“Insects in Ancient Amber Reveal Unexpected India-Asia Ties”

Geological evidence shows that (India) had been drifting independently for about 100 million years at the time, but the organisms in the amber are closely related to other species found in northern Europe, Australia, New Guinea and tropical America, the researchers report online this week in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

That means the fauna of India didn’t evolve in isolation, said study researcher David Grimaldi, the curator in the Division of Invertebrate Zoology at the American Museum of Natural History in New York.

“There must have been some connections between India and Asia that geologists aren’t accounting for,” Grimaldi told LiveScience.

How about this … the geological evidence is wrong, and India was not drifting independently after all? That’s what the Expanding Earth theory guys say.

In other words, the Expanding Earth theory is totally heretical and not accepted by the mainstream, but they are the only people in the world right now who are not surprised by the “unexpected India-Asia ties.” But plate tectonics is so entrenched there is zero chance of it being falsified by this finding. But at least we may say that the Expanding Earth theory has gained a point in its column.

Gulp:

An equipment failure disrupted communication between 50 nuclear missiles and the launch control center at Warren Air Force Base in Wyoming over the weekend, although the Air Force says it never lost the ability to launch the missiles.

Heckuva job.

A scrap of one anyway, 6000 years old. Same site has produced world’s oldest shoe.
Clearly the site of a paleolithic shopping mall.

Related: World’s Oldest Door.

Ghosts = Pipe organs and/or ventilation fans
Read on for the full explanation as only Cracked can so wittily provide.

With careful observation, the Allies were able to determine the serial numbers had a pattern denoting the order of tank production. Using this data, the Allies created a mathematical model to determine the rate of German tank production.

Egad:

“When the shark hit him, he just said, ‘Help me, dude!’ He knew what was going on,” Garcia told The Associated Press. “It was really fast. You just saw a red wave and this water is blue – as blue as it could ever be – and it was just red, the whole wave.” …
The shark, which breached the water on its side, appeared about 18 feet long, Garcia said.

Octomom doctor apology.

State officials say his notes show he implanted at least twice as many embryos as Suleman has claimed. Officials allege this is evidence of unreasonable judgment, substandard care, and a lack of concern for the eight children she would conceive and the six she was already struggling to raise.

Kamrava should instead have sent the unemployed 33-year-old single mom for a mental health evaluation, officials say.

In his testimony, Kamrava has moved away from his previous statements. Last year, he defended his actions in a Nightline interview that Suleman’s case “was done the right way … under the circumstances.”

Glad to see this apology; too bad he only saw the error of ways under years of intense withering criticism. Brings to mind the William S. Burroughs warning: “No job too dirty for a fucking scientist.” Get all caught up in the objectivity, fail to recognize the human implications … or possibly sociopathic. You decide.

South Korean Octopus-head industry goes to war:

the Seoul city government enraged restaurateurs and the fishing industry when it announced octopus heads contained hazardous amounts of cadmium, a carcinogen that poisons the liver and kidneys.

It advised against eating more than two heads a day.

Enraged fishermen threatened to sue the government and their cause caught the imagination of the public when lawmakers representing their constituents took an octopus into a national assembly session, causing laughter as it tried to escape the jar.

…Related: Chinese Live Crab Vending Machine

Preserved in peat. Part of what makes this a spectacular find is the relatively high elevation too:

But finding the remains at such a high elevation is “fairly rare,” said Larry Agenbroad, Ph.D. He is director of the Mammoth Site of Hot Springs in South Dakota and professor emeritus at Northern Arizona University.

“They do get that high occasionally,” he said …

I know I do.

Elect the Willfully Ignorant

I’ve been reading and thinking a lot about fictional universes lately for our fiction project. I am also an incorrigible comic book geek, and I stumbled upon this which I found pertinent: the Conan stories of Robert E. Howard have generated multiple competing chronologies:

In an attempt to provide a coherent timeline which fit the numerous adventures of Conan penned by Robert E. Howard and later writers, various “Conan chronologies” have been prepared by many people from the 1930s onward. Note that no consistent timeline has yet accommodated every single Conan story. The following are the principal theories that have been advanced over the years.

• Miller/Clark chronology — A Probable Outline of Conan’s Career (1936) was the first effort to put the tales in chronological order. Completed by P. Schuyler Miller and John D. Clark, the chronology was later revised by Clark and L. Sprague de Camp in An Informal Biography of Conan the Cimmerian (1952).
• Robert Jordan chronology — A Conan Chronology by Robert Jordan (1987) was a new chronology written by Conan writer Robert Jordan that included all written Conan material up to that point. It was heavily influenced by the Miller/Clark/de Camp chronologies, though it departed from them in a number of idiosyncratic instances.
• William Galen Gray chronology — Timeline of Conan’s Journeys (1997, rev. 2004), was fan William Galen Gray’s attempt to create “a chronology of all the stories, both Howard and pastiche.” Drawing on the earlier Miller/Clark and Jordan chronologies, it represents the ultimate expression of their tradition to date.
• Joe Marek chronology — Joe Marek’s chronology is limited to stories written (or devised) by Howard, though within that context it is essentially a revision of the Miller/Clark tradition to better reflect the internal evidence of the stories and avoid forcing Conan into what he perceives as a “mad dash” around the Hyborian world within timeframes too rapid to be credible.
• Dale Rippke chronology — The Darkstorm Conan Chronology (2003) was a completely revised and heavily researched chronology, radically repositioning a number of stories and including only those stories written or devised by Howard. The Dark Horse comic series follows this chronology.

I hope people argue over my work like this someday.
Reminds me of string theory in a way -

Paraphrasing.

It’s not the amount of radiation, necessarily. It’s the pulsed nature of the signal.

So next time someone tells you it’s the amount of radiation, you can tell them to suck it.

Bee study author FAILS to disclose chemical company link - we call such people assholes.

The lead researcher on a study linking colony collapse disorder (CCD) to a combination of a virus and fungus, with no mention of the possible role of pesticides -including previously implicated neonicotinoid insecticides, failed to disclose his relationship with Bayer Crop Science, according to the magazine Fortune. Bayer is the manufacturer of imidicloprid, a popular and controversial neonicotinoid and has been fighting regulators around the world to keep its product on the market. The same article also reports that the researcher, Jerry Bromenshenk, PhD, operates a company, Bee Alert Technology, that stands to profit if a disease, rather than a pesticide, causes CCD.

Alan Turing and Morphogenesis

Happy Non-GMO day motherfuckers.

SRL’s Plan for Social Improvement

Hitchens gets crazy on Theism.

Whatever they’re designed for, it’s not for laps:

“The computer placed on a lap may completely or partially occlude [obstruct] the ventilation-fan exhaust.”

Ah, technology.

TPM asks, “Which angry Tea Party candidate will be the first to throw a punch?”

Or will Moe Tucker of the Velvet Underground do it first..?