Two headed turtle

NORRISTOWN, Pa. - A two-headed turtle captured by a turtle collector is a rare example of a conjoined-twin birth, its owner said.

The turtle would have likely died in the wild because it swims awkwardly and would be an easy target for predators, according to Jay Jacoby, manager of Big Al's Aquarium Supercenter in East Norriton.

The store bought the tiny turtle from the collector for an undisclosed price and will keep it on display, he said.

The 2-month-old turtle, known as a red-eared slider, fits on a silver dollar. It has two heads sticking out from opposite ends of its shell, along with a pair of front feet on each side. But there is just one set of back feet and one tail.

The turtle is seemingly healthy, and the species can live 15 to 20 years, Jacoby said. The turtle has not yet been named.

The same exotic-turtle collector sold another Big Al's store a conjoined-twin turtle about 20 years ago, Jacoby said. The man lives in Florida, but he declined to identify him.

Dancing bird (snow ball)

Dancing bird--snow ball:-

Snowball, the dancing sulphur-crested cockatoo, is a big hit on YouTube--and now he's also a scientific sensation. Researchers have shown that the bird, who bobs his head and lifts his legs to the Backstreet Boys' song Everybody, is in fact listening to and following the beat. The findings--detailed in a pair of articles--challenge the notion that only humans have the neural wiring for dancing in time to music. "These are pathbreaking studies," says Bruno Repp, a cognitive psychologist at Haskins Laboratories in New Haven, Connecticut.

Aniruddh Patel remembers the first time he saw Snowball on the Internet. A neurobiologist at the Neurosciences Institute in San Diego, California, Patel had argued in an earlier study that our talent for moving synchronously to a rhythmic beat is tied to our ability to learn and mimic sounds. "It seems to be a byproduct of a link between the auditory and motor parts of the brain," he says. That seemed to rule out most animals except humans and parrots. Nevertheless, Patel was stunned to see Snowball's video. "My jaw hit the floor," he says.

To see if the cockatoo was actually in the groove and not simply trained, Patel visited Snowball at his Indiana home. He put the bird through the paces of a controlled experiment, speeding up and slowing down the music's tempo. Snowball wasn't fazed. "He adjusted the tempo of his dancing to stay synchronized to the beat," says Patel. To do so, he "must be monitoring the sounds" and changing his bobbing and kicking as the musical beat speeds up or slows down. The same neural abilities are required to imitate sounds, explains Patel, whose team reports its findings online today in Current Biology.

In a companion paper, another team revealed a similar talent in 14 species of parrot and in Asian elephants. This time, the star was an African gray parrot named Alex (now deceased). Although well-known for his ability to mimic sounds and English, Alex had never been tested for musical ability. When Adena Schachner, a graduate student in cognition at Harvard University, played a tune for him, the parrot began rhythmically bobbing. Like Snowball, Alex also changed his beat as the music changed.

That spurred the authors to look for other musically talented animals. They analyzed more than 1000 YouTube videos of dancing animals, including dogs, cats, chimpanzees, elephants, and birds, to see which individuals were actually moving synchronously with the beat and responding correctly if the beat changed. Only vocal mimics--primarily parrots, as well as one Asian elephant--could do so, the team discovered. (One elephant has been shown to imitate truck noises (ScienceNOW, 23 March 2005), a sign of vocal mimicry.) "It does seem that vocal mimicry and keeping a beat rely on the same neural mechanisms," says Schachner.

Now, "for the first time, we have animal models for investigating the neurobiology and evolution of human music," says Patel. But he also notes that parrots haven't been shown to dance to a beat in the wild, even to the songs of their courtship displays.

Perhaps they just need to be inspired by the Backstreet Boys.

The First sex Robot Of The World

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Men who never sleeps !!

Have you ever imagined a life where you wanna sleep ,but you can't !! well, that would be the worst nightmare for anyone.A rare disease called "Fatal Familial Insomnia" can make this nightmare becoming a true story.it is a rare curse that affects about 40 families around the world. It is caused by prion diseases (mutated proteins) which can affect both humans and animals.Here is one true story of Fatal Familial Insomnia.

Shortly after his 40th birthday in 1991, Michael Corke, a music teacher from Chicago, began having trouble sleeping. In the following weeks, the insomnia grew worse and his health rapidly deteriorated. Eventually he couldn’t sleep at all.The doctors were baffled but could do nothing for him. Michael was physically and mentally exhausted, and wanted nothing more than to be able to fall asleep. But his brain wouldn’t let him.He soon started to look like an old man from a fit and healthy individual he was just months earlier. doctors diagnosed him with an extremely rare genetic disorder called "Fatal Familial Insomnia" .

Michael Corke died in hospital after six months from a complete lack of sleep.

Symptoms of Fatal Familial Insomnia:

• Severe insomnia, worsening panic attacks and hallucinations, lasting for five months.
• Complete insomnia and rapid weight loss, lasting for three months.
• Dementia and unresponsiveness, lasting for six months. FFI is eventually fatal.

Causes of Fatal Familial Insomnia:

Fatal Familial Insomnia is caused by a dual mutation in a gene that codes for proteins. The tell-tale sign of prion diseases is an insoluble protein that causes plaque to develop in the thalamus. This is the region of the brain responsible for the regulation of sleep, as well as sensory and motor systems.

As the plaque "eats away" at the brain, the sufferer loses the ability to shut down at night. This manifests in the form of insomnia. The resulting symptoms of FFI are caused by the complete lack of REM and NREM sleep, proving that sleep is vital to everyone.

Treatments for Fatal Familial Insomnia:

Currently there is no treatment for this , however sleeping peels only worsen the problem.

One Step Closer to Invisibility Cloak Invention

How would you like to feel like Jessica Alba’s character in those “Fantastic Four” movies?

According to the researchers at the University of California in Berkeley, they are one step closer to developing an “Invisibility Cloak“. There’s already an existing material which can bend light around 3D objects – to make them ‘invisible’.

The developers of the technology are already excited that they are on the right track – so we just have to wait and see when we can actually get to be invisible.

Scientists say they are a step closer to developing materials that could render people and objects invisible. This feat is accomplished by using Metamaterials able to reroute light, forcing light around objects like water flowing around boulders in a stream. The waves of light come in and are swept around the cloak and reconstructed on the other side while avoiding the interior region, so it looks as if they just passed through free space. Watch out guys, someone maybe standing just next to you, invisible!

3D invisibility cloak made out of metamaterials

The Invisibility Cloak is finally out! Scientists investigating potential methods for rendering physical objects invisible to the human eye have now moved to the full three-dimension. The Karlsruhe Institute of Technology has developed a photonic metamaterial that can make things disappear when viewed from all angles, advancing from previous light refraction methods that only worked in 2D.

The invisibility cloaks are not really turning anything invisible, but rather playing tricks with the light, misdirecting it so that the objects they encase cannot be seen. Normally, the cloaks only work in two dimensions, so just by changing your point of view a bit, the cloak will become obvious, and the hidden object can be seen—a limitation scientists want to overcome. The 3D cloak in this case is made of woodpile-structured photonic crystals that can redirect light of wavelengths around the size of the crystals' rod spacing.

While crystals tailored to the visible range would hardly fool the human eye, a infrared cloak could probably fool a security detection system pretty easily. At any rate, it could at least make the object it covers look more like an anomaly than an approaching threat.

See-Through Vision Invented

Scientists have figured out how to "see" through opaque barriers by unscrambling what little light passes through.

The reason you can't see through thin materials such as dry paint, eggshells, paper, or skin is because any light that manages to pass through them is scattered in complicated and seemingly random ways.

However, it's actually possible to project light through such opaque materials and reveal objects hidden behind them, according to a new paper by scientists at the City of Paris's Industrial Physics and Chemistry Higher Educational Institution (ESPCI).

The trick is knowing exactly how materials alter light that enters them.

In experiments, the researchers shone a green laser beam at a roughly 80-micrometer-thick layer—that's 80 thousandths of a millimeter—of zinc oxide, a common ingredient in white paints. On the unseen side of the zinc layer were a series of tiny dots.

By analyzing the patterns of light that came through, the physicists generated a complex model called a transmission matrix—essentially a formula decoding the seemingly chaotic way light travels within the opaque material.

By applying the formula, the researchers say, they were able "translate" the green light coming through the zinc oxide, resulting in a digital camera image of dots in shades of green—revealing exactly what was behind the "wall."

The team is now attempting to make out far more complex images of familiar objects, though they're awaiting publication before giving specific examples, ESPCI physicist Sylvain Gigan told National Geographic News.

The see-through vision isn't perfect, though, since a lot of light never makes it through to the other side of the opaque material. In more complex, future experiments, this missing "information" might result in grainy images, said Gigan, who co-authored the new study.

Sorry, Peeping Toms

The technology will probably never be any good for looking through walls, said physicist Allard Mosk at University of Twente in Amsterdam.

"Looking through a hundred-millimeter [four-inch] wall would be a million times more difficult than looking through a hundred-micrometer layer of paint," said Mosk, who wasn't involved in the new research.

But the method might one day be used to peer into bodies, study co-author Gigan said. The system, though, would need to be thousands of times faster than it is, to compensate for all the scattering generated by the movement of living tissue.

Still, it may become possible to look through several millimeters of skin, the University of Twente's Mosk said. "I think that is still far off but not unrealistic to hope for."