book warrior faces a fight, metallic blades spring forth from his hand. A new study concludes that certain African frogs are similarly equipped, having sharp, claw-shaped bones that pierce through their own fingertips when the animal is threatened.More than 100 years ago, scientists observed the mysterious bony appendages in museum specimens of the Arthroleptidae frog family, but they had no idea what to make of them. Some speculated that the protrusions were an artifact of the preservation process. Harvard University biologists David Blackburn decided to solve the mystery once and for all after having the frequent misfortune of being injured by the amphibians while doing field research in Cameroon. “The frogs will start kicking and drag these claws against your skin,” he says. “I’ve gotten bloody scratches from them many a time.”
Due to strict government regulations on removing live animals from Cameroon, Blackburn’s team had to do their anatomical studies on preserved museum specimens. In addition to the talon-shaped finger bones others had seen, the researchers found a small bony nodule nestled in the tissue just beyond the frog’s fingertip. When sheathed, each claw is anchored to the nodule with tough strands of collagen, but, as Blackburn had discovered firsthand, when the frog is grabbed or attacked, the frog breaks the nodule connection and forces its sharpened bones through the skin.
This bizarre skeletal feature is found in only 12 species within the Arthroleptidae family,
Categories: Biology, Dr. Mobusu, Science Tags:
Alien Video to be revealed Friday
Damn aliens are all a bunch of jerks. All they want is to rape out planet, hunt our people, and eat our brains. It’s always a cookbook! And now, someone is claiming to have actual video evidence of an alien. An alien looking through a window. Damn alien Peeping Toms! That’s is, all aliens should be killed. I’ll take a loss of Mr. Spock, Alf, and ET to take out the ID4 aliens, Predator, Alien Aliens, Greys, Reptoids, and all those other jerks. Aliens suck, suffer not the aliens to live. It’s the only way to save the planet.Alien Video To Be Revealed To Media Tomorrow, Man Claims
The Rocky Mountain News is reporting that tomorrow the world might actually see who else is out there. A man, named Jeff Peckman, claims he will reveal video of live alien to the news media Friday. Brace yourselves. Below are some key excerpts from the story:
A video that purportedly shows a living, breathing space alien will be shown to the news media Friday in Denver.
“It shows an extraterrestrial’s head popping up outside of a window at night, looking in the window, that’s visible through an infrared camera,” he said. The alien is about 4 feet tall and can be seen blinking, Peckman said earlier this month.
An instructor at the Colorado Film School in Denver scrutinized the video “very carefully” and determined it was authentic, Peckman said.
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Caitet̼ Mund̬ РGiant Peccary (Pecari maximus) has been discovered.
Just when you thought SciFi Channel had run out of animals to use in their movies, we get a giant peccary. As someone who has a hobby making large versions of animals, I am ashamed that I did not think to create a giant peccary, and now it bites me in the butt. So now I will make up for lost time, and hunt down some of these creatures to use in growth experiments, thus making these giant peccaries look like dwarves compared to what I will cook up! MuHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!!!!
New Species Of Peccary — Pig-like Animal — Discovered In Amazon Region
ScienceDaily (Nov. 9, 2007) — Dutch biologist Marc van Roosmalen has discovered a new species of peccary, a member of the pig family, in the basin of the Rio Aripuanã in the south-eastern Amazon region. The divergence time from the already known peccary species (the time which has passed since the evolutionary division) has been set at one to 1.2 million years.
This species has been christened giant peccary (Pecari maximus) by the researchers on account of its size. The holotype of the species can be found in the museum of the Instituto Nacional de Pesquisas da Amazônia (INPA) in Manaus. The giant peccary was known by the local Tupi Indians as Caitetú Mundè, which means ‘great peccary which lives in pairs’.
Peccaries belong to the pig family from the New World (Tayassuidae). Until recently, the species consisted of three types: the collared peccary, the white-lipped peccary and the Chaccoan peccary. In his contacts with local hunters in area of the Rio Aripuanã basin, Van Roosmalen came across three hides of a species of peccary which he had encountered several times in the local jungle, and which differed strongly from the collared peccary which was also indigenous to the area.
The measurements of the body and the skull confirmed that the new species is larger than the other peccary species. The giant peccary has comparatively longer legs and its fur markings are also completely different. The skull sizes of the giant peccary also appear to differ from the other species. Genetic analysis indicates a divergence time with the collared and white-lipped peccary of between one and 1.2 million years. The giant peccary occurs sympatrically with the white-lipped and collared species, in other words they are found in the same region.
The new species also exhibits very different behaviour from its family members, the white-lipped and collared peccaries. These species are found in large to very large groups (even up to hundreds of individual animals in the case of the white-lipped peccary), while the giant peccary is only found in pairs or in small family groups with one or two offspring. The other peccary types root in the ground for seeds and roots.
The giant peccary eats mainly fruit and exhibits little or no rooting behaviour. The habitat of the giant peccary is limited to terra firme, dry wooded areas, in a small region of the basin of the Rio Aripuanã. The researchers therefore expect the giant peccary population to be small, and they recommend that this new species should be placed on the Red List of threatened species of the International Union for Conservation of Nature and Natural Resources (IUCN).
Categories: Biology, Dr. Mobusu, Science Tags:
High Degree Of Antibiotic Resistance Found In Wild Arctic Birds
It’s not just hospitals that have antibiotic resistant bacteria, now seabirds are getting in on the action! Maybe if seagulls weren’t so damn greedy all the time they wouldn’t be eating all sorts of bad crap. But they do. In addition to eating up things loaded with antibiotics, seabirds are also eating lots of plastic debris, as the ocean is rapidly becoming a swirling mass of plastic particles. I totally have nothing to do with that, and neither does my plastic debris factories operating out of Vietnam and Cambodia! Just keep Captain Planet off my back. And what the Hell kind of power is “love”? How lame can you get?High Degree Of Antibiotic Resistance Found In Wild Arctic BirdsScienceDaily (Jan. 15, 2008) — Swedish researchers report that birds captured in the hyperboreal tundra, in connection with the tundra expedition “Beringia 2005,” were carriers of antibiotics-resistant bacteria. These findings indicate that resistance to antibiotics has spread into nature, which is an alarming prospect for future health care.
The scientists took samples from 97 birds in northeastern Siberia, northern Alaska, and northern Greenland. These samples were cultivated directly in special laboratories that the researchers had installed onboard the icebreaker Oden and were further analyzed at the microbiological laboratory at the Central Hospital in Växjö, Sweden.
“We were extremely surprised,” says Björn Olsen, professor of infectious diseases at Uppsala University and at the Laboratory for Zoonosis Research at the University of Kalmar.
“We took samples from birds living far out on the tundra and had no contact with people. This further confirms that resistance to antibiotics has become a global phenomenon and that virtually no region of the earth, with the possible exception of the Antarctic, is unaffected.”
The researchers’ hypothesis is that immigrating birds have passed through regions in Southeast Asia, for example, where there is a great deal of antibiotics pressure and carried with them the resistant bacteria to the tundra.
“We already knew that birds in the Western world can be carriers of bacteria that are resistant to antibiotics, but it’s alarming to find that these bacteria exist among birds out on the tundra,” says Jonas Bonnedahl, a physician infectious specializing in infectious diseases in Kalmar and one of those participating in the expedition.
“Our findings show that resistance to antibiotics is not limited to society and hospitals but is now spreading into the wild. Escalating resistance to antibiotics over the last few years has crystallized into one of the greatest threats to well-functioning health care in the future.”
This research is published in the journal Emerging Infectious Diseases.
Adapted from materials provided by Uppsala University, via EurekAlert!, a service of AAAS.
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Avery’s Top 20 Craziest Kaiju Countdown
Avery G, who sends us movie news scoops, has just completed his Top 20 Craziest Kaiju Countdown hosted on the Undead Backbrain blog. Check out his choices and let him know what you think!
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Tasmanian Tiger gene inserted into mouse, will NOT allow dinosaur cloning
Seriously, shut up about dinosaur cloning. Unless you got some dinosaur DNA lying around, this is not applicable in the slightest. But thanks for the plug for the Jurassic Park book at the end, for those people who want to read a bad novel from hack political sellout. Speaking of movies, how come there isn’t many Thylacine films? The only one I know about is Howling 3: The Marsupials. Thylacines are just ripe for exploitation in a SciFi Channel-type film. Tasmanian Tiger Terror! Six teenagers are pursued by Tasmanian Devils only to find that they are not the only danger in the Outback jungle. Starring Dean Cain and some random chick from Buffy.
Extinct Tasmanian tiger gene brought back to life: scientists
by Lawrence Bartlett Tue May 20, 3:14 AM ET
SYDNEY (AFP) – Scientists said Tuesday they had “resurrected” a gene from the extinct Tasmanian tiger by implanting it in a mouse, raising the future possibility of bringing animals such as dinosaurs back to life.
In what they describe as a world first, researchers from Australian and US universities extracted a gene from a preserved specimen of the doglike marsupial — formally known as a thylacine — and revived it in a mouse embryo.
“This is the first time that DNA from an extinct species has been used to induce a functional response in another living organism,” said research leader Andrew Pask of the University of Melbourne.
The announcement was hailed here as raising the possibility of recreating extinct animals.
Mike Archer, dean of science at the University of New South Wales who led an attempt to clone the thylacine when he was director of the Australian Museum, called it “one very significant step in that direction.”
“I’m personally convinced this is going to happen,” he told the Australian Broadcasting Corporation. “I’ve got another group working on another extinct Australian animal and we think this is highly probable.”
Pask told AFP in a telephone interview that while recreating extinct animals might be possible one day, it could not be done with the technique his team used on the Tasmanian tiger.
“We can look at the function of one gene within that animal. Most animals have about 30,000 genes,” he said.
“We hope that with advances in techniques that maybe one day that might be possible, but certainly as science stands at the moment, we are not able to do that, unfortunately.
“We’ve now created a technique people can use to look at the function of DNA from any extinct species, so you could use it from mammoth or Neanderthal man or even dinosaurs if there’s some intact DNA there.”
The last known Tasmanian tiger, which took its name from the Australian island and the stripes on its back, died in captivity in the Hobart Zoo in 1936, having been hunted to extinction in the wild in the early 1900s.
Some thylacine pups and adult tissues were preserved in alcohol, however, and the research team used specimens from the Museum Victoria in Melbourne.
“The research team isolated DNA from 100-year-old ethanol-fixed specimens,” the scientists said in a statement.
“After authenticating this DNA as truly thylacine, it was inserted into mouse embryos and its function examined.
“The thylacine DNA was resurrected, showing a function in the developing mouse cartilage, which will later form the bone.”
The results were due to be published in the international scientific journal PLoS ONE on Tuesday.
“This research has enormous potential for many applications including the development of new biomedicines and gaining a better understanding of the biology of extinct animals,” said co-researcher Richard Behringer of the University of Texas.
At a time when extinction rates are increasing the discovery is critical, said senior author Marilyn Renfree of the University of Melbourne.
“For those species that have already become extinct, our method shows that access to their genetic biodiversity may not be completely lost,” she said.
But Renfree also cautioned that the recreation of extinct animals was not the aim of the research.
“Maybe one day this might be possible but it won’t happen in my lifetime,” she told AFP. “It might happen in my children’s lifetime, but there’s so many steps we need to achieve before you could actually make this work.”
The prospect of bringing extinct animals back to life caught the public imagination after Steven Spielberg’s 1993 film “Jurassic Park,” based on the novel of the same name by Michael Crichton.
In that story, dinosaurs are cloned from genetic material found in mosquitoes that had sucked their blood before becoming preserved in amber. The dinosaurs then wreak havoc.
Categories: Biology, Dinosaurs and other extinct, Science Tags:
