Thursday, January 20, 2011

More found than lost...



The title that immediately sprang to mind for today's blog was "Lost and Found." But then I thought about it, and the three stories I have today are more about found than lost. Which, when you ponder further, is definitely the cooler side of those opposites.

The YouTube video above came from Yahoo! News. Todd Bieber, a film-making New Yorker, found a canister of black and white film in Brooklyn's Prospect Park after the last blizzard. Out of curiosity, he developed the negatives and found a trove of exceedingly good images, seemingly taken by two men here in the US on vacation. Bieber made a video to post online in hopes of finding the men who lost the film.

Recently there was a spate of weird fish and bird deaths in the southeastern United States. I never found out if they decided on a recent for the mysterious genocide, but I was heartened by another Yahoo! story, one highlighting the discovery of a new species of crayfish in Tennessee. The sucker literally crawled out from under a rock and is five inches long, which is like twice the size of "normal" crayfish.

And now from something new to something very, very old. PhD candidate Brian Schubert found 34,000-year old bacteria living inside salt crystals. The crystals, dug up for climate research from Death Valley years ago, apparently grow very quickly and trap whats around them. The microorganisms suspended themselves in hibernation in the fluid inside the salt crystals but got right back to work reproducing and functioning after being released from the salt.

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