New Yorkers beware! New cockroach hits the Big Apple
NEW YORK (AFP) – New Yorkers are used to fighting each other for space, but there may be a new contender in town according to a Rockefeller study that appears to have uncovered a new species of cockroach.
“The cockroach is genetically modified. Species don’t differ more than one percent, this cockroach is four percent different, which suggests it is a new species of cockroach,” Professor Mark Stoeckle, an expert on genomics and DNA barcoding at Rockefeller University, told AFP.
“We think that the museums of natural history in Paris or New York could be interested.”
The previously-unidentified creepy-crawly was uncovered as part of a project undertaken by two high-school students, Brenda Tan, 17, and Matt Cost, 18, under Stoeckle’s supervision.
In their roles as “DNAHouse investigators,” the pair trawled New York apartments, stores and street, collecting 217 specimens between November 2008 and March 2009.
They took samples from supermarket food, the remains of an insect found in a box of fruit, a feather from a duster, dried dung and a cockroach and matched DNA sequences using the Barcode of Life Database and GenBank.
The American Museum of Natural History laboratory identified 170 genetic codes, leading the researchers to identify 95 different animal species, including some that were unexpected.
“A feather from a duster yielded ostrich DNA. A delicacy labeled ‘sturgeon caviar’ instead turned out to be from the strange-looking paddlefish. A popular Asian snack was revealed as giant flying squid. Bison DNA was found in a dog biscuit,” the pair wrote on the Rockefeller University website.
In fact, they found that 16 percent of food items were mislabeled, including cheeses labeled sheep’s milk that were actually made of cow’s milk, a potentially dangerous labeling error for those with allergies.
But perhaps the biggest surprise for the researchers was the discovery of “a genetically distinct ‘mystery’ cockroach that might be a new species.”
“By appearance it looks like the American cockroach (Periplaneta americana) but it is genetically different from other American cockroaches in the databases,” the researchers said.
The Frankenstein MAME cabinet — it's alive!
It’s cool enough to build your own MAME (multiple arcade machine emulator) cabinet – imagine having thousands of classic games ready to play. Mix in a little monster-movie magic and some steampunk styling and you have yourself a fantastic toy, albeit a pretty large one.
The only thing I can think of that it’s missing are some Tesla coils – now that would be a show-stopper!
See the project at Frankencade (via Gizmodo).
Blood Energy Potion, authentic looking synthetic blood drink in a transfusion bag
Thirsty at twilight – or after reading or watching Twilight? Slake your blood-lust by grabbing a transfusion bag of Blood Energy Potion, the best bloody drink around!
Vampires, zombies, witches and more – the culture of horror seems to have been given a shot in the arm. Speaking of which, Urban Collector’s Blood Energy Potion looks frighteningly like a fresh transfusion bag of people juice, so much so that we’re sure some overzealous Goth will attempt to infuse it IV style.
That would be unwise, because although Blood Energy Potion looks like blood, has the same viscosity as blood, has the same nutritional composition as blood and comes in a resealable plastic bag designed to emulate a Red Cross blood transfusion bag, it’s NOT blood.
Blood Energy Potion does, in a similar vein (sorry), provide 4 hours of energy, protein and electrolytes plus it’s a "delectable source of iron" and doesn’t contain garlic.
See the full article at Inventor Spot.
Lawn Chairs in Times Square
Native New Yorkers were a tad confused today when they learned that Broadway was shut down between 42nd Street and 47th Street over the long weekend. A new traffic pattern was put in place and a huge number of lawn chairs were placed to give Times Square tourists a place to sit.
Why toddlers don't do what they're told
New cognitive research shows that 3-year-olds neither plan for the future nor live completely in the present, but instead call up the past as they need it. ‘There is a lot of work in the field of cognitive development that focuses on how kids are basically little versions of adults trying to do the same things adults do, but they’re just not as good at it yet. What we show here is they are doing something completely different,’ says professor Yuko Munakata at the University of Colorado at Boulder.
Munakata’s team used a computer game and a setup that measures the diameter of the pupil of the eye to determine mental effort to study the cognitive abilities of 3-and-a-half-year-olds and 8-year-olds. The research concluded that while everything you tell toddlers seems to go in one ear and out the other, the study found that toddlers listen, but then store the information for later use. ‘For example, let’s say it’s cold outside and you tell your 3-year-old to go get his jacket out of his bedroom and get ready to go outside,’ says doctoral student Christopher Chatham. ‘You might expect the child to plan for the future, think "OK it’s cold outside so the jacket will keep me warm." But what we suggest is that this isn’t what goes on in a 3-year-old’s brain. Rather, they run outside, discover that it is cold, and then retrieve the memory of where their jacket is, and then they go get it.
Source: Slashdot.
