Stannous Flouride's Book of Truthiness

Japanese GPS artist Yasushi Takahashi – a.k.a. “Yassan” spent half a year creating the world’s largest marriage proposal, and also holds the Guinness Record for the world’s biggest GPS drawing at 7,164 kilometers long.

Yassan managed to cover the 7,164 kilometers in six months, mostly by foot but sometimes by car, ferry, or bicycle.

Each place that he passed through was planned beforehand to get the gigantic phrase just right.

The journey and the video were made six years ago, but the story of Yassan’s proposal is still pretty heartwarming. It was recently featured in a new documentary ad campaign series called The Walkumentary Series by hiking shoes maker Hi-Tech:

Archeologists have discovered many noisemakers that were used by the Aztecs. Made of clay, turkey feathers, sugar cane, frog skins and other natural materials – each one likely served a specific purpose.

Conch shells, for instance, were sounded at the beginning of ceremonies, while hunters used animal-shaped ocarinas to produce grunts that lured deer.

But it is the death whistle that generates the strongest reactions, because of the creepy sound it makes when blown into.

Give it a listen and imagine the sound of hundreds of them blown by warriors storming your city:

Here’s a YouTube video of musician Xavier Quijas Yxayotl blowing into a carved jade one:

“I want to share with you this very unique instrument,” he says before starting his macabre solo. “We call this the ‘death whistle’ that the Aztecs used for special ceremonies – for Day of the Dead celebrations, and also they use when they have a war, when they fight with other tribes. They play over a hundred instruments, a hundred death whistles marching to cause a big psychological effect to the enemy.”

Friends-

That sound when you bite down on Doritos? That’s the sound of rainforests being “crunched” to make way for massive palm oil plantations in Southeast Asia. Workers, and even children, are trapped in modern slavery on the plantations. Forests and peatlands are burned to the ground, driving endangered species like orangutans to extinction and polluting the Earth’s atmosphere with gigatons of greenhouse gases — all to make palm oil.

Doritos’ parent company, PepsiCo, could put a stop to the deforestation. But instead of leading the charge, PepsiCo is hanging back, issuing middling policies with gaps so big a parade of endangered pygmy elephants could fit through them.

Tell Doritos-maker PepsiCo to be bold and help save the rainforest.
Will you show your support for this issue by signing the petition?
http://action.sumofus.org/a/doritos-palm-oil/3/?sub=mtl.

Thank you!

A visual collage of ideas of greatly varying quality:

From a very entertaining site called Mommy Shorts, see more here:

30 New Members of the Picky Eaters Club

But… but…but that would mean the oil industry has been lying to us!
That would never happen, I’m sure.

COLUMBIA, Mo. –Recent discussions of fracking have centered on potential air and water pollution from chemicals used in these processes and how it affects the more than 15 million Americans living within one mile of these operations.

Susan C. Nagel, a researcher with the University of Missouri, and national colleagues have conducted the largest review to date of research centered on fracking byproducts and their effects on human reproductive and developmental health. They determined that exposure to chemicals released in fracturing may be harmful to human health in men, women and children and recommend further scientific study.

“We examined more than 150 peer-reviewed studies reporting on the effects of chemicals used in UOG (Unconventional Oil and Gas extraction) operations and found evidence to suggest there is cause for concern for human health,” said Nagel. “Further, we found that previous studies suggest that adult and early life exposure to chemicals associated with UOG operations can result in adverse reproductive health and developmental defects in humans.”

The reviewers concluded that exposure to air and water pollution caused by UOG operations may be linked to health concerns including infertility, miscarriage, impaired fetal growth, birth defects and reduced semen quality.

“There are far fewer human studies than animal studies; however, taken together, the studies did show that humans can be harmed by these chemicals released from fracking,” Nagel said. “There is strong evidence of decreased semen quality in men, higher miscarriages in women and increased risk of birth defects in children.

http://munews.missouri.edu/news-releases/2014/1205-chemicals-released-during-natural-gas-extraction-may-harm-human-reproduction-and-development/

A compound which in tests has eliminated the malaria parasite from the bloodstream in 48 hours is moving on to human testing. A single dose medicine which works so quickly may be the way around the malarial parasites’ ability to adapt and evolve drug resistance.

An international research collaborative has determined that a promising anti-malarial compound tricks the immune system to rapidly destroy red blood cells infected with the malaria parasite but leave healthy cells unharmed. St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital scientists led the study, which appears in the current online early edition of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

“Mushrooms are prolific chemical factories, yet only a few of their peptides are poisonous,” he said. “These toxins survive the high temperatures of cooking and the acids of digestion, and yet they’re readily absorbed by the bloodstream and go directly to their intended target. These are the exact qualities needed for an effective medicine.”

Amanita phalloides, commonly known as the death cap, is a deadly poisonous basidiomycete fungus, one of many in the genus Amanita.

A team of Michigan State University scientists has discovered an enzyme that is the key to the lethal potency of poisonous mushrooms. The results, published in the current issue of the journal Chemistry and Biology, reveal the enzyme’s ability to create the mushroom’s molecules that harbor missile-like proficiency in attacking and annihilating a single vulnerable target in the human liver.

Walton and his teammates disassembled one of its poisonous peptides, which can be compared to a laser-guided missile with a nuclear warhead.By removing the molecular equivalent of the deadly warhead, they now have a sturdy, precise delivery system that can supply medicine — rather than poison — to a single target. By taking a laser, rather than a shotgun approach, scientists could develop medicines capable of curing disease without the patient suffering any side effects.

If my explanation is too simplistic you can read the published paper,
Peptide Macrocyclization Catalyzed by a Prolyl Oligopeptidase Involved in α-Amanitin Biosynthesis.
here:
http://www.cell.com/chemistry-biology/abstract/S1074-5521(14)00381-0

This simple design, found among Homo Erectus fossils from 500,000 years ago, is the oldest art ever discovered.

New analysis of an engraving excavated from a riverbank in Indonesia suggests that it’s at least 430,000 years old—and that it wasn’t made by humans. At least it wasn’t made by Homo sapiens.

Rather, the earliest artist yet found appears to have been one of our ancestral cousins, Homo erectus.

Homo erectus on Java was already using shells of freshwater mussels as tools half a million years ago and, as shown here, as a ‘canvas’ for an engraving. An international team of researchers, led by Leiden archaeologist José Joordens, published this discovery on 3 December in Nature. The discovery provides new insights into the evolution of human behavior.

By applying two dating methods, researchers at the VU University Amsterdam and Wageningen University have determined that the shell with the engraving is minimally 430,000 and maximally 540,000 years old.This means that the engraving is at least four times older than the previously oldest known engravings, found in Africa.

“Until this discovery, it was assumed that comparable engravings were only made by modern humans (Homo sapiens) in Africa, starting about 100,000 years ago,” said the researchers.