Funky fungus puts hair on your chest

Don't blame me--blame the Associated Press for this awful pic, via IO9

Or at least that's what grown ups used to say to me to get me eat things that looked repulsive. I'm not sure why they thought that would work. All I know is there's nothing anyone could say to get me to eat this stuff. It's just about exactly what zombie brains would look like if I had to imagine them without the benefit of this horrifying photo.

According to a new study (or a really disgusting practical joke) the stuff is called "corn smut" (classy!) and contains lots of nutrients for making your bones healthy and your skin young and fresh. Sounds like a pact with the devil you say? Irony is way ahead of you my friends--it's also known as (gulp!) DEVIL'S CORN!

IO9 has the dirt on the fungi. Or something.

In Mexico, the fungus is called huitlacoche, and it's already considered a delicacy. But U.S. farmers, and the U.S. government, have spent millions of dollars to eradicate the blight and develop "smut-resistant strains" of corn.

It also has...

....beta-glucens, a soluble fiber that helps you cut your cholesterol. So it's actually better for you, and could turn out to be more valuable on the market, than the corn it "ruins."

Yeah, don't be surprised if it takes a while to catch on. Like never!

• More corn smut info than you can burn off with gasoline
• Here's a guy who was crazy enough to taste it out a can (it comes in cans?!) 

A choice quote from the Steve Don't Eat It! series of posts on The Sneeze:

Don't worry, I checked the ingredients before I tasted it. "Smoker's lung" was not on there. Before I even got the whole can open, I detected a vague aroma of sweet corn, along with what I can only describe as a deep musky funk. Put 'em together and it smells like corn that forgot to wipe.

Wow. Be sure to check out his site for even more repugnant photos and all the gory details. Bon Appetite!

Space Junk Threatens to Smash Us to Bits!

Image: space junk that fell to Earth on a farm in Australia in 2008. Ouch! Via: Sydney Morning Herald

Well judging by what the news has to say, there's plenty of actual space junk to keep me inspired for many more Random Space Finds posts. NASA even set up an office and full-time junk tracker to keep an eye on all that detrius. Wired has an excellent feature story on the pollution of space--at least that space immediately around our planet and the man charged with tracking it all, Donald Kessler. He wrote a paper clinching the argument for keeping one eye on the sky that painted a "nightmare scenario". Here's some choice quotes:

Spent satellites and other space trash would accumulate until crashes became inevitable. Colliding objects would shatter into countless equally dangerous fragments, setting off a chain reaction of additional crashes. “The result would be an exponential increase in the number of objects with time,” he wrote, “creating a belt of debris around the Earth.”

At age 38, Kessler had found his calling. Not that his bosses had encouraged him to look into the issue—”they didn’t like what I was finding,” he recalls. But after the paper came out, NASA set up the Orbital Debris Program Office to study the problem and put Kessler in charge. He spent the rest of his career tracking cosmic crap and forming alliances with counterparts in other nations in an effort to slow its proliferation. His description of a runaway cascade of collisions—which he predicted would happen in 30 to 40 years—became known as the Kessler syndrome.

Image: actual map of space junk orbiting our Pig Pen-like planet, via Discovery.com 

Kessler is now in his 70s and he was of course proven frighteningly correct. And just in case you were skeptical about how much space crap is floating around up there:

The operations center moved quickly to double its computer capacity. By early 2010, it was keeping a close eye on 1,000 active satellites, 3,700 inactive satellites and rocket pieces, and another 15,300 objects the size of a fist or larger—a level of awareness that revealed a much higher daily average of 75 possible collisions. And that’s ignoring the danger posed by the estimated half-million smaller pieces of debris the size of a marble or larger. Too small to track from the ground, each of those tiny projectiles is capable of severely damaging a satellite.

There's even a testing range in White Sands, NM that tests how dangerous our leftovers in the black can be:

...technicians operate a cannon that uses gunpowder and pressurized hydrogen to fire plastic slugs at shields and panels. Just like real space junk, the projectiles can approach speeds of 5 miles per second. [Emphasis mine, as if it need it!]

Duck and cover folks!

• Read the whole, fascinating article on Wired.com.
• Oh, and a quick rundown on Discovery.com about what the government plans to do about it.
• Here's more on that poor guy in Australia pictured above.

50+ Ways to Die in a Cave

Snakes, why is it always snakes? Hey, that's no. 44!

To be precise, it's 52 Ways to Die in a Cave by author James M. Tabor.  Personal favorites:

30. Animals eat rope (easy, just cover the rope in poison!)
29. Chemical contamination of rope (doh!)
32. Hair caught in rappel rack (ow.)
42. Asphyxiation by methane, carbon dioxide, blast fumes, etc. (Death by blast fumes! \m/ )
45. Struck by lightning while in cave stream (really? that can happen?)
27. Rappel into pit without ascent gear (this is a metaphor for a lot of things actually)
18. Rope cut by falling rock (that's just so unfair)

...and #52 (drum roll, please!)....

Stuck in crevice!  (how perfectly banal)

And then there's a disturbingly great amount of ways to die by whatever crappy gear you've brought along that failed to secure/protect you. Great.

Via Boing Boing.

What you should be watching: documentary TV as inspiration

I'm an unabashed lover of science and historical documentaries on TV, be they productions of PBS, the History Channel, Discovery, the Science Channel, etc. There's a lot out there these days to draw inspiration from--even the wacko programs on Ancient Aliens and Nostradamus that are filled with pseudoscience and the weakest of "facts" are still fun "info-tainment". I thought I'd share a list of my favorites along the spectrum of fact, fiction, and things-in-between:

Hard science and world-renown experts...

The Universe (History Channel) 
Chock full of great topics with experts like Neil Degrasse, director of the Hayden Planetarium at the Museum of Natural History / Rose Space Center in NYC.

NOVA (PBS)
Speaking of Dr. Degrasse, he hosts PBS's most venerable, and longest-running science program. Never disappointing and Dr. D is probably one of the most enigmatic hosts since the late Dr. Sagan.

How the Earth Was Made (History Channel)
Another wonderful show focusing on more than geology or volcanology but really a whole slew of Earth sciences (meteorology, oceanography, biology, thermo-dynamics, etc.). My favorite so far has been the recent episode on Iceland (timely!) which described the birth of the island of Surtsey in 1963, off the southern coast. An island the literally "arrived" via volcanic gestation.

Into the Universe with Stephen Hawking (Discovery Channel)
Arguably the smartest man in the (known) universe, Dr. Hawking has made quite a splash in recent episodes of his program about extra-terrestrials and the search for life in the universe. Into the Universe is a fantastic program that gives the topic of cosmology the beauty, grace, and raw intellect it so much deserves.

Planet Earth (Discovery Channel / BBC)
One of my all-time favorite programs. I own the DVD and it's spectacular documentation of the natural world at this time in history is superb. It sets a new standard in TV documentaries not only in cinematography but in scope--covering every continent and type of environment the planet has to offer. From Wikipedia:

To capture all the footage required by the producers, 71 cameramen and women filmed in 204 locations in 62 countries on all seven continents, spending more than 2000 days in the field

If there is any program here you must see, this is the one. A sequel series Life is now airing on Discovery in the US.

Speculative, but still credible...

Life After People (History Channel)
By now you've likely figured that I watch too much History Channel, and while I can't completely deny that, most of these episodes I caught on On-Demand. This program takes current pop-culture's post-apocalyptic fascination and tries to visualize for the viewer what a post-people world would look like months, years, centuries, and millennia after we're long gone. A really intriguing topic with plenty of credible experts in the Earth sciences as well as metallurgists and investigative experts.

Cities of the Underworld (History Channel)
This is another great show that's filled with plenty of factual and historical background on underground hideouts, lairs, tunnels, and more, hosted by actor Dan Wildman. I've put it into "speculative" if only because many of the wonderful stories are often based on a combination of myths and local legends--to be fair though an expert archeologist is always featured. The show was recently discontinued on the History Channel, but I'm certain it will pop up (if it hasn't already) on DVD soon.

Hardly credible, fun as hell...

Ancient Aliens (History Channel)
This show wanders dutiful (and happily, I might add!) into science fiction territory, but it's filled with so many great ideas--and so well constructed that it's impossible not to watch. My only regret is that the network's current audience may take much of this for fact. Frankly, I've gone to bed paranoid a few times already! ;)

Honorable mention...

Sci Fi Science: Physics of the Impossible (Science Channel)
I've only watched an episode or two online since we don't dropped the Science Channel from our subscription package (I still miss it...) but Sci Fi Science has a lot to appreciate in the way of using the hard sciences to explain how science fiction concepts could work. File this under "speculative" if you need to put it on the spectrum. It's hosted by Dr. Michio Kaku one of the world's leading astro-physicists and author of one of my favorite cosmology books, Parallel Worlds: A Journey Through Creation, Higher Dimensions, and the Future of the Cosmos. He's the Science Channel's default host for many of their mainline shows, including a series that previously aired on the topic of his book.

Ancient Monster Hunters (History Channel)
One of my favorite single-episode docs that traces the origins of the mythological beasts such as the cyclopes, and griffins in antiquity as told through the paleontologists, archeologists, geologists, and biologists who've done the dirty work. The griffin segment is particular fascinating. It airs occasionally, but your best bet is to monster-hunt a copy down.

This is just a sampling of what's out there to gorge your eyeballs on. I'm a big fan of ancient history (particularly Egyptian) as well as paleontology--and there's just too many to name, including many one-off specials--but hopefully this list gets you started. So, what are your favorite documentary programs to pull ideas from for stories, games, or whatever gets your gears turning? 


Let us know in the comments!