Herring, Einstein, Clinton, Poets and Numbers

• Herrings break wind to communicate and help form nightly protective shoals. Ben Wilson, a marine biologist says, "We know [herring] have excellent hearing but little about what they actually use it for. . . . It turns out that herring make unusual farting sounds at night." The fish gulp air from the surface which they store in their swim bladders. The herring expel the air from an opening next to their anus and produce a high-pitched raspberry sound. Source.
• Yoda's appearance is based on Albert Einstein. Source.
• In his time as president, Bill Clinton only sent two e-mails. One was an e-mail to astronaut John Glenn aboard the space shuttle. The other was not really an e-mail, but a test to see if Clinton "knew how to push the button on an e-mail." His staff sent 39,999,998 e-mails. Source.
• Dr Kaufman,an assistant professor of psychology at California State University, researched 1,987 deaths of writers. He found that, "[o]n average, poets lived 62 years, playwrights 63 years, novelists 66 years, and non-fiction writers lived 68 years. . . . [But} poets produce twice as much of their lifetime output in their 20s as novelists do." Source.
  
• The Piraha of the Amazon only have tree words for numbers: one, two and many. Peter Gordon, the psychologist at Columbia University in New York City, tried the following experiment. ""Gordon . . . sat opposite an individual and laid out a random number of familiar objects, including batteries, sticks and nuts, in a row. The Pirahã were supposed to respond by laying out the same number of objects from their own pile.For one, two and three objects, members of the tribe consistently matched Gordon’s pile correctly. But for four and five and up to ten, they could only match it approximately, deviating more from the correct number as the row got longer. The Pirahã also failed to remember whether a box they had been shown seconds ago had four or five fish drawn on the top. When Gordon’s colleagues tapped on the floor three times, the Pirahã were able to imitate this precisely, but failed to mimic strings of four or five taps." Source.

These museums are far from average.

The Museum of Bad Art: "[O]ur mission: to bring the worst of art to the widest of audiences."

• The caption for the picture above is: "The flesh tones bring to mind the top shelf liqueurs of a border bistro. With an astonishing emphasis on facial bone structure, the artist flirts with caricature and captures features of Mamma's face which remind us of a Presidential candidate. The upright marionettish pose of the babe hints that the early bond between mother and child is as formal as it is familiar. Good old fashioned parental respect is at the center of this celebration of color and contour."

The Cockroach Hall of Fame Museum in Texas: "A museum of cockroaches that everyone can love."

• The museum has life Madagascar hissing cockroaches and "cockroaches that have been dressed in costumes to portray various themes." Below is Liberoachi.

You may not want to read on if you are squeamish.


The Mutter Museum by the College of Physicians of Philadelphia: "Disturbingly Informative"

• Grover Cleavland's secret tumor
• John Wilkes Booth's thorax
• The "Soap Lady" who died of Yellow fever in the 19th century and whose body has turned into soap.
• The nine-foot colon of a man who only had a bowel movement once a month. A picture can be seen here.
  
• A collection of 2,000 objects that were swallowed and removed without surgery by Dr, Jackson.

The Icelandic Phallological Museum

• "[P]robably the only museum in the world to contain a collection of phallic specimens belonging to all the various types of mammal found in a single country."

The Vrolik Museum in Amsterdam: "over two thousand specimens of humans, mammals, and other vertebrates"

• "Since 1994, 150 specimens of congenital malformations have also been on display."
• congenital malformation: "physical defect present in a baby at birth[.]"
• From what I understand, the babies are in formaldehyde jars.

A few blips of science (reader discretion warned)

Here are a few oddish blips to ponder (Reader discretion is advised):

• Recognize the sheep above? Well it is not an ordinary sheep. It is 15% human, having a sheep body and half-human organs. It is the result of £5million and 7 years of research by Professor Esmail Zanjani of the University of Nevada. He created the sheep by injecting cells from human adults into the fetus of sheep. In the future, he hopes to use these sheep for organ transplants. He would inject stem cells from a donor's bone marrow into a sheep fetus, and in two months there would be a transplantable liver, lung and brain. Source
• Twins are either identical or fraternal, right? Wrong. There is a pair of semi-identical twins. They are identical on their mother's side but only half-identical on their father's side. This means that two sperms fertilized one egg which split. While one of the children is male, the other one is a hermaphrodite, with "both ovarian and testicular tissue." However, genetically, both children have some male and female cells. While their identities are anonymous, they are reported to be healthy and happy toddlers in the US. Source
• Surgeon Vladimir Petrovich Demikhov, chief of the organ-transplanting laboratory of the Soviet Academy of Medical Sciences, ran experiments. In one, he transplanted the head and forelegs of a puppy onto the neck of an adult dog. The puppy "kept its own personality," lapping up milk and yelping. The adult dog first tried to shake the puppy off of its neck, but soon grew reconciled. They both died after 6 days, but other dogs in his series of experiments stayed alive for 2 1/2 months. Here is a movie clip that shows his experiment. Source.
  
• The above scientist inspired a US scientist Dr. White who attached the living brain of one dog to the neck of another dog. the brain stayed alive for several days prompting the question: With the brain being alive, what was it experiencing? Mr. White then moved on to head transplants using rhesus monkeys. While the head acted on its own, it was impossible to connect all the nerve threads, so it was paralyzed from the neck down. He predicted that in the future, brain dead patients could donate their bodies for the heads of paraplegics. Source
• Researching LSD in 1962, the psychiatrist Louis Jolyon West and Chester M Pierce of the University of Oklahoma injected LSD into a male elephant. they believed that LSD would make an elephant go into musth: a condition where elephants "run berserk for a period of about two weeks, during which time {they] may attack or attempt to attack anything in [their] path." They gave a male elephant named Tusko enough LSD for 3,000 people. Sensing Tusko's distress, his mate rushed to his side and tried to support the swaying elephant. 5 minutes later, Tusko collapsed, and approximately 2 hours later he was dead. West and Pierce's take: "It appears that the elephant is highly sensitive to the effects of LSD - a finding which may prove to be valuable in elephant-control work in Africa." Source
• In the 1930s, Robert Cornish of the University of California tried to use seesaws to raise the dead. Injecting adrenaline and anti-coagulants into fox terriers he named Lazarus, 6 minutes after their death he would place them on a seesaw. While some did revive, they experienced blindness and brain damage before dying again within a few hours. He moved on to trying to revive 3 men dead for 5-6 hours. He had no luck. Source.