- That's one small step for rabbit penises, and potentially one giant hop for restorative surgery. An experiment that gave rabbits lab-grown penises capable of fathering offspring won the most votes in msnbc.com's 2010 Weird Science Awards contest. Cells of penile tissue were grown on scaffolds of cartilage. When the creations took on the right shape, they were grafted onto rabbits that had their penises removed. After the transplants, the rabbits were able to breed ... like rabbits. The procedure could someday be used to heal humans as well. The photos at right show an experimenter working on the penile tissue, and an X-ray image of the restored penis.
A researcher injects cells from a rabbit's penile erectile tissue into a scaffold (top photo), a procedure which results in a functional rabbit penis (bottom photo).
Click "Next" to see the nine other Weird award-winners for 2009-2010, and click on the highlighted links to learn more. - Fruit bats get kinkyResearchers report that female Chinese fruit bats use oral sex to prolong the pleasure for their partners. The study suggests that there may be an evolutionary advantage to at least some types of kinky sex in the animal world. But can you imagine being the researcher with the job of watching bat porn?Tan et al. / PLoS ONE
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Is the future trying to avert our doom?Why did it take so long to get the world's most powerful particle-smasher up and running? Two scientists suggested it might be because the Large Hadron Collider was about to create phenomena so catastrophic that the future sent a cosmos-altering signal back in time to disrupt its operation. The research wasn't taken all that seriously when it came out, and since then the LHC was restarted without incident.Martial Trezzini / AP
- Octopus builds mobile homeIt sounds like a spin-off from "The Little Mermaid" or "Spongebob Squarepants": An octopus builds a mobile home under the sea by stacking up coconut shells. It moves in ... and then it carries the whole heap across the seafloor. "It was an extremely comical sight," said marine biologist Julian Finn, who spotted the behavior off the Indonesian coast. "I never laughed so hard underwater." Let's just hope those clever cephalopods don't develop opposable thumbs. That won't be such a laughing matter.R. Steene
- Researchers clone dogs that glowAwww, how cute! South Korean scientists cloned a litter of genetically engineered dogs that glow red under ultraviolet light. Like an earlier experiment involving glowing cats, this isn't aimed at creating glow-in-the-dark pets. Rather, it's a proof of concept for procedures that could help develop treatments for genetic diseases in humans. If you can add the coding to make fluorescent protein, maybe you can add the coding to fix a genetic flaw.Seoul National University / AP
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Gay penguins make good dadsGerman zookeepers in Bremerhaven had a problem on their hands when penguin parents rejected one of their eggs. To solve it, they placed the egg in a nest shared by two male penguins. The pair is one of three same-sex couples that have tried to mate at the zoo. The males incubated the egg for 30 days and continued to care for the chick after it hatched. Homosexual behavior has been documented in many animal species. "Sex and coupling in our world don't always have something to do with reproduction," the zoo said.Focke Strangmann / AP
Video: Msnbc.com's Dara Brown reports on the gay penguin parents. - Huge blob lies deep beneath NevadaYou wouldn't know it by driving through the Great Basin in Nevada, but researchers have detected a huge blob of highly compressed rock that is dripping like honey, extending from a depth of about 47 miles to at least 310 miles beneath the surface. The blob is 30 to 60 miles across, scientists say. But don't worry, Nevadans: This blob isn't expected to cause earthquakes - or rise up and destroy Las Vegas.J.D. West / Silverheels Photography
- Nude 'Mona Lisa' surfacesArt historians have long suspected Leonardo da Vinci painted more than one version of his famous "Mona Lisa," and now a painting with much more Mona has surfaced. The painting, which portrays its subject nude from the waist up, had been hidden for almost a century within the wooden walls of a French cardinal's library. Experts are looking into whether this particular work, now on display in the Tuscan town of Vinci, was actually painted by the master.Museo Ideale Leonardo Da Vinci
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Galileo's fingers and tooth foundWas that any way to treat a genius? Back in 1737, Galileo Galilei's admirers removed three fingers, a vertebra and a tooth from the astronomer's body when his corpse was being moved to a new tomb. The vertebra and one of the fingers were recovered soon afterward, but the whereabouts of the tooth and the other two fingers were a mystery. Recently, however, the relics turned up in a container that was auctioned off to a private collector. Now the Galilean body parts, including the finger shown at right, will be put on display at the Museum of the History of Science in Florence.AP
- Fragrances pay tribute to dead celebs' DNALet's get one thing straight: MyDNAFragrance's "Antiquity" line of perfumery will not make you smell like Marilyn Monroe did when she was alive, and certainly not like her mortal remains. Rather, the "Marilyn" fragrance is mixed up from ingredients that are coded to capture the "essence" of the movie star's mitochondrial DNA. Other scents pay tribute to Albert Einstein, Joan Crawford, Katharine Hepburn, Michael Jackson and Elvis Presley. The company behind the scents says the process is "very scientific," but others might well conclude that the whole exercise smells like a gimmick.Hulton Archive / Getty Images file
Click here for the 2009 Weird Science Awards
Unfiltered raw news for the reader without the bullshit censured in other places; with a lot of those “ conspiracy theories” that are being proved we are correct
Thursday, November 15, 2012
Explainer: The 2010 Weird Science Awards
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