Pepper inside a pepper

Baby Bell pepper, Capsicum annuum which was found inside an adult pepper. It is unknown what causes smaller peppers to develop inside a fully grown fruit, a rare occurrence.

Photo and text credit MBZ1, via Fresh Photons.

"Stagecoach" Mary Fields

"Stagecoach" Mary Fields was born in March 1832... in Hickman County Tennessee and moved to the Great Falls, Montana area. Fields was the first female African American carrier for the mail service in Montana. She also owned several businesses in Cascade County Montana and drove the stagecoach, hence her nickname. Fields was an extremely popular person in Virginia City, Montana, so much so, that a Virginia City ordinance was enacted that made it legal for her to enter a saloon, a place forbidden by law to any other self-respecting woman, except Mary, not engaged in the honky-tonk business.

Text and image from the Billings, Montana Examiner article about the High Plains Women's Museum, via the interesting Hey to Your Mama N'em blog, via Fuck Yeah, Victorians!

Addendum:  prompted by Ninabi's comment, I tracked down more of Mary Fields' history at Cascade Montana. 

Bucket orchid

From PZ Myers' Pharyngula blog comes the link to this image of a "bucket orchid" (Coryanthes), originally posted at Environmental Graffiti, where you can read about the reproductive strategies embodied in this complex flower (see also the Wikipedia summary).

A hat tip to Mike B, for sending me the link.

The "severed feet" saga continues...

Almost four years ago when a flurry of severed feet started washing ashore in the U.S. Pacific Northwest, I created a severed feet category for this blog, never imagining that I would be writing additional posts on the subject this many years later. 

It's not a fetish for me, and I don't monitor the web for additional incidents or set any Google alerts, but having posted so many stories in the past, I now have a set of readers alert to new developments.  Thus it was that when I took a few days off to attend to family matters, Mike and a couple anons posted comments, and Phil sent me an email - all alerting me to another one of these bizarre incidents.

The severed foot, with a "leg bone" protruding from its running shoe, was discovered on August 30; depending on how the feet are enumerated, this can be considered the 11th incident.  AOL has covered the story (briefly), with a link to a report on the incidents by Rachel Maddow (from August 2010, after the ninth foot was found).  ABC News has a report (via Neatorama). The Vancouver Sun also has a brief article about this most recent incident, and there was some detailed coverage in an apparently undated report in Outside magazine online.  None of these sources have any significant details about the most recent event, which obviously is still under investigation.

My understanding re the huge Japanese tsunami is that it is too early for debris from that incident to start washing ashore in North America (due to arrive in the spring of 2013).

Addendum:  A hat tip to Nathanial Hoodrich for finding a recent article on this subject in the National Post, which included this better map (click for bigger):

Carduelis tristis

Last weekend I hiked with the SWBA group at the Pheasant Branch Conservancy.  We spotted about a dozen species of butterflies, but the highlight of the walk for me came as I was scanning the thistle plants looking for nectaring insects.

One of the thistles was looking back at me.  Only about five feet off the trail, but reasonably camouflaged was the nest of an American Goldfinch:

She remained perfectly immobile for the several minutes it took me to capture her portrait, but when my camera strap jiggled, she fluttered a short distance away, revealing a beautiful nest and her four five eggs:

I am repeatedly in awe of the fact that creatures with no hands can create such intricate structures.  From Wikipedia:

The nest is built in late summer by the female in the branches of a deciduous shrub or tree at a height of up to 10 meters (30 ft). The nest-building lasts approximately six days, during which time the female works in 10–40 minute increments. The male frequently flies with the female as she collects nesting materials, and though he may carry some materials back to the nest, he leaves its construction to the female. The outer shell of the nest is built of bark, weeds, vines, and grass.  The inside diameter of the finished nest is about 6.5 centimeters (2.5 in). The rim is reinforced with bark bound by spiderwebs and caterpillar silk, and the cup is lined with plant down from milkweed, thistle, or cattail. The nest is so tightly woven that it can hold water, and it is possible for nestlings to drown following a rainstorm if the parents do not cover the nest. 

Before I was even out of sight down the trail, she was back on her nest to incubate and hide her precious eggs.

A search for the UK's most multilingual child

To mark the launch of their new language learning courses, Collins and Livemocha – the world’s largest online language-learning community – are searching for the UK’s most multilingual children and students. From 1st June 2011, Collins and Livemocha want to hear from the parents or guardians of children (up to and including the age of 15), and students (aged 16 to 22 years), who are conversant in multiple languages, and believe they have what it takes to be awarded the title of ‘Most Multilingual Child in Britain’ or ‘Most Multilingual Student in Britain’.

In keeping with this quest, Collins and Livemocha have discovered the UK’s leading multilingual adults... Richard Simcott is conversant in a staggering 33 languages. Richard works as the language consultant for eModeration – an international, specialist user-generated content moderation company – giving advice on multilingual projects and providing a QA service for their multilingual work. The list of languages Richard speaks and has studied in any depth are: English (mother tongue); French, Spanish, German, Dutch and Macedonian (near-native level, Richard is often assumed to be a native or bilingual speaker of these languages); Italian, Portuguese, Swedish, Welsh, Czech, Esperanto, Bulgarian and Serbo-Croat (able to communicate thoughts and ideas easily); Danish, Romanian, Russian, Albanian, Greek and British Sign Language - able to converse with speakers at a conversational level and read (intermediate level); Icelandic, Hebrew, Mandarin, Arabic, Thai, Georgian, Norwegian, Luxembourgish, Polish, Estonian, Turkish, Slovene and Latvian (has studied and can communicate these languages at a basic level).

At the Collins website are instructions on how to submit your child's name for this award.

Alfred Hitchcock distinguishes "mystery" and "suspense"

YouTube link. 

From a 1970 AFI seminar.  Via HuffPo.

Google River View

From the Telegraph:

Google team members sail a boat with a 360-degree camera system mounted on a trike on its roof to record Google Street View images of the Amazon on the Negro River, around Tumbira Community, Amazonas State. In partnership with Brazil's Amazonas Sustainable Foundation (FAS), Google's Street View for the Amazon project will capture 360-degree imagery of the Amazon's Negro River...

Does anyone know if they've already photographed other rivers?

Photo: EVARISTO SA/AFP/Getty Images

"Trying to become the fattest woman ever."

From the Telegraph:

Susanne Eman, 32, and her two sons, Brendin and Gabriel, do their weekly shopping trip at the local supermarket in Casa Grande, Arizona. She is trying to become the fattest woman ever. Already 50 stone, she aims to reach a whopping 115 stone by guzzling more and more food every day. 

Photo: Laurentiu Garofeanu / Barcroft Media

An "endangered words" list

Excerpts from a Guardian article:

Aerodrome and charabanc are among the words presumed to have become extinct in the past year, according to lexicographers.

Collins Dictionary experts have compiled a list of words which have fallen out of use by tracking how often they appear. Other words on the list include "wittol"– a man who tolerates his wife's infidelity, which has not been much used since the 1940s.

The terms "drysalter", a dealer in certain chemical products and foods, and "alienism", the study and treatment of mental illness, have also faded from use...

Dr Ruth O'Donovan, asset development manager at Collins Language Division in Glasgow, said: "We track words using a very large database of language which is a very large collection of various texts from spoken and written language, including books, newspapers and magazines so we can track language change over time. "We track new words but we can also track for the frequency of existing words and when they get below a certain threshold we see them as being obsolete, though they may be used in very specialist circumstances."

Other words discussed at the link are cyclogyro, stauroscope, supererogate, succedaneum, and woolfell. I have not found a link to the primary source list of all the words Collins consideres endangered.

How to make a striped omelet

YouTube link. 

WHY you would want a striped omelet is of course a separate question.

The technique requires you to have a "silpat," a "pastry comb," and you have to "dispense siphoned scrambled eggs charged with nitrous oxide."  And the final step of course, as in so many modernist cuisine preparations, is to spread butter on the concoction.

Tissue hypoxia is the trigger for caterpillar molting

As caterpillars grow larger, it is periodically necessary for them to shed their skin (actually their exoskeleton).  When you raise them in captivity, you can sometimes find in the container, mixed with the frass, a complete exoskeleton as shown above (this one may have come from the final morph into the chrysalis stage).  At other times you find just the head capsules (below).

I had never pondered the question of what triggers the caterpillar to molt until I encountered an article this past week at PhysOrg.

The research shows that a baby moth's respiratory system is fixed in size at each stage of development, which limits its oxygen intake. Sensing it is low on oxygen apparently signals to the insect that it cannot continue to grow without proceeding to the next stage of its development, by molting...

In the new study, Nijhout and his graduate student, Viviane Callier, measured the size of the caterpillar's respiratory system. They found that the insect's tracheal tubing is fixed in size at each stage of its larval life. Other parts of the caterpillar's body can grow, but not the respiratory tubing. As a result, the insect eventually begins to suffocate. The only way it can continue to mature is to shed the old tubing for newer, longer ones...

In the new study, she and Nijhout tested oxygen's effects on the caterpillars' body size by placing the larvae into airtight glove boxes and pumping in air with different amounts of oxygen. Under hypoxic conditions, the caterpillars molted at body sizes well below the critical weight. 

Not discussed at the link (though perhaps in the PNAS article) is the question that immediately comes to my mind: what if you raise the caterpillars in a hyperoxic environment?  Would the various instars grow to unusually large sizes prior to molting?  Would the resultant chrysalis and butterfly be extra large?

Does anyone have a tank of 40% O2 they could loan me next summer?

This is not a "fox on stilts"

It's a maned wolf (Chrysocyon brachyurus).  I have never seen one of these interesting creatures before.  Hat tip to 22 Words, where there is more information.

And a hat tip to long-time reader Binho, from Brazil, who sent a link with this info:

The maned wolf's evolutionary relationship to the other members of the canid family makes it a unique animal. Electrophoretic studies did not link Chrysocyon with any of the other canids studied.

One conclusion of this study is that the maned wolf is the only survivor of the late Pleistocene extinction of the large South American canids. Fossils of the maned wolf from the Holocene and the late Pleistocene have been excavated from the Brazilian Highlands...

The maned wolf is not closely related to any other living canid. It is not a fox, wolf, coyote, dog, or jackal, but it is a distinct canid.

The irony of wearing a Guy Fawkes mask

Stark white with blushed pink cheeks and a wide grin, the mask resonates with the hackers because it was worn by a rogue anarchist challenging an authoritarian government in "V for Vendetta," the movie produced in 2006 by Warner Brothers.

What few people seem to know, though, is that Time Warner, one of the largest media companies in the world and parent of Warner Brothers, owns the rights to the image and is paid a licensing fee with the sale of each mask...

Indeed, with the help of Anonymous, the $6 mask has become one of the most popular disguises and -- in a small way -- has added to the $28 billion in revenue Time Warner accumulated last year. 

Via the StarTribune.  Photo credit: Jacquelyn Martin, Associated Press.

Addendum October 2011:  The BBC has just posted a long report entitled "V for Vendetta masks: Who's behind them?"

How to make a "turtle bridge"

All that's needed is a little pile of gravel to prevent turtles from dying of dehydration when they get trapped between railroad tracks. This SciFri video explains the need and the solution.