Grow your own bike

On the outskirts of Lusaka, Zambia, next year's crop of bicycles is being watered by Benjamin Banda.

"We planted this bamboo last year," he says, "and now the stems are taller than me. When it's ready we'll cut it, cure it and then turn it into frames."

Mr Banda, is the caretaker for Zambikes, a company set up by two Californians and two Zambians which aimed to build bikes tough enough to handle the local terrain.

Meet your new masters, Earthlings

A single mega-colony of ants has colonised much of the world, scientists have discovered.

Argentine ants living in vast numbers across Europe, the US and Japan belong to the same interrelated colony, and will refuse to fight one another.

The colony may be the largest of its type ever known for any insect species, and could rival humans in the scale of its world domination.

In Europe, one vast colony of Argentine ants is thought to stretch for 6,000km (375 miles) along the Mediterranean coast, while another in the US, known as the 'Californian large', extends over 900km along the coast of California. A third huge colony exists on the west coast of Japan.

Nuclear blimpicide

I wouldn't have thought it was necessary to detonate a 19 kiloton nuclear weapon to see what it would do to an airship, but that's just what the US Department of Energy did on 7 August 1957. . .

In 1960, the Bureau of Naval Weapons issued a report on the airship tests, entitled "Structural Response and Gas Dynamics of an Airship Exposed to a Nuclear Detonation". The abstract reveals that the aim was to see how an airship employed on anti-submarine duties -- the USN was still using these into the 1960s -- would fare after dropping a nuclear depth charge.

Clearing away the old for the Games in Delhi

Delhi attracts migrants from all over India (as well as some like me, from the rest of world) and is now the most cosmopolitan and fastest-growing of India's large cities. . .

It is also visibly preparing for its next moment of anxiously anticipated glory, the Commonwealth Games of 2010.

Unsurprisingly, then, there are construction sites all over the city. But despite this extraordinary speed of development, Delhi remains both the leafiest and most archaeologically impressive of the world's megacities.

Stupidest caption ever

Today's NY Daily News headline: "Long before Michael Jackson died, pop star looked barely alive".

So far, so good.
Below the picture, though, runs the caption: "Michael Jackson suffered cardiac arrest, a condition that can lead to death if not treated within five minutes, according to doctors". Oy gevalt.

Poison gas for Tokyo, poison darts for Berlin

British officials considered attacking Tokyo with poison gas in 1944, more than a year before the United States dropped two atomic bombs on Japan.

Documents made public today include a memorandum written by a government academic entitled Attack on Tokyo with Gas Bombs. His report was coupled with a note from the Ministry of Supply, dated May 22, 1944.

A war strategy to shower enemy troops with tens of thousands of poisoned darts that could bring death in minutes. . .

Details, revealed today in secret documents released by the National Archives, outline the gruesome physical effects of such an attack on Nazi troops.

The papers also show how the Government tried to rope the Singer Sewing Machine Company into supplying the needles.

The concept, developed between 1941 and 1945, involved darts carrying a sufficient amount of poison to cause 'death or disablement'.

More the 30,000 of the darts could be stored in cluster bombs, which could be dropped onto enemy troops from an aircraft at 3,000ft, according to the file entitled Research Into Use Of Anthrax And Other Poisons For Biological Warfare. Death of a target would occur in 30 minutes if the darts were not removed quickly.

Chili grenades?

Indian defence scientists are planning to put one of the world's hottest chilli powders into hand grenades.

They say the devices will be used to control rioters and in counter-insurgency operations.

Researchers say the idea is to replace explosives in small hand grenades with a certain variety of red chilli to immobilise people without killing them.

Scanning the mummies

A long line of hospital staff wraps around the corridor outside a small conference room in New York to catch a glimpse of the precious cargo.

Inside are the three frail bodies in open wooden crates causing all the commotion. Another body -- a prince no less -- is a few rooms down in a computer tomography scanner.

The bodies are part of the Brooklyn Museum's collection of 11 Egyptian mummies, transported to the North Shore University Hospital to be scanned.

Crop circles discovery

Australian wallabies are eating opium poppies and creating crop circles as they hop around "as high as a kite", a government official has said.

Save the whales -- shoot a seagull

The BBC reports, with slideshow:

Whales off the coast of Argentina have acquired a new enemy - seagulls. The gulls have learned to feed on the whales by landing on their backs and just pecking away the skin and blubber. . . .

Thoughts on the new Acropolis Museum

Michael Kimmelman discusses the Acropolis Museum and its implications for the dispute over the Elgin Marbles. Notable quote from writer Nikos Dimou, regarding the paradoxical nature of modern Greek identity:

"We used to speak Albanian and call ourselves Romans, but then Winckelmann, Goethe, Victor Hugo, Delacroix, they all told us, 'No, you are Hellenes, direct descendants of Plato and Socrates,' and that did it. If a small, poor nation has such a burden put on its shoulders, it will never recover."

Very early music

Archaeologists reported Wednesday the discovery last fall of a bone flute and two fragments of ivory flutes that they said represent the earliest known flowering of music-making in Stone Age culture. They said the bone flute with five finger holes, found at Hohle Fels Cave in the hills west of Ulm, was "by far the most complete of the musical instruments so far recovered from the caves" in a region where pieces of other flutes have been turning up in recent years.

End of the line for Kodachrome

I love Kodachrome, but I've shot so little of it for so many years now. Nothing like Kodachrome 25 and 64 -- my standbys during my art history grad student days.

Eastman Kodak Co., the photography pioneer whose Kodachrome film inspired Paul Simon's 1973 hit of the same name, said it will retire the 74-year-old product this year after sales dwindled and most labs stopped processing it.

Revenue from Kodachrome represents "a fraction of one percent" of Kodak's total sales of still-picture films, the company said today in a statement. Kodachrome became the world's first commercially successful color film in 1935, Kodak said

Anne Frank's 80th birthday

The Anne Frank House museum says it will put the teenage Holocaust victim's diaries and other writings on permanent display to commemorate what would have been her 80th birthday on Friday. . .

Until now her posthumously published diaries and other works have been kept in an archive at the Netherlands Institute for War Documentation. Some have previously been displayed at the museum, which encompasses and preserves the "Secret Annex" — the tiny apartment above a canal-side warehouse where the Frank family hid for two years.

Return of the lituus

Cutting-edge computer modelling software has enabled a long-lost, trumpet-like instrument to be recreated – allowing a work by Bach to be performed as the composer may have intended for the first time in nearly 300 years. . .

Following its use to improve trombone design, the software has been deployed to help the Schola Cantorum Basiliensis (SCB), who asked the University to recreate the instrument, which is called the Lituus – even though no-one alive today has heard, played or even seen a picture of this forgotten instrument.

Godzilla-maru!

How do you drill several kilometers into the Earth's crust -- at sea, in waters themselves kilometers deep?

The first thing that strikes you when the Chikyu comes into view is the drill derrick, which stands 100m above the deck - the tallest ship-borne rig in the world.

Festooned from it are cables a handspan thick, and huge pieces of yellow machinery, all connected with the core business of sending a drill bit deeper into the Earth than has ever been done at sea.

Chins up, sauropods!

. . . after studying X-rays of members of 10 different vertebrate groups, Dr Taylor is convinced that when they were not reaching down for a drink, the sauropods stood with their heads held very high indeed.

With their necks aloft, like giraffes, the dinosaurs would have towered up to 15m above the ground.

Dr Taylor and his colleagues found that the necks of mammals and birds - the only modern groups that share the upright leg posture of dinosaurs - are "strongly inclined" vertically.

"Our approach was embarrassingly straightforward," said Dr Taylor. "We looked at real animals, and at the whole animal."

Paul Barrett, a palaeontologist from London's Natural History Museum, thinks the sauropods were likely to have been able to lift their heads high, but he remains unconvinced that would have been their "resting posture". . .

"Sauropods are bizarre," he told BBC News. "There is no living animal built in the same way."

So, although the study of living animals' skeletons is very valuable, he added, "finding a model to explain the biology of these creatures is not that easy"

In praise of hand work

The visceral experience of failure seems to have been edited out of the career trajectories of gifted students. It stands to reason, then, that those who end up making big decisions that affect all of us don't seem to have much sense of their own fallibility, and of how badly things can go wrong even with the best of intentions (like when I dropped that feeler gauge down into the Ninja). In the boardrooms of Wall Street and the corridors of Pennsylvania Avenue, I don't think you'll see a yellow sign that says "Think Safety!" as you do on job sites and in many repair shops, no doubt because those who sit on the swivel chairs tend to live remote from the consequences of the decisions they make. Why not encourage gifted students to learn a trade, if only in the summers, so that their fingers will be crushed once or twice before they go on to run the country?

Vietnamese art mess

How many of the paintings displayed at the Vietnamese National Museum of Fine Arts in Hanoi are originals and how many are copies? . . .

It is well known among Vietnamese artists that the museum has been hanging works of art that are in fact copies of very famous Vietnamese paintings as some of the originals were either sold or lost. . .

Now no-one is certain what has happened to the originals, but it is thought that some were sold by officials and are now in private hands or in galleries around the world.

Artists themselves were asked by the museum to copy their own paintings, and now no-one knows for sure which are original and which are copies.

Fast train travel: back to the 1930s

Train-buff friends have long regaled me with unflattering comparisons of the fast trains of the '30s with their present-day counterparts:

The aforementioned Montreal Limited, for example, circa 1942, would pull out of New York's Grand Central Station at 11:15 p.m., arriving at Montreal's (now defunct) Windsor Station at 8:25 a.m., a little more than nine hours later. To make that journey today, from New York's Penn Station on the Adirondack, requires a nearly 12-hour ride. The trip from Chicago to Minneapolis via the Olympian Hiawatha in the 1950s took about four and a half hours; today, via Amtrak's Empire Builder, the journey is more than eight hours. . .

Obama's bold vision obscures a simple fact: 220 mph would be phenomenal, but we would also do well to simply get trains back up to the speeds they traveled at during the Harding administration.

Vitamins vs exercise

So many people still think that vitamin C helps against colds; others pop vitamin E supplements, putting their faith in antioxidants -- even as that particular credo is crumbling:

About forty healthy young male volunteers took part in the study, which involved four weeks of identical exercise programs. Half of the volunteers were already in athletic training, and half weren't. Both groups were then split again, and half of each cohort took 1000 mg/day of vitamin C and 400 IU/day vitamin E, while the other half took no antioxidants at all. So, we have the effects of exercise, plus and minus previous training, and plus and minus antioxidants.

And as it turns out, antioxidant supplements appear to cancel out many of the beneficial effects of exercise. Soaking up those transient bursts of reactive oxygen species keeps them from signaling.

ADDENDUM: Another study showing widespread Vitamin D deficiency here.

Lenovo Thinkpad X61 hard drive replacement

My just-over-a-year-old Thinkpad's hard drive abruptly started giving a loud "clack clack clack" sound and became unusable. I let it cool down and tried again, only to get the same loud clicking and no boot. Called Lenovo for a replacement drive and a set of disks to restore the system (not supplied with the computer, and I hadn't burned a set since the X61 doesn't have an optical drive), and picked up an external DVD burner in preparation. While waiting for the replacement drive, tried the computer again, and this time it started up fine. Putting an ice pack over the hard drive, I quickly made a full backup to an external hard drive and burned restore disks as well.

Lenovo sent me a used drive as a replacement, and it came screwed into a metal slide that must have been for some other model of notebook. The slide had to be removed before I could install the drive, which was annoying. Then I found that the restore disks from Lenovo didn't work; perhaps not surprising, since they were labeled as being for the older X60 series. Luckily, the boot disk I had burned when my defective drive came back to life worked just fine, and I was then able to do a full restoration of my hard drive and all its contents from the backup.

The procedure was straightforward, but neither the Lenovo website nor extensive Googling gave me definitive, step-by-step instructions -- so here they are, for all of you who may need to replace or want to upgrade your Thinkpad's hard drive:

Use the Thinkvantage Rescue and Recovery utility to make a full system backup to an external hard drive. Go to Start > Programs > ThinkVantage > Create Recovery Media (for XP) and burn recovery disks, if you haven't already. If you have any encrypted partitions, format them after moving their contents elsewhere. Restart and press F1 on startup to go into Setup; change the boot order so that the external DVD/CD drive is on top. Open the tray on your external DVD/CD drive and leave it open. Shut down your computer, disconnect the power cord (none of this should be done on battery power), remove the battery, and do the hard drive swap. Put the battery back in place, put the bootable recovery startup disk in the external DVD/CD drive and close it up and plug it in, and plug in the external HD with your system backup. From here on it's easy. Turn on the power, and the computer should boot to the recovery utility. Follow the instructions, and all should go remarkably quickly. Note that you will not be given the option of restoring from a backup if you start without having plugging in your external HD first -- the only option shown will be a fresh installation of the factory original contents, which of course can be done with the other recovery disk(s) you burned before starting out.

Michelangelo to the Kimball

In an extraordinary coup, the Kimbell Art Museum has acquired the earliest known painting by Michelangelo, one of only four easel paintings by the Renaissance master in the world.

The Kimbell's purchase, The Torment of Saint Anthony (1487-88), will be the only painting by Michelangelo Buonarroti (1475-1564) to enter the permanent collection of a U.S. museum.

Museum of Scientifically Accurate Brain Art

Chaperoning my daughter's recent class trip to the Boston Museum of Science, I was quite taken by a knitted model of a human brain on display. I had somehow missed this writeup about its creation from earlier in the year. It's also on display online -- in excellent company -- at the Museum of Scientifically Accurate Brain Art.

Where, oh where, did my basking shark go?

The migration patterns of basking sharks have long mystified marine biologists, but new research has finally revealed where the world's second-biggest fish hide out for half of every year. . .

Using new satellite-tagging and a new geo-location technique, the researchers found that basking sharks make long migrations through tropical waters of the Atlantic Ocean during the winter, traveling at depths of 200 to 1,000 meters.

The researcher's data show that the sharks sometimes stay at those depths for weeks or even months at a time.

"In doing so, they have completely avoided detection by humans for millennia," Skomal said in the report.