![“On December 30th, an online community site posted a screen cap from a broadcast representative’s Twitter. The captured tweet read: ”After our after-party, a Happy Together PD saw Yoo Jae Suk packing up food. He asked, “Why are you packing that?” and a bashful Yoo Jae Suk laughingly answered, “Whatever food I [eat] that I think tastes good, my wife seems to think so as well. That’s why I wanted to take this to her. That’s okay, right?”””
He’s so cute.](http://24.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_ly0qzgz1mz1qa4us9o1_500.jpg)
“On December 30th, an online community site posted a screen cap from a broadcast representative’s Twitter. The captured tweet read: ”After our after-party, a Happy Together PD saw Yoo Jae Suk packing up food. He asked, “Why are you packing that?” and a bashful Yoo Jae Suk laughingly answered, “Whatever food I [eat] that I think tastes good, my wife seems to think so as well. That’s why I wanted to take this to her. That’s okay, right?”””
He’s so cute.
Source: allkpop.com
Now you know who to stay away from (and occasionally think about egging).
Source: stuffgracelikes
We Should All Be So Amazing of the Day: Sensei Keiko Fukuda, the last surviving student of Judo founder Kanō Jigorō, has officially been promoted to the rank of 10th dan — the highest black-belt degree in her sport — becoming the first woman to reach the rank, and only the sixteenth person to achieve it since the martial art was founded in 1882.
Oh, and did I mention Fukuda is 98 years old?
“All my life,” Fukuda, who started practicing judo in 1935, said, “this has been my dream.”
Fukuda is no stranger to breaking barriers. In 1972, following a letter campaign to reverse the longstanding rule prohibiting women from rising above 5th dan (which kept her at the same level for nearly two decades), she became the first woman promoted to 6th dan.
And she’s not done yet: Fukuda continues to teach judo three times a week at a women’s dojo in Noe Valley.
Source: thedailywhat
Snakes evolved venom as part of their eternal war with opossums
Venomous vipers like rattlesnakes evolved their deadly toxins incredibly quickly. Scientists had long assumed it was so that they could hunt their prey better, but it might have been to fight off their deadliest predator: the possum.
The longstanding assumption was that snake venom is what’s known as a feeding adaptation, which means it evolved in response to what they eat. And while we’ve known for a long time that various mammals hunt these snakes, researchers hadn’t yet explored how all this might fit together. Researchers at the American Museum of Natural History have probed this connection, and they’ve revealed the shocking truth: rattlesnakes and opossums are locked in an evolutionary arms race.
Department of Mammalology curator Robert Voss explains:
“Snake venom toxins evolve incredibly rapidly. Most herpetologists interpret this as evidence that venom in snakes evolves because of interactions with their prey, but if that were true you would see equally rapid evolution in toxin-targeted molecules of prey species, which has not yet been seen. What we’ve found is that a venom-targeted protein is evolving rapidly in mammals that eat snakes. That suggests that venom has a defensive as well as a trophic role.”
There’s at least a hundred different opossum species, most of which are found throughout Central and South America. Recent genetic studies into these marsupial species revealed rapid evolution in von Willebrand’s factor, a blood-clotting protein that is targeted by the snake toxins.
Sharon Jansaof the University of Minnesota explains further:
“This finding took us by surprise. We sequenced several genes — including the one that codes for von Willebrand Factor (vWF) — to use in a study of opossum phylogeny. Once we started to analyze the data, vWF was a real outlier. It was evolving much more rapidly than expected in a group of opossums that also, as it turns out, are resistant to pitviper venom. Most nucleotide substitutions have little or no effect on protein function, but that doesn’t seem to be the case with vWF in these venom-resistant opossums. The specific amino acids in vWF that interact with toxin proteins show unexpectedly high rates of replacement substitutions. These substitutions undoubtedly affect protein function, suggesting that the vWF protein can no longer be attacked by these snake toxins.”
Voss explains what this all means for vipers and possums:
“It is so uncommon to find genes under strong positive selection, that the exceptions are really interesting and often conform to one evolutionary circumstance when two organisms are coevolving with each other. We’ve known for years that venom genes evolve rapidly in snakes, but the partner in this arms race was unknown until now. Opossums eat snakes because they can.”
Source: dx.doi.org
They came from mid-Permian deposits in Russia, North America, Japan, and Australia. Curious spiral structures, some 10 inches (26 centimetres) across - or about the size of a large dinner plate. At first, they were thought to be the coiled shell of a somewhat odd ammonite (primitive cephalopods with a spiraling external shell). On closer inspection, it was discovered that they were a continuous whorl of teeth or perhaps dermal denticles from some kind of shark.
In short order, the creature was named Helicoprion and the game of trying to figure out how this structure might have fit onto a shark began in earnest. A Russian paleontologist named Andrzej P. Karpinski invested years of his life in futile attempts to restore the position of the whorl. Karpinski tried just about everything. He perched the whorl on top of the first dorsal fin, like some kind of bizarre windmill. He tried hanging it from the tip of the tail, coiled like a piglet’s tail. He even placed the whorl on the tip of its nose, making the fish resemble a sinister swimming elephant.
Source: elasmo-research.org
“In a tiny corner of western Poland a forest of about 400 pine trees grow with a 90 degree bend at the base of their trunks - all bent northward. Surrounded by a larger forest of straight growing pine trees this collection of curved trees, or “Crooked Forest,” is a mystery.
Planted around 1930, the trees managed to grow for seven to 10 years before getting held down, in what is understood to have been human mechanical intervention. Though why exactly the original tree farmers wanted so many crooked trees is unknown.”
Source: news.discovery.com
Zoos are giving chimps mental illnesses
We may not be on the verge of full-on chimp rebellion, but we still might want to rethink the ethics of keeping chimps in zoos. The captive apes are showing signs of mental illnesses never seen in their wild counterparts.
These are some fairly serious manifestations of mental health problems: self-mutilation, constant rocking back and forth, pand even eating their own feces (as opposed to the perfectly normal behavior of throwing them, I guess). These behaviors have never been observed in wild chimps, but they are all associated with human mental disorders. These behaviors were seen even among chimps at well-respected zoos.
University of Kent researcher Nicholas Newton-Fisher explains what this all means:
“Absolutely abnormal behavior and possible mental health issues are most commonly associated with lab chimps. This is one of the reasons we were surprised to see the levels of abnormal behavior that we did — in chimpanzees living in good zoos. We conclude that the chimpanzee mind might have difficulties dealing with captivity.”
Newton-Fisher and his research partner Lucy Birkett examined the behavior of 40 chimps from six zoos in the United States and United Kingdom. From over two years of research, they found every last one of the chimps manifested some form of abnormal behavior, even when provided with a good social environment, a varied diet, and various other forms of enrichment. The simple fact of captivity seemed to be the trigger for these chimps’ mental problems.
This study might well be seen as an argument for no longer keeping chimpanzees in zoos - they are our closest evolutionary relatives, after all - but it’s unfortunately not quite that simple. Many chimps in zoos are acquired from laboratories or the pet trade. These chimps are completely human-raised, so it’s highly unlikely they would ever be able to return to the wild and survive.
Even if we resolve to only use zoos as a refuge for human-raised chimps, we’ll likely still have plenty of available chimps for many years to come. The best we can do then is probably just to only place chimps in zoos when there are no better options, and to try to learn from this new study and make whatever alterations we can to make their captivity more palatable. That seems, for lack of a more species-neutral term, like the humane thing to do.
Source: news.discovery.com
An elk rescues a drowning marmot at Pocatello Zoo, Idaho. Keepers were worried when they noticed Shooter, a four-year-old elk, turning his nose up at his water. They looked on baffled as the moose tried to dip his hooves in his drinking trough - before trying to dunk his entire head in the water. But they were amazed when they saw 12-foot-tall Shooter lift his head out of the water - clutching a tiny marmot - a large ground squirrel - between his jaws. They looked on as Shooter gently nudged the rodent with his hoof, to make sure it was alive - before calmly watching it run off into the bushes.
Source: telegraph.co.uk
“Cracking” sex crimes.
“I am betting nine out of 10 times, when a woman asks for a female detective the story is going to be untrue.”—Lt. Adam Lamboy, commander of the Manhattan Special Victims Squad, in a story about how the NYPD Special Victims Division does its job, explaining that if a woman who reports being raped requests a female detective, the request is “taken as a sign of possible deception” because the “operative theory is that women who are lying think female cops will be more receptive to their stories.”
Terrifying.
It is absolutely horrendous to think that there have been women whose allegations have been dismissed out of hand because, in the aftermath of having been brutally violated by a man, they mustered up the gumption to request a female cop with whom they’d feel safer discussing that most intimate of crimes against them.
WHAT WHAT IS THIS I CAN’T EVEN I AM SO … ugh, I need to go to bed.
Source: Newsweek
![9/11 Hate-Crime Victim Seeks To Save His Attacker
Just 10 days after the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, Rais Bhuiyan was working at a gas station in Dallas when he was shot in the face by a man named Mark Stroman.
Stroman was on a shooting spree, targeting people who appeared to be Muslim or of Middle Eastern descent. Stroman is due to be executed July 20; Bhuiyan, the only survivor of the attacks, is fighting to save his life.
When Stroman entered the gas station, Bhuiyan initially thought it was a routine robbery.
“I opened the cash register, offered him the cash, and requested him not to shoot me,” Bhuiyan tells weekends on All Things Considered host Laura Sullivan. “In reply he asked me, ‘Where are you from?’ And the question seemed strange to ask during a robbery. And I said, ‘Excuse me?’ And as soon as I spoke, I felt the sensation of a million bees stinging my face, and then heard an explosion.”
Bhuiyan required medical attention for years after the attack. The bullet hit him on the right side of the face, leaving severe injuries, particularly to his right eye.
“I had to go through several surgeries and finally the doctor could save the eye, but the vision is gone, and I’m still carrying more than 35 pellets on the right side of my face,” he says. “Once I touch my face, my skull, I can feel it’s all bumpy. It took several years to go through all these painful surgeries one after another one.”
… Despite the difficulties, Bhuiyan looked to his faith in order to find forgiveness.
“According to my faith in Islam, there is no hate, no killing. It doesn’t allow anything like that,” says Bhuiyan. “Yes, Mark Stroman did a horrible thing, and he brought a lot of pain and disaster, sufferings in my life. But in return I never hated him.”
Bhuiyan has created a website called World Without Hate to educate others about hate crimes as a means of preventing them. He’s also working with Amnesty International and Stroman’s defense attorney, who has filed several appeals on Stroman’s death sentence.
“I strongly believe executing him is not a solution. We will just simply lose a human life without dealing with the root cause, which is hate crime,” Bhuiyan says. “In Islam it says that saving one human life is the same as saving the entire mankind. Since I forgave him, all those principles encouraged me to go even further, and stop his execution and save another human life.”
[top photo: after the shooting; bottom photo: 2011]
This man is far stronger than I could ever be, in every way.](http://24.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_ln22ib2CNP1qzdgszo1_r2_500.jpg)
9/11 Hate-Crime Victim Seeks To Save His Attacker
Just 10 days after the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, Rais Bhuiyan was working at a gas station in Dallas when he was shot in the face by a man named Mark Stroman.
Stroman was on a shooting spree, targeting people who appeared to be Muslim or of Middle Eastern descent. Stroman is due to be executed July 20; Bhuiyan, the only survivor of the attacks, is fighting to save his life.
When Stroman entered the gas station, Bhuiyan initially thought it was a routine robbery.
“I opened the cash register, offered him the cash, and requested him not to shoot me,” Bhuiyan tells weekends on All Things Considered host Laura Sullivan. “In reply he asked me, ‘Where are you from?’ And the question seemed strange to ask during a robbery. And I said, ‘Excuse me?’ And as soon as I spoke, I felt the sensation of a million bees stinging my face, and then heard an explosion.”
Bhuiyan required medical attention for years after the attack. The bullet hit him on the right side of the face, leaving severe injuries, particularly to his right eye.
“I had to go through several surgeries and finally the doctor could save the eye, but the vision is gone, and I’m still carrying more than 35 pellets on the right side of my face,” he says. “Once I touch my face, my skull, I can feel it’s all bumpy. It took several years to go through all these painful surgeries one after another one.”
… Despite the difficulties, Bhuiyan looked to his faith in order to find forgiveness.
“According to my faith in Islam, there is no hate, no killing. It doesn’t allow anything like that,” says Bhuiyan. “Yes, Mark Stroman did a horrible thing, and he brought a lot of pain and disaster, sufferings in my life. But in return I never hated him.”
Bhuiyan has created a website called World Without Hate to educate others about hate crimes as a means of preventing them. He’s also working with Amnesty International and Stroman’s defense attorney, who has filed several appeals on Stroman’s death sentence.
“I strongly believe executing him is not a solution. We will just simply lose a human life without dealing with the root cause, which is hate crime,” Bhuiyan says. “In Islam it says that saving one human life is the same as saving the entire mankind. Since I forgave him, all those principles encouraged me to go even further, and stop his execution and save another human life.”
[top photo: after the shooting; bottom photo: 2011]
This man is far stronger than I could ever be, in every way.
Source: elgin-marbles
When Jonathan Reed’s wife, Mary, died in 1893, the widower didn’t want to leave her side. In fact, he was so devoted he moved in to her tomb, where he lived (with a parrot) for over 10 years. From the Evergreen Cemetery’s website: Reed had his Mary’s casket transferred to the vault, where he installed an empty casket in which he would eventually lie. He then settled into what became his second home. Domestic furniture stood in the vestibule, a wood stove provided heat, and scattered about the vault were a clock, some urns filled with flowers, photographs, paintings on the wall, a deck of playing cards, Mary’s half-finished knitting, and the family’s pet parrot (first alive, later stuffed). As word of Reed’s story spread, company began stopping by. Around 7,000 people stopped by in the first year alone. Witnesses said he ate all of his meals there and held imaginary conversations with his wife. According to the New York Times article, published in March of 1905, “Mr. Reed could never be made to believe that his wife was really dead, his explanation of her condition being that the warmth had simply left her body and that if he kept the mausoleum warm she would continue to sleep peacefully in the costly metallic casket in which her remains were put.” The article also states, “According to his friends, he really believed that his wife could understand what he was saying to her.” Reed died in 1905 and was finally interred with Mary — you can read his New York Timesobituary here. Given that she was buried in the vault, their I Love Lucy sleeping arrangements allow this story to be bittersweet + weird (as opposed to weird + weird).
Scandals of Classic Hollywood: Clark Gable, the Scandal That Wasn’t
Clark Gable married five times, slept with nearly all of his co-stars, and cheated on everyone. In just about every movie in which he plays the romantic lead, he cajoles, spanks, slaps, or otherwise mistreats the object of his affection. In other words, he’s a bastard, but he’s one steamy bastard. And he challenged the image of the leading man in 1930s Hollywood, offering a barrel-chested alternative to the fleet-footed likes of Fred Astaire and Cary Grant. He looked very much as if someone had taken a swarthy pirate, given him a facial, parted his hair to the side, trimmed his mustache, and put him in tails. Years before Brando popularized the menace and gravitas that characterized a new generation of male stars, there was Gable, and shit did he smolder.
For all of Gable’s bad behavior, he never got caught. Apart from whispers and scolds in the gossip columns, his image remained relatively untarnished. His affairs — and the fruit of those affairs — were kept under wraps by the skillful Fixers at his studio, MGM. An action is never de facto scandalous: It becomes scandalous when it challenges the status quo. What’s fascinating about Gable, then, is how a womanizing drunkard remained free of scandal — and what made it so easy to do so.
Read the rest here - this is a pretty fascinating article about Old Hollywood.
If you read a recent front page story of the San Francisco Chronicle, you would have read about a female humpback whale who had become entangled in a spider web of crab traps and lines. She was weighted down by hundreds of pounds of traps that caused her to struggle to stay afloat. She also had hundreds of yards of line rope wrapped around her body, her tail, her torso, a line tugging in her mouth.
A fisherman spotted her just east of the Farallon Islands (outside the Golden Gate) and radioed an environmental group for help. Within a few hours, the rescue team arrived and determined that she was so bad off, the only way to save her was to dive in and untangle her. They worked for hours with curved knives and eventually freed her. When she was free, the divers say she swam in what seemed like joyous circles. She then came back to each and every diver, one at a time, and nudged them, pushed them gently around as she was thanking them. Some said it was the most incredibly beautiful experience of their lives. The guy who cut the rope out of her mouth said her eyes were following him the whole time, and he will never be the same.
Source: chuushite
bigbardas:
Source: osobigbear