The Story of the Lonely Whale Will Break Your Heart

Once upon a time, there was a whale called June. Or maybe her name is Margaret. Or Kate. We don't really know. A few nitrogen-hearted scientists call her 52 Hertz just because she sings at a 51.75Hz frequency, but I will call her Alice.

Alice isn't like any other baleen whale. Unlike all whales, Alice doesn't have friends. She doesn't have a family. She doesn't belong to any tribe, pack or gang. She doesn't have a lover. She never had one.

In the immense solitude of the ocean, Alice is completely alone.

The only thing Alice does is sing. Like other whales, she has been singing for a very long time. The first time we heard her song was in 1989, when the hydrophone network of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration recorded her voice for the first time. The researchers at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution have been tracking her using these hydrophones for the last two decades.


Her songs—in this recording accelerated by a factor of five—come in groups of two to six calls, lasting for five to six seconds each. But her voice is unlike any other baleen whale. It is unique—while the rest of her kind communicate between 12 and 25Hz, Alice sings at 51.75Hz.

You see, my dear humans, that's precisely Alice's problem. No other whales can hear her. Every one of her desperate calls to communicate remains unanswered. Each cry ignored. And with every lonely song, Alice becomes sadder and more frustrated, her notes going deeper in despair as the years go by.

Nobody knows why this is happening. Nobody knows why Alice is going through the wrong paths instead of following the usual baleen whale's migratory channels. Some think that she might be a weird hybrid, one of a kind. Maybe she—or he, as we don't really know the whale's sex—is the last member of her species. Perhaps there was a mutation. Who knows. Who cares—the explanation doesn't matter.

Whatever the reason is, the sad fact is that there's no happy ending to this tale. Alice keeps roaming the big blue, eating krill, seeing other creatures around her but unable to communicate with any of them. And one day, the NOAA hydrophones will record Alice's unique voice one last time. And again, that farewell cry will get no reply. But it will not matter this time because, at last, Alice would be sad no more.

Bizarre Sex Laws From Around the World!

The Incredible Story of a Dog Named Wall-E Who Resurrected Himself After Being Put Down

That cute little dog, now named Wall-E, isn't supposed to be alive. He (along with the rest of his littermates) was abandoned in front of a shelter and since the shelter didn't have any room to care for him, was put to sleep.

Wall-E was euthanized twice, with lethal injections to both his heart and limbs, and was pronounced dead after a stethoscope test. They discarded Wall-E and the other dogs in a trash dumpster and moved on.

But! The story doesn't end there. Amazingly, the next day Wall-E wasn't dead. He was somehow resurrected, alive and kicking. Hell, he was healthy as can be, walking around inside the dumpster (his littermates all died) and just doing dog things. An angel dog they called him. A survivor, a fighter and a medical miracle.

Did Dr. Richard B. Hoover Just Discover Alien Life?

So the methane organisms discovered in that hostile little lake in California weren't such a big deal after all. No harm, no foul—they were at the very least interesting. Interesting, but nothing like this: Dr. Richard Hoover, as astrobiologist with NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center, claims he's found alien life.

Real alien life. Not weird Earthbound extremophiles or hints of the building blocks of life that are really just errant specks of dust on the lens of a telescope. Life, and not of this Earth.

If Dr. Hoover's paper detailing the find holds up to scrutiny, we can finally, truly say it: We are not alone.

In fact, if Dr. Hoover's paper holds up to the incredibly thorough peer review currently taking place around it, life may in fact be pretty boring and downright common in the grand scheme of the universe.

So what, exactly, did Dr. Hoover find? It's pretty mind-blowing, actually: Contained within nine extremely rare meteorites called CI1 carbonaceous chondrites he discovered what he believes are the fossils of common bacteria that's both similar and nothing like what exists on our planet. In addition to being extremely rare, these meteorites are also some of the oldest in our solar system.

"The exciting thing is that they are in many cases recognizable and can be associated very closely with the generic species here on earth," said Hoover in an interview with Yahoo News. Some of the fossils, however, are quite odd. "There are some that are just very strange and don't look like anything that I've been able to identify, and I've shown them to many other experts that have also come up stump."

More specifically, Hoover claims to have discovered traces of filaments and remnants of algae-like organisms called cyanobacteria. Another find was similar to a bacterium called Titanospirillum velox. They were very Earth-like and unremarkable save for one important difference: They lacked nitrogen.

This caveat is important, as the lack of nitrogen indicates the samples are "the remains of extraterrestrial life forms that grew on the parent bodies of the meteorites when liquid water was present, long before the meteorites entered the Earth's atmosphere," he said.

Hoover is being incredibly open about his paper. As stated above, peer scrutiny has already begun, to the tune of 100 experts who have started dissecting his work in advance of its official publication. A broader, more general invitation was issued to a further 5,000 scientists as well, making this one of the most vetted scientific papers ever. This vetting is a good thing, as Hoover has made claims like this before with other meteorites that ultimately did not pan out.

Should the paper hold up, however, the game is well and truly changed. We are not just "not alone," we are common.

Update: Counterclaims calling the journal a joke and the science suspect have already begun.

Update 2: Bad Astronomy, a blog I read often due to its insightful author and spot-on commentary, debunks this news even more. Sigh.

The Devastating Health Impacts of a Nuclear Crisis

The Japanese authorities have announced that radiation levels surrounding the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant are increasing to potentially harmful levels. New Scientist investigates the health risks associated with nuclear power plant explosions.

How do nuclear accidents impact health?

Apart from the damage caused by fires and explosions, accidents also release radioactive materials which can cause radiation sickness. Radiation exposure above a certain threshold, usually only received by workers and emergency teams in a stricken plant, causes acute radiation syndrome within hours of exposure. Depending on the dose of radiation this ranges from skin rashes, vomiting and diarrhoea, to coma and death.

Radiation damages DNA, especially as it assembles in dividing cells. That means tissues which contain many dividing cells, such as the gut lining, skin and bone marrow, are most at risk of damage. High enough doses also damage brain cells and such doses are invariably fatal.

Less severe damage can be treated, however. Gut damage disturbs fluid balance and can lead to blood infection; marrow damage means no blood cells are produced for clotting and fighting infection. If those problems can be managed, people can be kept alive long enough for gut and marrow to regenerate. A cloned human hormone that boosts white blood cell production sometimes helps; there is little else.

Fears of nuclear terrorism have recently inspired more funding for research into new treatments, most aiming to limit cell death in damaged tissues.

What radioactive elements are being released at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant?

As nuclear cores melt down, reacting nuclear fuel creates many different radioactive elements, all with different toxic effects. Results from previous accidents at nuclear power plants suggest that inert gases such as xenon and krypton are likely to be released, together with iodine-131, two isotopes of caesium, and possibly strontium, tellurium and rubidium.

What effect do these elements have on the body?

Exposure to any radioactive material is bad: the US Nuclear Regulatory Commission assumes that exposure to anything higher than normal background levels increases health risks.

Xenon and krypton are not retained by the body so they have little effect.

Iodine-131 and caesium are more damaging, however. Iodine is actively taken up by the thyroid gland to make hormones. If iodine-131, which emits beta particles, is taken up, this can damage DNA and cause thyroid cancer.

Following the Chernobyl nuclear reactor explosion in Ukraine in 1986, more than 6000 people developed thyroid cancer, probably after drinking contaminated milk as children, according to an investigation by the UN released in February. For unknown reasons iodine-131 does not seem to affect adults.

These cancers can be prevented if children are given pills containing the non-radioactive isotope of iodine soon after exposure. These saturate the thyroid with safe iodine and stop it taking up the radioactive kind. Most children did not get these pills after Chernobyl. They are now being distributed in Japan.

Vast amounts of caesium-137 were distributed across 40 per cent of Europe's surface after Chernobyl. Environmental levels remain elevated in wildlife, with restrictions still in place on eating some sheep farmed in the UK, and game and mushrooms from elsewhere. However, exposure to environmental caesium-137 from Chernobyl has never been linked conclusively to any direct health effects in people, although researchers are divided over whether there is no effect, or just not enough data to say.

How do the nuclear reactor explosions happening in Japan compare to previous nuclear disasters?

The crisis at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant is the worst nuclear accident since Chernobyl in Ukraine in 1986. However, so far it seems more likely to resemble the Three Mile Island (TMI) accident in Pennsylvania in 1979 which, like Fukushima, lost coolant and had a partial meltdown.

So far, the release of radioactivity at Fukushima appears to be closer to what happened at TMI than at Chernobyl. The huge plume of smoke from Chernobyl spread radiation over most of Europe and forced evacuation within a 30-kilometre radius. The gases that escaped TMI, in contrast, might have travelled as far as New York state, but most stayed within 15 kilometres of the plant.

US authorities have found little evidence of any health damage after TMI. But Joseph Mangano of the Radiation and Public Health Project, a pressure group, claims that deaths from disease have been 26 to 54 per cent higher among young people who were fetuses or babies living downwind of the accident than among local but less exposed people.

He blames the absence of a solid conclusion on poor data on where radionuclides went, and who was exposed to how much. The same arguments will dog Fukushima, unless the data collection is better this time.

Now This Is How You Retrieve Two Massive Solid Rocket Boosters from the Ocean!

I still can't believe this is the first up-close, 480p video of NASA retrieving the space shuttle's two solid rocket boosters (SRBs) from the Atlantic Ocean, and yet it is! The SRBs are, in a word, massive. And they float!

Obviously, right? How else would NASA retrieve these two huge towers of propulsion from the ocean once the space shuttle no longer needs them to achieve orbit around the Earth?

Once the boosters are retrieved by the two teams (Liberty Star and Freedom Star) and a gaggle of divers, they are sent to Utah to be refurbished and stored.

This particular pick-up followed the final launch of Discovery on February 24. Listen for the loud "plunk-plunk" when the second boat gets set to begin the retrieval process.

Qatar Will Use $500,000 Artificial Clouds for the World Cup

When I heard that World Cup 2022 was going to be in Qatar, I was confused like everyone else. Isn't it deathly hot over there? But they've got a solution: to make artificial clouds (something Bill Gates has wanted to do) to cool down the temperature.

Apparently, the artificial clouds, developed by scientists at Qatar University, are made from a "lightweight carbon structure carrying a giant envelope of material containing helium gas." There are four solar-powered engines that will move the "cloud" (via remote control) to block the sun and make the temperature playable. This is cool! But this will also happen in 2022, a whole 11 years from now where we'll likely be using an iPhone 16 (which hopefully by then, will have its own artificial cloud) and seeing a dominant US soccer team win the damn thing. One or the other, at least.