Who Is Who & What Is What: June 2013

Sunday 30 June 2013

Deucy, a Two-Faced Kitten, is Born in Oregon

That's right, an extremely rare, two-faced kitten was born in Amity, Oregon, on Tuesday. According to Stephanie Durkee, the owner of both the female kitten and its mother, took the two-faced cat to a vet, who say she's in good health. Deucy was initially rejected by her mother, so she's been feeding her warmed kitten formula from a syringe.

Google Expert Claims Humans will Upload their Minds to Computers by 2045, Become Immortal

Google's director of engineering Ray Kurzweil believes that humans will be able to upload their entire brains to computers within the next 32 years - an event known as singularity - and our body parts will be replaced by machines by the turn of the century, making them immortal in a sense.

The conference was created by Russian multimillionaire Dmitry Itskov and featured visionary talks about how the world will look by 2045. Kurzweil said: 'Based on conservative estimates of the amount of computation you need to functionally simulate a human brain, we'll be able to expand the scope of our intelligence a billion-fold.' He referred to Moore's Law that states the power of computing doubles, on average, every two years quoting the developments from genetic sequencing and 3D printing.

Julia Caples: Real-Life Vampire who Drinks Almost Two Liters of Human Blood a Month

For the past 30 years, real-life vampire Julia Caples has been regularly consuming human blood. Her donors are fellow vampire enthusiasts she meets at her local oddities store, who allow her to suck the blood right from their bodies.

Julia Caples fascination with drinking blood started when she was just 15 years old. During her first kiss, she got the urge to bite her boyfriend. “It was my natural instinct and I liked the taste. I just got an urge and can’t really explain it. It’s never gone away,” she said in an interview with Barcroft Media. ”Needless to say though, he never kissed me again.” The experience definitely sparked her interest in human blood, but she only went crazy for it after meeting her now ex-husband Donald, who shared her passion for vampires and goth lifestyle. They got married in a graveyard, and after saying their vows, they consecrated their love for each other by sharing blood. But when their son Alexi was born, Julia and Donald decided one of them had to stop playing vampire to ensure he had a balanced upbringing. It was Donald who quit drinking blood, so Julia wouldn’t have to. Although they are no longer together, Donald told the press Julia is an amazing mother who would never let her bizarre habits come between her and the kids.

Her bizarre habit has made Julia very popular with vampire fans around the world. Julia, who also goes by the nickname Dark Rose, says she meets some of her donors online, but makes it clear that she has to meet them in person before sucking their blood. They all have to get their blood tested to make sure they’re not carrying any kind of blood disease.

Medical experts say there has been a resurgence of vampirism lately, and Julia herself confirms there are more people secretly drinking blood than anyone can imagine. Drinking blood makes Caples feel beautiful and full of energy, and she believes her aging process is much slower than in people who don’t drink blood.

A Man Survived Under The Sea For 2 Days

After two days trapped in freezing cold water and breathing from an air bubble in an upturned tugboat under the ocean, Harrison Okene was sure he was going to die. Then a torch light pierced the darkness.

Ship’s cook Okene, 29, was on board the Jascon-4 tugboat when it capsized on May 26 due to heavy Atlantic ocean swells around 30 km (20 miles) off the coast of Nigeria, while stabilizing an oil tanker filling up at a Chevron platform.

Of the 12 people on board, divers recovered 10 dead bodies while a remaining crew member has not been found. Somehow Okene survived, breathing inside a four foot high bubble of air as it shrunk in the waters slowly rising from the ceiling of the tiny toilet and adjoining bedroom where he sought refuge, until two South African divers eventually rescued him.

”I was there in the water in total darkness just thinking it’s the end. I kept thinking the water was going to fill up the room but it did not,” Okene said, parts of his skin peeling away after days soaking in the salt water.

“I was so hungry but mostly so, so thirsty. The salt water took the skin off my tongue,” he said. Seawater got into his mouth but he had nothing to eat or drink throughout his ordeal.

At 4:50 a.m. on May 26, Okene says he was in the toilet when he realized the tugboat was beginning to turn over. As water rushed in and the Jascon-4 flipped, he forced open the metal door.

“As I was coming out of the toilet it was pitch black so we were trying to link our way out to the water tidal (exit hatch),” Okene told Reuters in his home town of Warri, a city in Nigeria’s oil-producing Niger Delta.

“Three guys were in front of me and suddenly water rushed in full force. I saw the first one, the second one, the third one just washed away. I knew these guys were dead.”

What he didn’t know was that he would spend the next two and a half days trapped under the sea praying he would be found.

Turning away from his only exit, Okene was swept along a narrow passageway by surging water into another toilet, this time adjoining a ship’s officers cabin, as the overturned boat crashed onto the ocean floor. To his amazement he was still breathing.

FISH FEASTED ON THE DEAD

Okene, wearing only his underpants, survived around a day in the four foot square toilet, holding onto the overturned washbasin to keep his head out of the water.

He built up the courage to open the door and swim into the officer’s bedroom and began pulling off the wall paneling to use as a tiny raft to lift himself out of the freezing water.

He sensed he was not alone in the darkness.

“I was very, very cold and it was black. I couldn’t see anything,” says Okene, staring into the middle distance.

“But I could perceive the dead bodies of my crew were nearby. I could smell them. The fish came in and began eating the bodies. I could hear the sound. It was horror.”

What Okene didn’t know was a team of divers sent by Chevron and the ship’s owners, West African Ventures, were searching for crew members, assumed by now to be dead.

Then in the afternoon of May 28, Okene heard them.

”I heard a sound of a hammer hitting the vessel. Boom, boom, boom. I swam down and found a water dispenser. I pulled the water filter and I hammered the side of the vessel hoping someone would hear me. Then the diver must have heard a sound.”

Divers broke into the ship and Okene saw light from a head torch of someone swimming along the passageway past the room.

“I went into the water and tapped him. I was waving my hands and he was shocked,” Okene said, his relief still visible.

He thought he was at the bottom of the sea, although the company says it was 30 meters below.

The diving team fitted Okene with an oxygen mask, diver’s suit and helmet and he reached the surface at 19:32, more than 60 hours after the ship sank, he says.

Okene says he spent another 60 hours in a decompression chamber where his body pressure was returned to normal. Had he just been exposed immediately to the outside air he would have died.

The cook describes his extraordinary survival story as a “miracle” but the memories of his time in the watery darkness still haunt him and he is not sure he will return to the sea.

“When I am at home sometimes it feels like the bed I am sleeping in is sinking. I think I’m still in the sea again. I jump up and I scream,” Okene said, shaking his head.

“I don’t know what stopped the water from filling that room. I was calling on God. He did it. It was a miracle.”

Commonly Believed Myths about the Human Body

1. Eyelid wart: Warts can be caught from other animals like toads:

Human warts are caused by a virus that affects only humans, the human pappiloma virus. They cannot be caught by animals with warts and certainly not by toads whose bumps are not warts but glands.

2. Taste buds

We have learned much about our bodies through old wives' tales handed down from our moms and grandmothers and even in school, but not all of it is correct. Here we look at 10 misconceptions that might surprise you.

3. Sleepwalkers should never be woken

Sleepwalkers are often confused and/or disoriented when awakened but this is far better than the danger of injuries that are common from tripping over things, walking into dangerous areas and more. Thus, wake them gently and help them get back to bed.

4. You will catch a cold if you go out in wet, freezing weather

There is no evidence to support this misconception at all. Viruses are more common in the low humidity time of winter and of course, people are gathered indoors more, so they spread easily but the only thing that going out in the cold does is perhaps lower your resistance to an infection you already have, starting some temporary sneezing and coughing.

5. Fingernails and hair continue to grow after death

Neither continue to to grow. What does happen is that the cuticles and skin shrink after death, making it appear as if the nails and hair were lengthening.

6. Your hair grows back thicker and darker after shaving

Another falsity: Uncut hair is tapered, so doesn't appear as thick as cut hair. Also, uncut hair has more exposure to the sun, which lightens it a little, making cut hair appear darker at first.

7. Conditioners and shampoos can cure split ends

Not so, there are no cures for split ends beyond cutting them. Good conditioners and shampoos might help prevent them in the first place but anything purporting to heal them should be looked at with the same eye as you would look at snake oil.

8. Men think of sex every seven seconds

It would make it hard to concentrate on needed things such as work if this were true, so good thing it isn't. Even though there is no way of measuring this properly, studies scientists have done show this is a huge exaggeration.

9. Different areas of the tongue taste different things

The idea that taste buds in different areas of the tongue correspond to sweet, sour, savory and salty has been floating around for decades but is false. Every area of the tongue can taste every type; the idea that there was a tongue map came from a mistranslation by a Harvard professor, of a badly written and discredited German paper.

10. We use only 10% of our human brain

William James, a psychologist in the 1800s, once metaphorically used the idea of 10% of the brain being all that was used at one time. This grew into the rumor that it was all the brain was overall and most of the rest was not understood or used as far as we know. Actually, the inactive neurons are just as important at any given moment as the ones actively firing at a point in time, and the 10% comes from varying areas at different times.

11. Sugar makes children hyperactive

False! Twelve controlled, double blind trials have shown that there is absolutely no connection between children's behavior and their sugar intake. One thing was found, namely that parents rate their child's behavior as more hyper when they thought they had been given a sugary drink. "The studies included sugar from sweets, chocolate and natural sources. Even in studies of those who were considered “sensitive” to sugar, children did not behave differently after eating sugar-full or sugar-free diets," said Vreeman and Carrol who undertook the retrospective study.

Saturday 29 June 2013

10 Craziest Things You Can Buy In China

If you want to step outside your comfort zone, go skydiving. If you want to forget you ever had a comfort zone, buy a ticket to China. If you already live in China, you’re two sentences ahead of me and just a few yuan away from owning some of the most bizarre items ever available on the legal free market. Here are ten of the craziest things you can buy in China. And if you know of anything that can top the items on this list, feel free to put it in the comments.

10. Live Crabs From Vending Machines

In 2010 the Twin Lakes Crab Co., a Chinese crab supplier, decided that sometimes a grocery store just isn’t convenient enough. So they built a vending machine that dispenses live crabs to be installed in subway stations in the city of Nanjing. Picture a typical snack vending machine, then replace all the chips and cookies with aerated plastic boxes containing living, moving crabs and you’ll have a perfect image of what this looks like.

The crabs are kept at a constant 5 degrees Celsius (41 F), which is cold enough to put them in a temporary stasis, but not so cold it kills them. They sell for the equivalent of about two US dollars, and the bottom row of the machine also offers bottles of ginger vinegar—a combo sort of like ketchup and french fries.

9. Panda Tea

Let’s just go ahead and say it: Panda Tea is a drink made from panda poop, and it’s the single most expensive tea in the world—one dried kilo of the tea will run you about US $77,000. Why would anybody want to drink it? The theory is that pandas really only use about 30 percent of the bamboo they eat, eliminating the rest of the unprocessed bamboo in their fecal matter. It’s believed that, among other nutrients, bamboo contains antioxidants that can prevent cancer, so panda tea is marketed as an anti-cancer tonic and a weight loss aid.

The facility is located in the Sichuan Province, and the owner of Panda Tea, Yanshi An, started his company with 11 tons of dung that he bought from a nearby panda sanctuary.

8. Food Prepared, Cooked, And Served By Robots

From noodles to spicy chicken, everything tastes better when it’s prepared by the cold, metallic dicing hooks of a robot. This isn’t just one isolated example, either—it’s three isolated examples, showing a growing trend in robotic food service.

In 2011, inventor Cui Runquan created Chef Cui, a humanoid robot that prepares shaved noodles, a popular noodle variety in China in which the noodles are shaved by hand off a block of dough and then boiled. The robots are being mass produced and sold for the equivalent of US $2,000, and over 3,000 have already been sold.

A fast food chain in Shanghai is also using robots—but this time as the actual chefs. The obvious benefit is the efficiency: one robot can wash a dirty pot, combine the ingredients, cook the dish, and have the finished order on a plate in only three minutes. The downside? Yet one more integration that will make it easier for robots to kill us all.

Finally, if cooking wasn’t enough, you can also go to the Dalu Rebot Restaurant and have your food brought to you by a robot server. The six robots follow a rotation that allows them to serve the restaurant’s twenty-one tables before returning to the kitchen to refill their trays.

7. Canned Air

If you want a breath of fresh air in China, it’s going to cost you about five yuan. That’s how much Chen Guangbaio is selling his new line of canned air for, which is literally a soda can filled with air. This product is part publicity stunt and part environmental statement on Chinese air pollution, which is now so bad that the haze is visible from space in some areas of the country (seriously).

For the purest air, you can pick up a flavor called Pristine Tibet, and if you’re feeling nostalgic you can buy Revolutionary Yah’an or Post-Industrial Taiwan flavored air.

6. Traffic Jam Stand-Ins

For a country with 1.3 billion people, it’s not surprising that China sometimes has some pretty long traffic jams—sometimes lasting for weeks. But a few entrepreneurs have turned lemons into the Chinese version of lemonade by offering a service that provides a person who will actually sit in your car for you while it’s stuck in traffic.

It works like this: If you find yourself stuck in a gridlock, you can call the service, tell them where you are, and wait for two men to arrive on a motorcycle. The stand-in will sit in your car, and the motorcycle driver will take you anywhere you need to go. The service is mostly offered around Wuhan in Central China, which typically has some of the worst traffic in the country.

5. Dwarf Tours

The Kingdom of the Little People is sort of like a cross between a theme park and the Shire—located in the Yunnan Province, it encompasses 13,000 acres set aside to build a miniature world that will be populated exclusively by dwarfs and open for tours like a safari. Don’t bother reading that sentence again; it’s even more offensive the second time.

The brainchild of entrepreneur Chen Mingjing, the Kingdom of the Little People is still being built, but already has over 30 tiny cottages to house the dwarfs and a parody presentation of Swan Lake, which is now open to the public. Although a lot of people are offended by the idea, Chen claims that it will provide people with permanent job opportunities when they would otherwise struggle in a difficult economy, and many of the residents of the Kingdom are proud to be part of the community.

4. Obama Fried Chicken

From morally ambiguous dwarfism to vaguely racist copyright infringement, China truly has it all. In 2011, a businessman in Beijing opened China’s first OFC—Obama Fried Chicken. The restaurant uses a KFC-styled banner and logo complete with a cartoonishly grinning caricature of Barack Obama and sells fried chicken.

Believe it or not, this isn’t actually the first Obama Fried Chicken to grace the planet—or the first time China has used Obama’s image to sell chicken. The first OFC opened in Brooklyn in 2009, but closed down a short time later. And in a completely unrelated stunt, the official KFC in China released this ad in 2011 which features an actor who looks like Obama giving a speech before being crushed by a giant chicken sandwich. There’s some sort of message here…but we’re totally not spelling it out.

3. Live Turtle Key Rings

Arguably one of the oddest things you can buy in China is a tiny live animal on a key ring. The animals—usually a miniature Brazilian turtle or a kingfish—are enclosed in a small bag or plastic bubble that is filled with a nutrient-rich liquid that’s supposed to be able to feed the creature for up to three or four months.

Of course, the sealed container raises a lot of questions about how the animal is supposed to get oxygen, and several animal welfare services in China have understandably raised a public outcry that call these trinkets a particularly severe form of animal abuse. One of the reasons people buy them is for good luck, but supposedly many people will buy one just to set the animal free.

2. White People

At the risk of sidestepping premise for a second here, you can’t actually buy white people in China—but you can rent them, which is close enough. Chinese businessmen will often rent white actors to stand beside them at important events and, well, that’s about it.

The idea is that Western businesses are successful (China’s words, not mine), and so for a Chinese businessman to be seen with a guy who could be an overseas business partner is a symbol of status and prestige. Sometimes the actor just stands there, sometimes he gives a speech, and sometimes he’ll be given a small role to play, complete with fake business cards. One actor named Jonathan Zatkin was paid to give a speech for the opening of a jewelry store and describe “how wonderful it was to work with the company for 10 years.”

According to Zatkin, “The requirements for these jobs are simple. 1. Be white. 2. Do not speak any Chinese, or really speak at all unless asked. 3. Pretend like you just got off of an airplane yesterday.”

1. Tea Picked By The Mouth Of A Virgin

Here’s a fun sentence: The Jiuhua tea plantation in the Henan Province hires virgins with C-cup breasts to pick tea by grabbing the leaves with their lips and then dropping them into a wicker basket nestled between their breasts.

The women can not touch the leaves or the basket with their hands, and in addition to specifically requesting C-cup breasts, the plantation also requires that the women have no visible scars or wounds. According to the spokesperson for the company, this odd requirement comes from a legend about how the tea used to be picked by the mouths of fairies. With this method, the tea is supposed to be infused with the virility and purity of the virgins, which is then passed on to the person who drinks the tea.

Flying car concept from Volkswagen

No matter how much we advance in technology, lengthening lifespans, creating artificial organs, and plastering touchscreens of all sizes on absolutely everything, it won’t feel quite like the “future” until we can fly to work. That most basic element in depictions of the future, the flying car, has been absent from reality, somehow leaving us unconvinced of how far we’ve come.From Volkswagen, and a young gaming design student from Chengdu city, we get a flying car concept that fits not only our own desires for futurism, but also the closest idea yet to something that will effectively introduce flight into our daily routines.

The car basically has a spherical shape with space for two people inside. It has no wheel and floats a few inches above the ground. The image of the car floating in the middle of the street, when other autos are running on the road, is absolutely amazing. Circular glass discs have been fitted on the two ends of the car and an elongated glass panel has been fixed at the front. The glass and metal bubble looks utterly stupendous.The Volkswagen Hover Car is a pod-like zero-emissions vehicle that uses electromagnetic road networks to float above the road. The small Volkswagen has two seats and a joystick and, to demonstrate how the car would work, a Chinese couple appears to put the flying car to the test around the bustling streets of Chengdu. The two seem reluctant to climb aboard at first, but once they lift-off, they seem to enjoy all the attention the pod car gets.

Chinese man builds his own bionic arms, helps hundreds by selling more

Sun Jifa, a farmer in China, had his life changed forever when an explosive he planned on using for fishing went off prematurely. He lost his arms and when he couldn’t afford high-end, hospital-made prosthetics he opted for a cheaper set. Finding those to be less than acceptable, Sun started building his own pair of arms, which he currently wears. It’s an incredible story of ingenuity and personal strength.

After creating his own pair of arms Sun started building others. Selling functional prosthetic arms for under $500, he saves people from buying the poor quality ones he was forced to use and helps those who are unable to afford professionally-made ones which can cost up to ten times the price. To date Sun has sold around 1000 arms, which means he’s been able to help hundreds of people rebuild their lives after a catastrophe.

While the arms look rudimentary compared to what you may expect (especially once the term “bionic” gets thrown around) the video shows that they are fully functional and don’t hinder their owner from doing manual labor or precise mechanical work (such as making more arms). Sun noted that “[The left arm] transfers power from the natural movement of my elbow into the finger, allowing it to grab and hold… rotating the two bones that I have left in this arm allows my right hand to open and close,” giving us some idea of how they operate.

The mechanisms inside the arms appear to be simple, functional, and versatile, so while the arms lack the life-like nature of the prosthetics produced by a major firm they are still an incredible achievement.

For his effort Sun Jifa has created a thriving business, become local celebrity, and earned international media attention.

The Wave. Between Arizona and Utah – USA

Views of the stunning red rocks on the border of Arizona and Utah. The Wave comes from the sand dunes about 190 million years old who have been turned into stone. These formations arerarely known can only be reached by walking through the journey as far as 3 miles and without a hitch.

Outside: Exploring the swirl

Inside: Navajo sandstone and blue sky