The Weird Science Drop #7 🧪 Suspicious mind control
🕷 Tampering with spider DNA 🐧 Penguin poop to save us all 👨🚀 Five seconds on Uranus 👀 Plus, how to solve a Rubik's Cube
“Hvordan har du det?* Welcome to issue #7 of The Weird Science Drop. If you could control minds, what would you do? Well, this week’s weird scientist got close to inventing a remote control for people. And his ultimate vision was a chilling one. Strap yourself in, it’s going to be a bumpy ride!
Daniel
Weird Science News ✍
🕸 German scientists have been busy creating genetically modified spiders. I don’t even need to say where this will end up. They’ve been fiddling with the DNA of your average friendly neighbourhood house spider to make all manner of weird arachnids, including a spider with no eyes and another that can spin fluorescent red silk. Why have they done this? Well, errr, ‘because they can’ appears to be the best reason. Although it also highlighted the power of a gene-editing tool called CRISPR-Cas9, while raising the possibility of harvesting spider’s silk, famous for being as strong as steel but a lot more bendy. Read more on Science Alert
🌕 A treasure trove of fossils has been discovered in a long-lost world now hidden beneath the sea off the coast of Indonesia. A stretch of water between the islands of Java and Madura hides a 140,000-year-old sunken prehistoric continent known as Sundaland (who, if my knowledge of sports is right, will be playing in the Premier League next season). Among the relics recently recovered are skull fragments from a Homo erectus, plus bones from Komodo dragons, buffalo, deer, and a now-extinct genus of elephant-like herbivore known as Stegodon. Read more on The Daily Galaxy
🐧 The fight against climate change has just recruited an unlikely ally - penguin poop. A new study has discovered that a chemical released from penguin excrement boosts cloud formation, which reflects sunlight, and so cools things down. Antarctica is particularly under threat as the Earth heats up, and so any way of battling the rising temperatures would be welcomed. It turns out penguins release lots of ammonia through their droppings, which interacts with sulfur-bearing gases emitted by microscopic algae that thrive in the surrounding ocean to form tiny aerosol particles that grow into clouds. Read more on Word Today News
🔋 I’d say the one thing holding back the human race at the moment is battery life - or the lack of it. Be that your phone, laptop or car, most things in the modern world are at the mercy of the crusty old lithium battery. Seventies tech trying to power the 21st Century. Rather than being seduced by AI features few of us want, a tech company that could crack the puzzle of keeping your mobile going longer would hit the jackpot. And finally, we might have some hope. Scientists have created a battery that lasts 5,700 years without needing to be recharged. They’ve used a type of radioactive carbon embedded in a diamond structure to generate a steady trickle of electricity over millennia. Imagine a life free of charging cables! Read more on Earth.com
🌋 A secret Russian military base on an otherwise deserted volcanic island in the north Pacific that caused the sun to turn blue gives me strong James Bond villain vibes. Even if the nuclear submarines upped and left for good some 30 years ago, Simushir is still the home of something that changed the world and could do so again. The five-mile island features four volcanoes in a row, one of which is the site of one of the largest eruptions in recorded history that cooled the average temperature of half the planet by 1C. This caused crops to fail, widespread famine, and much political instability. For a long time, scientists knew that a big volcanic bang occurred in 1831, but were having trouble tracking down the culprit until they finally came across Zavaritzki on Simushir. Read more on Live Science
Weird Scientist - Jose Delgado 🧠📻
Psychologists always make me nervous. When I meet a mind scientist I’m always thinking they can look into my soul. And no one wants that. However, there is one in particular we’d all have swerved if seen at a party back in the day.
Jose Delgado was a graduate who went on to be given a prestigious professorship at Yale University. So far, so respectable. But it was what he got up to in America in the 50s and 60s that gave the game away he might have loony leanings.
He was super interested in mind control. In that he wanted to control minds. Jose started off by inserting electrode implants into the brains of primates and using a remote control that gave off radio frequencies to make the animals perform complicated movements.
The next step was implanting a similar device into the brain of a bull. To show he walked the walk, he then got into the ring with the beast and used his transmitter to stop it charging before it reached him.
What next? Yep, you guessed it, people. Good old Jose wired up 25 poor humans in an attempt to control them. In the end, his device only impacted people's aggression rather than giving him total power over them, but he kept striving for the rest of his career, once creepily musing…
"We must electronically control the brain. Someday armies and generals will be controlled by electric stimulation of the brain."
Yikes!
Doomsday Watch - oxygen comes and goes 🚅
The clock’s ticking on life on Earth. It’s only a case of when and not if it gets wiped out. No need to panic, though, as we’re talking about aeons into the future. By that time, humankind will either be spread throughout the stars or a long-forgotten note in the planet’s long history.
How will life come to a full stop? Well, scientists have come up with a new final chapter by looking into the past. We currently enjoy a healthy supply of oxygen but that wasn’t always so and one day it will revert back to air that’s rich in methane instead.
This shift - which will happen quite suddenly - would take the planet back to something like the state it was in before what's known as the Great Oxidation Event some 2.4 billion years ago.
It’s interesting to note, however, that oxygen levels can go up as well as down. For a spell around 300 million years ago, the gas rose above 30% of the atmosphere and super-sized invertebrates. This resulted in some truly large and freaky prehistoric creepycrawlies such as giant dragonflies with a wingspan of up to 75cm, millipedes almost three metres long and fearsome scorpions 70cm long. Not the kind of things you’d like to meet down a dark alley.
Photo of the Week 📷
Astronomers have seen something very familiar through their telescopes - a galaxy dating way back in the universe's history that is shaped just like our Milky Way. The distant galaxy, called J0107a, was observed as it appeared 11.1 billion years ago, when the universe was about a fifth of its current age. Its spiral structure with a straight bar of stars and gas running through its centre is very reminiscent of home. Read more on Daily Sabah
For your eye holes 👀
Infographic Magic 📊
Cool Quote 🗣
“The most exciting phrase to hear in science, the one that heralds new discoveries, is not ‘Eureka’ but ‘That's funny...’”
Isaac Asimov
Weird Science Factoid 🤯
If you lined up all the planets side by side they would fit in the space between the Earth and the Moon. So if you think about it, the solar system is really empty.
Weird Science Fries on the Side 🍟 (aka the best of the rest)
Archaeologists finally crack origin mystery of Tibet’s ‘ghost ancestors’
Cancer-fighting immune cells could soon be engineered inside our bodies
Scientists Uncover DNA Puzzle: 6,000-Year-Old Remains Reveal Mysterious Ancestors
Missions to Mars with the Starship Could Only Take Three Months
What did you miss? More from The Weird Science Drop 👀
Brain broken
Supercharge your sorry
Talking to the Almighty
The most-visited links from the last newsletter 👆
Archaeologists confirm first 'hybrid child' showing human-Neanderthal interbreeding
Scientists Are Pretty Sure They Found a Portal to the Fifth Dimension
* How you doing? in Norwegian
About The Weird Science Drop 🚀
Science is weird, and here’s the proof. The Weird Science Drop goes where other, more-sensible newsletters fear to tread. Every week, we grab our trusty white lab coat, bunch of bubbling test tubes and world-ending robot prototype to go in search for the overlooked, under-the-radar and, above all else, most madcap science news, views and research.
About me 👴
Daniel Smith is an old experienced journalist who has worked for a host of news publishers on both sides of the Atlantic. A long, long time ago, he fancied himself as an astrophysicist but instead turned out to be the worst scientist since the man who mapped out all those canals on Mars that turned out to be scratches on his telescope's lens. Luckily, he is now not working on the Large Hadron Collider inadvertently creating a black hole that would swallow the world by pressing the big red button but is safely behind a desk writing this newsletter, bringing you the fantastical underbelly of nature... The Weird Science Drop.
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