Titanoboa once slithered the planet. A snake stretching longer than a school bus and too thick to fit through a doorway may sound like a creature in a Hollywood bio-horror flick, but this one actually ruled the roost on part of the planet millions of years ago.
Weighing 2,500 pounds and stretching 48 feet long, Titanoboa — whose name combines "titanic" for its size and "boa" for its close relation to modern-day boa constrictors — roamed the Earth 65 million years ago and was the largest snake that has ever lived. Titanoboa: Monster Snake, premiering Sunday at 8 p.m. ET on the Smithsonian Channel, gives viewers an insight into the life of a species that was once the largest predator on Earth.
The special will also air Monday at 6 p.m. ET and be available for viewing on the channel's website. A life-size replica of the ancient snake appears in the film and was put on display at the National Museum of Natural History in Washington, as of Friday. So is it possible for a snake of such enormity to come back into existence? Seeing in the Dark & SEEDMAGAZINE.COM. Credit: cliff1066tm.
Patient TN was, by his own account, completely blind. Two consecutive strokes had destroyed the visual cortex of his brain, and consequently, his ability to see. It is not uncommon for stroke patients to suffer brain damage, but the case of TN — referenced by his initials, the general practice in such studies — was peculiar. His first stroke had injured only one hemisphere of his visual cortex. About five weeks later, a second stroke damaged the other hemisphere. Known as selective bilateral occipital damage, TN’s unusual injury made him the subject of much interest while recovering at a hospital in Geneva. To further test the extent of TN’s abilities, researchers from Tilburg University in the Netherlands devised a simple yet decisive experiment: an obstacle course.
TN’s rare condition is known as blindsight. The researchers explained that TN’s success indicates that “humans can sustain sophisticated visuo-spacial skills in the absence of perceptual awareness.” Chicken Came Before the Egg: "Scientific Proof" British scientists claim to have solved one of the great mysteries of life, the universe and everything in it: The chicken came before the egg, they say, and they're not mincing words.
"It had long been suspected that the egg came first, but now we have the scientific proof that shows that in fact the chicken came first," Sheffield University's Dr Colin Freeman, according to a report in the Metro. Researchers from Scotland and England used a supercomputer called HECToR to look in such detail at a chicken eggshell that they were able to determine the vital role of a protein used to kick-start the egg's formation. That protein is only found, wait for it... inside a chicken. Freeman, who worked on HECToR with counterparts at Edinburgh's Warwick University, said the protein had been identified earlier by scientists and was known to be linked to egg formation, "but by examining it closely we have been able to see how it controls the process," he added, describing it as a catalyst.
Brain.