Shark films like Jaws have changed our perceptions about the open waters and sharks. Today, we see sharks as dangerous creatures that we should be fearful of, thanks to the over 100 shark films that portrayed them as such. This irrational fear that comes from these films have affected shark conservation efforts negatively.

In a world-first study, conservation psychology researchers, UniSA's Dr Briana Le Busque and Associate Professor Carla Litchfield have evaluated how sharks are portrayed in movies, finding that 96 per cent of shark films are overtly portraying sharks as a threat to humans.

Dr Le Busque says sensationalised depictions of sharks in popular media can unfairly influence how people perceive sharks and harm conservation efforts.

[...]

"Sharks are at much greater risk of harm from humans, than humans from sharks, with global shark populations in rapid decline, and many species at risk of extinction.

"Exacerbating a fear of sharks that's disproportionate to their actual threat, damages conservation efforts, often influencing people to support potentially harmful mitigation strategies.

Le Busque states that the research is one “important step” in debunking shark myths.

(Image Credit: PIRO4D/ Pixabay)

A person’s body begins sending “death signals” after the person suffers from a heart attack. These said signals cause heart cells to die, a phenomenon that makes heart disease the leading cause of death in the world. For decades, scientists have been attempting to prevent these death signals from being communicated. Scientists have found an answer, and they have found it in the unlikeliest of places — venom from a funnel-web spider, one of the deadliest species in the world.

So far the experimental medicine has only been lab-tested.

[...]

The team has successfully used a protein from spider venom on beating human heart cells that were exposed to heart-attack stresses.

"The Hi1a protein from spider venom blocks acid-sensing ion channels in the heart, so the death message is blocked, cell death is reduced, and we see improved heart cell survival,"...

What a breakthrough!

(Image Credit: Tirin/ Wikimedia Commons)

Twitter user Tricky-D had a stepson who brought a girl inside his room the night before. The stepdad hadn’t seen the girl yet, but he knew that it was a girl because of the noises that came out from his stepson’s room. The problem is: how will his stepson smuggle his overnight guest out of his room and out of the house, now that the whole family is awake? Tricky-D watched the whole thing unfold in front of his eyes, while giving occasional updates to his followers on Twitter.

When some of his followers suggested that he might intervene and help Stepson with his escape, Tricky-D had this to say:

“I see all ya comments about help the kid out… He’s a 18yo grown ass man. We live and die by our choices”

Was the stepson able to smuggle his girl out of the house without anyone knowing (except his stepdad, of course)? Find out what happened over at Awkward.

(Image Credit: Tricky-D/ Awkward)

Antibodies and white blood cells usually take the stage when the talks are about bacterial invasions inside the body. However, they are not the only players that help in combating bacteria. John MacMicking, an immunologist, says that “all cells are endowed with some ability to combat infection.” This cell in particular has an interesting ability: it produces soap-like substance that helps dissolve bacteria.

In humans, these run-of-the-mill cellular defenses have often been overlooked, MacMicking says, even though they are part of “an ancient and primordial defense system” and could inform the development of treatments for new infections. 

Often, nonimmune cells rely on a warning from their professional counterparts to combat infections. Upon detecting outsiders, specialized immune cells release an alarm signal called interferon gamma. That signal rouses other cells, including epithelial cells that line the throat and intestines and are often targeted by pathogens, to action.

More about this over at Science News.

(Image Credit: NIAID/ Wikimedia Commons)

In one way, this is the story of a highly respected physician, Dr. Jim Lee, who treated AIDS patients in the early '80s when other doctors wanted nothing to do with the "gay epidemic." He was a star among his patients, and became well-known in Los Angeles. In another way, this is the story of a unique drug. In 1996, Serostim was approved to treat the wasting away that plagued AIDS patients towards the end of their lives, at a cost of $75,000 a year, although its maker Serono Labs eventually lowered the price somewhat. Serostim is essentially human growth hormone (HGH), which is very popular among body builders and people who believe it may extend their lives, but cannot be prescribed for those conditions.

But for Serono, the timing of the drug’s introduction was inauspicious. Effective combinations of antiretroviral drugs designed to combat AIDS had just been approved, leading to massive decreases in deaths from the virus. Serostim’s “use as an HIV drug was limited by the fact that wasting is a really late-stage manifestation of AIDS,” says Ng, the immunologist. Advances in other therapies soon meant that the symptom Serostim was meant to treat rarely presented.

In response, Serono launched a marketing blitz. In 1997, it trained sales representatives to broadly “redefine AIDS wasting,” developing an unapproved device to measure “body cell mass” so that more HIV patients would qualify for Serostim. In 2001, federal prosecutors filed a suit against Serono on charges of filing false claims, or illegally promoting the sale of a medication. The firm pled guilty to charges related to bringing a group of American doctors on an all-expenses-paid trip to Cannes, France, in exchange for prescribing Serostim. The suit was settled in April 2005; Serono was ordered to pay more than $700 million. Sullivan, the U.S. attorney in Boston, told The New York Times that 85 percent of all Serostim prescriptions were unnecessary.

There were still ways to sell Serostim, even to those who wanted it for off-label purposes, which involved cash-strapped AIDS patients, insurance companies, and Dr. Jim Lee. You can read (or listen to) that story at Narratively. -via Damn Interesting

Trends in television were easier to define when there were only three networks. If a show became a hit, suddenly there were other shows just like it, and a simple formula could be run into the ground before the audience demanded something different. In comedy, the 1950s were the age of the suburban nuclear family sitcom. The '70s had more workplace comedies and families dealing with modern issues. In between, TV comedy in the 1960s was dominated by hillbillies, from The Andy Griffith Show to The Beverly Hillbillies to Hee Haw. Comedies that poked fun at a fictional rural South were a total escape from the real world.

When the newscasts were full of footage from My Lai and Saigon, from Selma and Birmingham, Americans looked for laughs in Hooterville. They sought them in Cornfield County, Pixley, and Mayberry. These were fictional rural places full of carefree, unencumbered country folks. There was no racial strife in these burgs because everyone was white. In these worlds, the sheriff didn’t carry a gun, a man could join the Marines and never talk about the war in Vietnam, and nobody even thought about the War on Poverty.

“Rural America was like true America: simpler, without all the problems of big city life, technology, the Russians, and that kind of stuff,” says TV historian and former executive Tim Brooks.

CBS did not invent the idea of using the South as a foil for modern life, but the shows it aired streamlined the concept for television. The combination of old stereotypes and mass media created an alternative "South" that combined all of rural America into a single land of silliness, simplicity, and safety. And it put an exaggerated idea of the white working class at the center of everything.

"Hillbilly TV" flourished until it was suddenly purged in 1971. But it never really went away completely. Read about the rise and fall of rural comedy from the perspective of its producers at The Bitter Southerner. -via Metafilter

P.T. Barnum famously said, "There's a sucker born every minute." Or maybe he never said that. Or if he did, we don't know whether he came up with it himself or got it from someone else. There's a lot of things we don't know know for sure about Barnum, as he was in the business of making things up. So we don't know whether or not there is any truth in the tale of the cherry-colored cat.  

According to this tale, one day Barnum received a letter from a Connecticut farmer who claimed to possess a genuine cherry-colored cat. The farmer asked Barnum if he would be interested in purchasing the cat, explaining that his cat would beat any of the other odd critters Barnum had on display at his museum.

Barnum contacted the farmer and said he’d gladly purchase the cat for his museum if the cat were truly cherry-colored. The farm agreed to ship the cat to Barnum for $300 (other articles say Barnum paid $25, $50, or $200.)

A few days later a crate arrived at the museum. When Barnum opened it, he found a an ordinary-looking jet-black cat inside. In response to Barnum’s angry letter, the farmer responded with a note: Dear Mr. Barnum, did you never see a black cherry? We have loads of them born in Connecticut. There’s a sucker born every minute.”

The kicker is that, instead of getting upset, Barnum took this trick and ran with it. Read the rest of the story at The Hatching Cat. -via Strange Company

Mount Athos is not only a mountain, but also the peninsula it rests on, geographically connected to Greece, but socially isolated from it. It is home to many monasteries, and women aren't welcome. Athos was given special administrative status in order to get around Greek and European anti-discrimination laws, as those customs are sort of grandfathered in. You may wonder, as I did, why the area wasn't just given to the Orthodox Church to be kept as private property, but I imagine it's a rather large chunk of land to cede in that manner. This video is only four minutes long; the rest is an ad. -via Digg

St. John the Baptist Church in Danbury, Essex, UK, was built in the 13th century and is the burial place of a few Knights Templar. One of the graves, in the floor of the church, was unearthed briefly in 1779, and an account of the disinterment was published in a magazine in 1789. It describes the discovery of a lead vault containing an elm coffin with a shell inside, and inside that, a corpse. The following excerpt may be disturbing for sensitive readers.

The magazine continues, “The lid of this shell being taken off, we were presented with a view of the body laying in a liquor or pickle resembling mushroom catchup…As I never possessed the sense of smelling and was willing to ascertain the flavour of the liquor, I tasted; and found it to be aromatic, though not very pungent partaking of the taste of catchup and of the pickle of Spanish olives. The body was tolerably perfect…The flesh, except of the face and throat appeared exceedingly white and firm…The body was covered with a shirt of linen; the stitches were very evident, and attached very strongly…There was no hair on the head, nor do I remember any in the liquor, though feathers, flowers and herbs in abundance were floating..the leaves and stalks of which appeared quite perfect.”

Read about the church, its Templar connections, and the pickled knight at MJ Wayland's blog. -via Strange Company

(Image credit: Malcolm Reid)

Imagine you are on a spaceship approaching the solar system's largest planet, but first you swing by its largest moon. This is what you might see.

On June 7, 2021, NASA’s Juno spacecraft flew closer to Jupiter’s ice-encrusted moon Ganymede than any spacecraft in more than two decades. Less than a day later, Juno made its 34th flyby of Jupiter. This animation provides a “starship captain” point of view of each flyby. For both worlds, JunoCam images were orthographically projected onto a digital sphere and used to create the flyby animation. Synthetic frames were added to provide views of approach and departure for both Ganymede and Jupiter.

If you liked this, you'll love the gallery of more images from Juno at NASA. -via Metafilter

When did humans start experimenting with alcohol and drugs?https://t.co/1PDHqAOIT2 pic.twitter.com/8DCduwolpD

— Damn Interesting (@DamnInteresting) July 16, 2021

Common sense would tell you that humans discovered drugs in nature pretty early, since we are omnivores and there's always someone in the group who will try anything. But that doesn't mean they survived the attempt, nor does it mean that the wider culture adopted the use of psychoactive chemicals found in nature. So how far back does alcohol and drug use really go?

Archaeologists have found evidence of opium use in Europe by 5,700 BC. Cannabis seeds appear in archaeological digs at 8,100 BC in Asia, and the ancient Greek historian Herodotus reported Scythians getting high on weed in 450 BC. Tea was brewed in China by 100 BC.

It’s possible our ancestors experimented with substances before the archaeological evidence suggests. Stones and pottery preserve well, but plants and chemicals decay quickly. For all we know, Neanderthals could have been the first to smoke pot. But archaeology suggests the discovery and intensive use of psychoactive substances mostly happened late, after the Neolithic Revolution in 10,000 BC, when we invented farming and civilisation.

That makes sense, because agriculture made manufacturing alcohol and drugs easier to scale up. Or was that just the point where they left evidence behind? Read about the history of drugs and alcohol at The Conversation. -via Damn Interesting

The USPS has released a new postage stamp that appears to be a coded message. Each stamp contains twenty panels that spell out a message. It's not really a code, though, but an artistic font that's easy to decipher if you take the time to see each letter. Appropriately, the dedication ceremony was held at the International Spy Museum in Washington, DC.

“As you add these stamps to your collection, or use them to send a message to your family and friends — we hope they will appeal to the puzzle-solver in all of us,” said Robert M. Duncan, a member of the U.S. Postal Service Board of Governors, who served as dedicating official for the ceremony.

Joining Governor Duncan for the ceremony were Tamara Christian, the Spy Museum’s president and chief operating officer; Rebecca Roberts, curator of programming, Planet Word; and an “international spy” as a special guest.

Read more about the stamp at the Postal Service's website. -via Boing Boing

Last year we shared the Instagram account Subpar Parks, in which Amber Share illustrates one-star reviews of US National Parks. Now Share has turned her collection of reviews into a book called Subpar Parks: America's Most Extraordinary National Parks and Their Least Impressed Visitors. It contains reviews in both text and illustrations, plus commentary from the author. All 63 US National Parks are included, plus some national monuments, recreation areas, and other areas under the Park Service's umbrella.  

The Raleigh, North Carolina-based designer had some strict criteria when it came to determining which reviews to use in her illustrations. She looked for reviews that predated the project; once it took off, people began to plant fake reviews to get her attention. Then, she tried to weed out any sarcastic ones, and others that criticized park management or administration.

“I really try to focus in on people just criticizing nature because that, to me, is what keeps it funny and light,” she says. “You could go on all day about the ways that Zion manages the shuttle system, and that’s not really what this is about. But somebody who thinks the scenery of Zion is distant and impersonal is really what gets me.”

See a half-dozen such reviews and what Share thinks about them at Smithsonian.

In 1891, 14-year-old Michael Zoettl was recruited to become a Benedictine monk, and was sent from his home in Bavaria to Cullman, Alabama, to live at St. Bernard’s Abbey. Now called Brother Joseph, he studied to be a priest until an accident left him so hunchbacked that his superiors decided he would never have his own parish. Zoettl labored at the abbey, and filled his free time making miniature grottos.

Using simple hand tools and found objects – bits of broken pottery, shells, leftover tiles, marbles, chicken wire – he branched out from tiny grottos into a model of the city of Jerusalem, which he installed in the monastery’s garden in 1912. Originally meant just for the resident monks, Little Jerusalem soon attracted curious tourists. In fact, so many visitors arrived that the abbot told Zoettl he had to quit his little hobby because it was disturbing the monastery’s operations. Zoettl asked permission to move his creation to an old quarry on the grounds but was denied.

Eventually, the monastery embraced the tourism, and Little Jerusalem was moved and expanded. Brother Joseph worked on it until his 80s. Read the story of Little Jerusalem and the man who dedicated his life to it at Messy Nessy Chic.

(Image credit: AlabamaSouthern)

You've heard the phrase, "If you love the law and you love sausage, you don't want to see either one being made." Well, sausages begin with the pig, and learning unsavory details about pigs may put you off sausage for a while. And ham and bacon. Ze Frank lays out all the unpleasantness for us, and still manages to make us laugh.