BEARSCARE

A disturbing story is coming out of a Washington, DC suburb in Virginia. Apparently, a house cat was so upset with her owners’ purchase and use of a new vacuum cleaner that she lept off a balcony and fell 15′ feet onto a faux-wood floor. The attempt was unsuccessful and the cat, named Snickers (pictured below), holed up under a sofa for over two hours after the fall. Reports are coming in now that she’s moved to an old chair. Keep checking back.

My fellow bearscarers, today marks our fourth year of ONLINE DOMINANCE OF BEAR RELATED CONTENT. Let’s all give ourselves a pat on the back.

And guess what? I received a letter from President Obama a few days ago which was marked not to be opened until today. It reads:

“Bearscare is a valuable resource for all Americans. Often when I begin to veto a bill, just before I squiggle the “3″ part of “B”, I catch myself, and my breath, sit back in my high-backed executive chair and reflect. Then I go to bearscare.org to clear my mind and actually learn something new.” With the election year roaring distance away, I won’t take sides, but I would like to thank Mr. Obama for his warm comments and wish him and his a very merry Christmas. And to all of you, from the very bottom of my furry heart, merry Christmas! We couldn’t have done this without you.

Sincerely,

Tom

Last week, a piece of space junk crashed into a savannah in Namibia, Africa. Though NASA wrote it off as just another “Composite Overwrapped Pressure Vessel”, or COPV, which are pretty common in space and often survive reentry and land on Earth intact, local authorities knew they had something special. In a press conference, Namibian president, Hifikepunye Lucas Pohamba, addressed press questions, “Oh yes, we did open it. It was filled with dead ants. We’ve recruited some experts to examine them, and they haven’t been able to identify them.”

He went on, “Carbon dating suggests that the ants are over 20,000 years old, which obviously makes no sense in any conventional way.” The international community, so far, has shown little reaction. When pressed on the matter, EU Secretary for Extraterrestrial affairs gave the following statement: “We do not believe the object is any reason for alarm. Many ants were launched into space during the 1970s in COPVs and we reject any results suggesting the ants date back to the stone age. Who even cared about ants back then? It’s a bunch of bologna, if you ask me.”

We’ll be following this story closely. I’m personally interested to find out if the ants are 100% carbon based, or if they have traces of silicon or arsenic. Stay tuned and stay watchful.

As Bearscare.org’s fourth anniversary approaches, I feel it’s time to offer a little clarification on the nature of the Honeybear, a rogue species of which little is known; the very existence of the Honeybear was a significant motivation when I founded this site and also The National Journal of Ursalography, the only periodical dedicated to the scientific study of bears and sometimes other animals.

Many people ask me if there’s any (non-taxonomical) relationship between the Honeybear and the honey badger, especially since the airing of “The Crazy Nastyass Honey Badger” (see below) by a fellow zoographer known only as Randall. The answer is a resounding NO. The honey badger deserves myriads of respect in its own right, but its notoriety arises from different characteristics than the Honeybear. The honey badger, pictured below in Fig. 1, is known to enjoy eating anything which can feel pain. It also has a sweet tooth (and can you blame it?), so locals began referring to Mellivora capensis by its more commonly known name.

In contrast, “the fact is that the Honeybear’s name comes exclusively from the color of its fur,” says Doug Gilmore, a Delaware park ranger turned naturalist and consultant to the Delaware Department of Parks and Wildlife. He goes on, “yes, we have found evidence that they do consume honey in that they eat the entire hive. The disorderly buzzing attracts them and they don’t turn down the opportunity to get a significant amount of protein from the bees, insoluble fiber from the hive walls and simple carbohydrates from the honey. In consuming honey, though, unlike the honey badger, the Honeybear actually eats the hive whole. Picture a someone picking oranges from an orange tree. It’s like that, except there’s only one orange and it’s very big and full of angry bees and honey.

“Sadly, we’ve noticed that more often than not, when a Delaware beekeeper goes missing, his hives do too. And, when we investigate, we find the telltale signs of a Honeybear attack that the police usually miss. You can’t fault them, though, since Honeybears leave very little behind. Usually there’s just some faint claw marks on nearby trees and a tuft of honey-colored fur or two. Blood is rare, as the Honeybear needs all the iron it can get. We don’t know whether the Honeybear smells the human prey first or whether it’s the incessant buzzing, but we do know it’s not the honey itself which attracts the bear.”

I’ve also been asked which animal is more vicious and who would win if a Honeybear  (see Fig. 2) were to fight a honey badger. Unfortunately, due to recent “laws”, such a matchup is illegal in most parts of the US, including Delaware, the only state where Honeybears are found. Furthermore, a Honeybear has never been successfully captured, much less transferred across state lines for any reason, whether legitimate or not. That said, it’s my opinion that a honey badger would have a very difficult time besting a Honeybear. Although the honey badger is very resilient, I believe that the Honeybear’s kill move–grasping the victim in its powerful jaws and shaking it violently at over 70 hertz–would ultimately subdue it. There’s a chance the honey badger could scurry into another animal’s borrow, if one were to be nearby, and wait out the confrontation, though. We know that honeybears will pursue new prey after several minutes of being unable to reach an animal. However, even just considering height and weight ratios, I would be very surprised to hear of a decisive win by a honey badger in a matchup.

Memory corealization (Déjà Vu) is a phenomenon where an individual experiencing an instantaneous event recalls a real or imagined, past event as if the two were the same, occurring concurrently, while retaining a sense of separation in time. Starting with Aristotle, scientists, behavioral researchers and other experts have been unable to explain this phenomena. Today, a colleague and I conceived a theory which exhaustively explains Déjà Vu using logical deduction and proven scientific law.

The key to our theory is the fact that our universe is accelerating in its expansion; this is a relatively new discovery, but its implications are profound. Our theory derives from two propositions:

1) The universe’s expansion is accelerating outward radially. Therefore, our perception of time at a young age is different than our current perception of time (assuming adult age); that is, time apparently speeds up as we age since our absolute velocity through the cosmos is continually increasing, maintaining a gradient* of temporal perception**.

2) The well-known theory of the existence of a multiverse is true. More specifically, the multiverse is realized by infinite space and dimensions containing infinitely numerous “big-bang” events which, in some cases, can interact with each other .

Therefore, a nominally expanding sphere of temporal perception interrupted occasionally by distant or extradimensional effects of an alternate creative event can alter an individual’s perception of time, thus inducing familiar yet unexplainable effects in memory.

QED.

*The structure of this gradient is currently under debate. Theories of its nature vary between constant, linear, and high-order polynomial forms.

**This assumes that there is no absolute standard for perception of time, but only that there exists a relative difference between an entity’s first memory of the passage of time compared to his/her perception as he/she ages. The proposition does not address the question of the possibility of a continual shift in perception of time over the existence of sentience in the known universe; unfortunately, at this time, data are not known to exist to analyze this matter and probably will not until the theory posited here is accepted and subsequent studies are commissioned; even then, considering the magnitude of the distances and forces necessary to gather accurate data, hundreds of thousands of years’, if not millions’, worth of data would be required.

The Iguana is the largest extant reptile on Earth. They are generally green, but sometimes brown, and can reach over 16 feet (5 meters) in length and over 800 lbs (363 kg).

For more, please visit our wiki: http://www.bearscare.org/wiki/index.php?title=Iguana.

Snow is a phenomenon regularly experienced in the upper (and sometimes lower) latitudes. For centuries scientists have argued over exactly what snow is, but over the last few decades a vague consensus has emerged: snow is frozen air, sometimes containing trace amounts of moisture. Nils Leeuwenhoek, a Danish meteorologist was kind enough to sit down for an interview.

Bearscare (BS): Mr. Leeuwenhoek, thank you for agreeing to this controversial interview.

Nils Leeuwenhoek (NL): Of course. Anytime.

BS: I understand you’ve been studying snow for, what, 30 years or so? What have you learned?

NL: With out a doubt, I can tell you it contains frozen water.

BS: And air? Oxygen?

NL: Yes, those too. Let me elaborate. In cold conditions, moisture from the clouds combines with the air to make snow. That is why it looks different than either rain or ice. It is a hybrid substance.

BS: Interesting.

.

There are many conflicting opinions on snow. Unfortunately, we’ve seen a lot of it in recent weeks. Roofs have collapsed, roads have been compromised and regular, hardworking Americans have suffered. Hopefully the scientific debate will narrow in on a comprehensive explanation. Until then, bundle up.

NASA released a breakthrough astrobiological finding Thursday. NASA scientists have discovered animals made with arsenic rather than phosphorus, the fundamental building block of all known life. Arsenic, a metal, is structurally similar to phosphorus, a non-metal. Because of this, arsenic is deadly to phosphorus-based animals since their bodies incorrectly identify it as phosphorus and attempt to bond with it.

Found primarily on Rhea, a moon of Saturn, astrobiologists have identified over 900,000 species, ranging from small ant-like organisms to, “well, primates, if you will,” explains Shannon O’Keefe, NASA’s top astrobiology researcher and professor emeritus at Christopher Columbus University. O’Keefe went on to explain that high resolution photographs taken during fly-bys by NASA’s New Horizons deep space probe were the primary source for the new findings.

“We are planning a mission to attempt to interact or even communicate with the new species. Everything is moving very quickly. It’s very exciting,” O’Keefe went on, “We think the quickest way is to send a new space probe containing written and recorded information and also a radio transponder so that, if or when these new species have the intelligence to communicate, they will be able to do so.” O’Keefe would not comment on rumors that President Obama had ordered the 1970s era Pioneer design be used to save money, but she did answer, “Yes, we already spent the money and would like some return,” to the question of whether the space probe would include the Pioneer Plaque pictured below (NSFW version here).

Check back for updates on this rapidly developing story.

NASA has announced that they plan to release new findings about their search for extraterrestrial intelligence (SETI) on 2 December 2010. Although NASA official are remaining tight lipped on the matter, it is highly likely they will announce that we have been contacted by an otherworldly civilization.

Extraterrestrial life is nothing new; Bearscare.org has reported two separate events concerning astrobiological discoveries (http://www.bearscare.org/2010/01/09/new-alien-discovered-on-mars/ and http://www.bearscare.org/2009/08/16/life-discovered-on-mars/). So, considering little worm-like aliens are old news, my guess is this new discovery is either of a civilization, or, at least, alien dinosaurs.

Check back tomorrow for all the details.

Prime spirals are a way to visualize the distribution of prime numbers within the set of natural numbers. Accidentally discoverd by Stanislaw Ulam in 1963, the prime spirals show that there is order in the distribution of prime numbers, where one would expect randomness.

Prime numbers are those which are not composed of other numbers. For instance, 3, 5, 7, and 41 cannot be described as the product of two or more smaller numbers. Considering the set of natural numbers, one would expect that, counting up from 1, the frequency of encountering prime numbers would decrease, since the subset being considered, the set of candidate numbers to form a larger, composite number, is increasing. Surprisingly, though, prime numbers can be shown to be prominent among large composite numbers. A program I wrote is calculating that approximately 8% of large (>1,000,000) numbers are primes.

Prime spirals show that, not only do primes appear much more frequently than we would expect, but that they have structure in their positions in the list of natural numbers. During a “boring” presentation, Ulam was doodling on paper. He began writing out natural numbers with 1 in the center of the page, and circling outward. See Figure 1 [1].

Figure 1: Natural Numbers Spiral

Removing composite numbers from the picture shows the beginning of the pattern (Figure 2 [2]):

Figure 2: Prime Spiral

Look at the following sets of numbers: {37, 17, 5}, {41, 19, 5}, {19, 7, 23, 47} and {3, 13, 31}. Each set is arranged as a diagonal line traversing the spiral space. Now consider a grid that is 200×200 numbers (Figure 3 [3]):

200x200 Prime Spiral

Figure 3 obviously shows order in the position of prime numbers (each pixel is a prime number). The image shows the space which the first 400,000 natural numbers occupy. It is clear that many of these numbers are primes and they exhibit the same behavior as those in the set of the first 50 prime numbers.

So, why does this matter? No one really knows. Intuitively, we would expect far fewer prime numbers than there are. And we certainly wouldn’t expect any pattern to their occurrence. The fact that an arbitrary visualization of a expectedly random process yields order is very profound. A simple conclusion is that the very fabric of nature is ordered, that looking even at the most primal systems, i.e., the set of natural numbers, we cannot escape order. Further, we would expect that our universe, the structure of mater, everything we know is a derivation of order from disorder, but prime spirals take us back one more level of abstraction indicating that, in nature, there is no fundamental disorder. The act of counting on your fingers, the number of fish in the seas, the number of cells in your body and the number of particles in the universe all exist in a framework which is fundamentally non-random. There is invisible order within the concept of numbers itself.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Ulam_spiral_howto_all_numbers.svg

[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Ulam_spiral_howto_primes_only.svg

[3] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Ulam_1.png