Bampot

Salamanders are the only terrestrial vertebrates that possess the remarkable ability to regenerate limbs or tails. The vast majority of research on vertebrate regeneration is based on the axolotl and has provided great insights on regenerative mechanisms. But how does regeneration proceed in other salamanders with different ecologies and life strategies, and which features are shared or variable?

The axolotl (Ambystoma mexicanum), a salamander native to Mexico, is known for its impressive ability to repeatedly regenerate injured or lost organs and body parts, including parts of the brain, eye, spine, and heart, as well as parts of the tail and complete limbs. The field of regeneration biology is trying to uncover the mechanisms underlying this amazing capacity and for that the axolotl has become the vertebrate model organism over the past hundred years. However, as a so-called neotenic salamander the axolotl is quite special in that it spends its entire life in the water while retaining a number of typical larval characteristics such as external gills and a paddle-shaped tail even as a mature adult.

Air quality in India's capital Delhi has deteriorated to severe and extremely poor levels in the past few days, data shows.

Pollution levels crossed 25-30 times the World Health Organization (WHO)’s recommended safe limit at several locations in the city last week.

Experts have warned that the situation will worsen in the coming days due to weather conditions, use of firecrackers during the festival of Diwali on Thursday and burning of crop remains in neighbouring states.

Delhi and several northern Indian cities report extreme levels of air pollution between October and January every year, causing disruption to businesses, shutting down of schools and offices.

Our ancient ancestors divided their lives into days, following the natural rhythm of the rising and setting Sun. This system worked well for millennia but by the 20th century, scientists made a big discovery: the Earth is actually a terrible timekeeper.

Why? It turns out that no two rotations – no two days – are ever exactly the same length.

There are many factors that can affect the Earth’s spin, including earthquakes. The 2011 quake in Japan – the one that triggered the Fukushima nuclear accident – sped up Earth’s rotation by 1.8 millionths of a second.

The Moon’s gravity also contributes to all of this. It tries to hold our oceans in place, but the Earth continues to turn beneath them regardless. This tidal friction robs the Earth of a little rotational energy, meaning the day is getting longer by about two-thousandths of a second (2 milliseconds) per century.

Scientists have also discovered that so-called megastructures built by humans can also affect the Earth’s rotation. Take the 185m (about 600 feet) tall Three Gorges Dam. Spanning the Yangtze River in Hubei province, Central China, it is the largest dam in the world and is over 2,300m (7,500 feet) in length.

Its vital statistics are dizzying. It was made using 28 million cubic metres of concrete and enough steel to build 63 copies of the Eiffel Tower. It took 40,000 people 17 years to construct, at a total cost of $37 billion (£28 billion). The dam can hold 40 billion cubic metres of water – about 16 million Olympic-sized swimming pools.

While flying saucers and other unexplained phenomena were most likely to be spotted in the North West or the South East, the data shows that the best time to see a UFO last year was on a Monday evening between 9pm and 10pm. The most common sighting was a “star-like” UFO, followed by an orb - with several different witnesses reporting clusters of orbs in the skies across different locations.

Great ape social behavior suggests that kissing is likely the conserved final mouth-contact stage of a grooming bout when the groomer sucks with protruded lips the fur or skin of the groomed to latch on debris or a parasite. The hygienic relevance of grooming decreased over human evolution due to fur-loss, but shorter sessions would have predictably retained a final “kissing” stage, ultimately, remaining the only vestige of a once ritualistic behavior for signaling and strengthening social and kinship ties in an ancestral ape.

A new study from Australia involving over 83,000 participants found that prolonged standing may not improve heart health and could even increase the risk of certain circulatory problems.

Researchers discovered that standing for extended periods did not reduce the risk of heart disease and stroke. In fact, spending too much time either sitting or standing was linked to a higher risk of problems such as varicose veins and feeling dizzy or lightheaded when you stand up.

Phototherapy is provided by machines that resemble tanning beds or that can be smaller devices for hands or feet, but they emit a specific wavelength of ultraviolet light that treats psoriasis effectively without exposing patients to the cancer-causing wavelengths that are found in commercial tanning beds. Phototherapy is often used in combination with pills and biologic therapies for psoriasis (12% of patients were taking these medications during the LITE study).

The TRAPPIST-1 system is exciting because of several Earth-sized worlds within the habitable zone of a red dwarf star, but it's also a dangerous environment, with powerful superflares sweeping past the planets. How would the hardiest Earth life handle that kind of environment? Researchers exposed two types of hardy Earth bacteria to TRAPPIST-1 level flares and found that both could handle it, even without any protective shielding. Life is surprisingly durable.

Home The Paranormal Database is a serious ongoing project to document locations with folkloric, paranormal and cryptozoological connections in the UK, Ireland and the Channel Islands. The site currently features over 14,000 entries; some accounts are recent and other stories reputedly hundreds of years old. This should not be considered a 'paranormal tourism' site - many of these places are private, and as such, the owner's privacy should be considered paramount. Select a region or category below to discover more.

Update to the #paranormal  database include a tranche of tales from Kent and Cumbria, and a spluttering of #spooks across the rest of the isles…

Tales of strange, nocturnal people haunt the region—and so do theories about who they were, from a lost Welsh “tribe” to aliens.

“The legend of the moon-eyed people is not a major part of the Cherokee history and culture,” park manager Stewart confirms.

But white colonists were fascinated by the legend and speculated about who the moon-eyed people could have been. Some believed they were possibly descendants of a fabled community of albino people who were said to have lived in what is now Panama. Others adhered to the idea that the moon-eyed were actually descendants of the mythical 12th-century Welsh prince Madoc ab Owain Gwynedd, who allegedly landed in the Americas near what’s now Mobile, Alabama.

While this version of the story may explain the Welsh connection to the legend, it’s at odds with the stories in Lossiah’s Secrets and Mysteries of the Cherokee Little People. Here, the moon-eyed people are not pale; they have the same complexion as the Cherokee. In Lossiah’s version, the “little people” can be hospitable or sneaky and treacherous, and they’re particularly vengeful when mocked or betrayed, traits that parallel European trickster elves and gnomes.

According to Lossiah, Cherokee tradition taught the importance of respecting the Yunwi Tsunsdi and their territory. “When a hunter finds anything in the woods, such as a knife or a trinket, he must say, ‘Little People, I want to take this,’” she wrote. “Because it may belong to them, and if he does not ask permission, they will throw stones at him as he goes home.”

Amid conflicting tales of mythical Welsh princes, lost tribes, and fairy-like forest creatures, there is one truth we know about the so-called “little people” of Appalachia, says Schexnayder: “The legend of the moon-eyed people shows that we don’t have to go that far back to know that we don’t know anything about where we live.”

The fungal network hidden under fleshy, white king oyster mushrooms doesn’t just sprout elegant appetizers. It can also serve as a keen robotic sensor, helping to pilot a wheeled bot and a squishy, star-shaped hopping one.

Oyster mushrooms’ rootlike mycelial threads generate voltage spikes when flashed with ultraviolet light. In an experiment for Science Robotics, researchers used this process to direct fungal tendrils, grown in a petri dish, to activate robots’ motors via attached electrodes.

These bots join a family of machines known as biohybrids. Successes so far range from a silicone-based jellyfish that uses cardiac cells to propel itself in water to a two-legged robot powered by laboratory-grown skeletal muscle.

The fool's funnel mushroom is also known as the false champignon and can easily be confused with the real champignon. Only when the mushroom is damaged by cutting, cooking or digestion, an enzyme releases the poisonous muscarine from this precursor molecule.

In other mushrooms however, muscarine is already present in its active form. It is not uncommon for organisms to show defense and protective reactions when they are damaged, for example by being eaten by animals.

The mixture of free active and "hidden" inactive muscarine, which only becomes active poison when eaten, increases the danger of certain types of mushrooms such as the funnel mushrooms. These results could help doctors and toxicologists to better assess the actual danger of certain types of fungi and treat poisoning more efficiently.