BigShinyThing

Also, some ‘outtakes‘ (in the Pixar tradition), on the designers’ website…

Evidently someone in The Guardian‘s art department has some classic vinyl at home: compare the cover for yesterday’s Guardian Weekend (above) with the sleeve art from hard rock band Mama Lion’s 1972 album Preserve Wildlife (below):

Points to The Guardian for revisiting the timeless theme of long-haired, slightly-disheveled blondes suckling cute baby animals, but our vote goes to the original shot of Mama Lion’s lead singer Lynn Carey and the kitty cat.

If you’ve never heard Mama Lion, hunt them down for some Joplin-esque, bluesy rock. Carey also turned in a storming vocal performance as the singing voice of character Kelly McNamara (played by actress Dolly Read) in Russ Meyer’s cult film Beyond the Valley of the Dolls.

[Thanks to Helen Noir for introducing us to the music of Lynn Carey and Mama Lion]

UPDATE: More album-art suckling identified by our readers. See the comments, below…

Tom Ballhatchet‘s hamster-powered paper shredder. Genius.

Via Core77.

Turking meets art meets politics in Aaron Koblin’s online work The Sheep Market.

Koblin used Amazon’s Mechanical Turk webservice to recruit 10,000 workers for a simple task — to each submit a drawing of a ‘sheep facing left’. All sheep can be viewed on the website, and what a diverse flock they are: from fluffy and well-proportioned, to stick-legged and wobbly.

The work is open to critical interpretation or simple woolly appreciation. You can even purchase (while stocks last) sets of stickers of your favourite sheep.

Whatever you’re doing on the 14th, we offer an alternative take on romance for your enjoyment: Scanner‘s 2002 Valentine’s Day radio piece The Sounds of Love, featuring (in no particular order):

Bats; Albatrosses; Tungler frogs; Asian Lions; Billygoats; Mute Swans; Elephants; Puerto Rican Tree Frogs; Peacocks; Swallows; Beluga Whales; Capuchin Birds; Blue Tits; Cats; Bees; Grey Lions; Toads; Satin Bowerbirds; Grey Seals; Hammer Headed Fruit Bats; Swallow Gulls and Elephant Seals

Scanner played an awesome spatialised version of this at the recent Future of Sound launch. Find more of his works on the compendious, tremendous UbuWeb.

Enjoy.

Originally transmitted by the BBC on 13th February 2002.

With thanks to Tom.

We all know that PETA have a long history of stunts against fashion industry fur fanciers. But do they (or we) ever consider how PETA has in fact done a grand job of publicising and popularising their ‘victims’?

Example One. Julien MacDonald’s show at London Fashion Week. Having been Creative Director at Givenchy a few years back, he quit after a few lacklustre collections. He now has his own line at Debenhams department store and Paris Hilton as a muse — oh, and he’s the catty judge on Sky One’s Project Catwalk. So his show was hardly destined to be front page news — and certainly not big news outside the UK fashion fish bowl. That is, until the PETA flour bombing incident. (Note this also got everyone’s favourite publicity whore, Paris, the lion’s share of the coverage too.)

Example Two. Anna Wintour. Although a known and respected fashion editor, she truly entered mainstream consciousness when PETA started dumping dead raccoons on her dinner plate in restaurants. Since then it’s been one long panto season of ‘Nuclear Wintour’ vs. the animal rights loons, garnering plenty of press for both American Vogue and PETA in the process. It’s also a win-win situation on both sides (although we’re sure damned inconvenient for Wintour on occasion) — PETA make Anna their very own Cruella de Ville and Wintour looks like a stoic protector of Vogue’s (crucial) advertisers.

Example Three. The ‘Giselle fur scum’ sign paraded on the Victoria’s Secret catwalk behind an oblivious-looking Giselle a few years back. She did pretty well out of that did she not? In fact, it seems to have become staple image in any press coverage of PETA — namechecking the VS underwear label as well, of course.

It’s just a thought…

Last year the name of a Bolivian monkey was bought in an online auction for $650,000 by the online casino Golden Palace. Now Golden Palace’s entire marketing strategy is based on doing quirky things in order to generate publicity — they are the proud owners of William Shatner’s gallstone, for instance. That is not The Economist‘s concern however — this article is more interested in the science of taxonomy and the issue of inspiration.

That Bolivian monkey is now the proud owner of the moniker Callicebus Aureipalatii and The Economist thinks that there is a marketing opportunity in branded taxonomies:

Notwithstanding recent discoveries in New Guinea (the ‘lost world’ reported this week) few biologists these days have flashy mammals and birds to hawk around. But a little imagination might find sponsors for lesser creatures. For, while a wealthy airline (if any still exist) might aspire to a Papuan bird of paradise, its low-cost confrere could consider something a bit more within its budget – a butterfly perhaps? And which building society would not be seriously tempted by its own bee? These humble yet hard working animals save in the summer to survive through the winter – and build their own homes, to boot. Neglected molluscs could, meanwhile, be snapped up by Shell, while moth taxonomy would certainly be boosted by the interest of the construction firm, Caterpillar.

The article has a nice sign off, too:

Detractors of such horrid commercialisation there will no doubt be. But they might consider that taxonomists have been amusing themselves quietly for years, as names as Colon rectum (a beetle), Ba humbugi (a snail), Oedipus complex (a salamander) and Ytu brutus (a beetle) attest. Besides, how much disrepute could commerce really bring to the discipline what brought the world Trombicula fujigmo, a mite whose name is an acronym for ‘fuck you Jack, I got my orders’.

Pictured is our own BST-sponsored creature, Monstrum mirabile visu — a new type of echidna. More about the state of taxonomy and a proposed ‘ZooBank’ of names is available on the The Economist site.

The wolf also shall dwell with the lamb, the leopard shall lie down with the young goat, the calf and the young lion and the fatling together, and a little child shall lead them. The cow and the bear shall graze; their young ones shall lie down together, and the lion shall eat straw like the ox. The nursing child shall play by the cobra’s hole, and the weaned child shall put his hand in the viper’s den. Isaiah 11 : 6-9

A Tokyo zoo reports that a snake is co-habiting with a hamster which was initially introduced to its tank as lunch. The bizarre pairing joins the now-famous odd couples of a year-old hippo and a 107-year old tortoise in Kenya and the tigress that adopted an onyx back in 2002.

“I have never seen anything like it,” a zookeeper at the Mutsugoro Okoku zoo said, adding that the hamster was known to fall asleep sitting atop the snake. The hamster was initially offered to Aochan, the two-year-old rat snake, because it was refusing to eat frozen mice, the Associated Press reports. As a joke, the zookeeper said they named the hamster Gohan – the Japanese word for meal.

Via the BBC and included because no BST week is complete without a comedy wildlife story.

The investigation was prompted the case of a dog alerting its owner to the presence of a melanoma by constantly sniffing the skin lesion. Subsequent studies published in major medical journals further confirmed the ability of trained dogs to detect both melanomas and bladder cancers — as reported by the BBC earlier this year. This new study, led by Michael McCulloch of the Pine Street Foundation in San Anselmo, California, and Tadeusz Jezierski of the Polish Academy of Sciences, Institute of Genetics and Animal Breeding, is the first to test whether dogs can detect cancers only by sniffing the exhaled breath of cancer patients.

Five household dogs were trained over a three week period to detect lung or breast cancer by sniffing the breath of cancer participants. The trial itself was comprised of 86 cancer patients — 55 with lung cancer and 31 with breast cancer — and a control sample of 83 healthy patients. All the cancer patients had recently been diagnosed and had not yet undergone any chemotherapy. The dogs were presented with breath samples from the cancer patients and the controls, captured in a special tube. Dogs were trained to give a positive identification of a cancer patient by sitting or lying down directly in front of a test station containing a cancer patient sample, while ignoring the control samples.

The results were astonishing: the dogs detected breast and lung cancer with a sensitivity and specificity between 88% and 97%. The high accuracy persisted even after results were adjusted to take into account whether the lung cancer patients were currently smokers. Moreover, the study also confirmed that the trained dogs could even detect the early stages of lung cancer, as well as early breast cancer.

Sadly, there isn’t much demand for a collective noun for the world’s most feckless animal — how about a luck of pandas? This record number of panda cubs were all born at China’s biggest panda farm in Wolong. Even better, they all survived.

Get your daily baby panda fix at San Diego Zoo’s wonderful pandacams. Despite being useless at everything (surviving, eating, breeding, hiding) pandas actually have opposable thumbs — see what we mean about the fecklessness?

The BBC report today that a new species of furry thing has been spotted by the World Wildlife Fund, rather sensibly running away from its motion detection cameras. WWF caught two images of the animal, which is bigger than a domestic cat, dark red, and has a long muscular tail. Local people, the WWF says, had not seen the species before, and researchers say it looks to be new.

The creature, believed to be carnivorous, was spotted in the Kayan Mentarang National Park, which lies in Indonesian territory on Borneo. The team which discovered it, led by biologist Stephan Wulffraat, is publishing full details in a new book on Borneo and its wildlife – making the small furry thing excellent PR.

“You don’t find new mammals that often, and to do so must be extraordinary,” said Callum Rankine, head of the species programme at WWF-UK.

“We’ve got camera traps there, which are passive devices relying on infra-red beams across forest paths,” he told the BBC News website.

“Lots of animals come past – it’s much easier than pushing through the forest itself – and when an animal cuts the beam, two cameras catch images from the front and back.”

So far, two images are all that exist. But they were enough to convince Nick Isaac from the Institute of Zoology in London that the animal may indeed be new.

“The photos look most like a lemur,” he told the BBC News website. “But there certainly shouldn’t be lemurs in Borneo.”

These long-tailed primates are confined to the island of Madagascar.

“It’s more likely to be a viverrid – that’s the family which includes the mongoose and civets – which is a very poorly known group,” Dr Isaac said.

“One of the photos clearly shows the length of the tail and how muscley it is; civets use their tails to balance in trees, so this new animal may spend chunks of its time up trees too.”

That could be one reason why it has not been spotted before. Another could be that access to the heart of Borneo is becoming easier as population centres expand and roads are built.

The WWF says this is the heart of the issue. It accuses the governments of Indonesia and Malaysia, which each own parts of Borneo, of encouraging the loss of native jungle by allowing the development of giant palm oil plantations.

Last week Pehin Sri Haji Abdul Taib Mahmud, chief minister of Sarawak, the larger Malaysian state on Borneo, said that such claims are unfounded and part of a smear campaign.

He told the BBC News website that palm oil plantations are mainly sited on land which had previously been cleared for cultivation or are in “secondary jungle”.

But the WWF says species like the new viverrid – if new viverrid it be – are threatened by such development.

It is concerned that other as yet unknown creatures may go extinct before their existence can be documented.

The group is planning to capture the new species in a live trap so it can be properly studied and described.

The shiny-eyed photograph reminds us of the unintentionally lovely Game Cam which features footage from hunters’ motion sensitive cameras.

Wired reports:

Genetically altered mice discovered accidentally at the Wistar Institute in Pennsylvania have the seemingly miraculous ability to regenerate like a salamander, and even regrow vital organs. Researchers systematically amputated digits and damaged various organs of the mice, including the heart, liver and brain, most of which grew back.

The results stunned scientists because if such regeneration is possible in this mammal, it might also be possible in humans.

The researchers also made a remarkable second discovery: When cells from the regenerative mice were injected into normal mice, the normal mice adopted the ability to regenerate. And when the special mice bred with normal mice, their offspring inherited souped-up regeneration capabilities.

Obviously this is exciting news for the medical sciences. Maybe it’s just me, but the phrase ‘most of which grew back’ adds a certain Pet Sematary zombie flavour to the otherwise Utopian vision of a world free of permanent physical damage.

Experts claim that some 36 of the mammals could be packing ‘toxic dart’ guns and present a significant risk to divers and surfers in the area. The US navy admits it has been training dolphins for military purposes but has refused to confirm that any are missing. Dolphins have been trained in attack-to-kill missions since the Cold War and these US Atlantic bottlenose dolphins have apparently been taught to shoot terrorists attacking military vessels. Their coastal compound was breached during the hurricane, sweeping them out to sea.

Leo Sheridan, 72, a ‘respected accident investigator’ quoted by the paper, said that he had received intelligence from sources close to the US government’s marine fisheries service confirming that dolphins had escaped.

My concern is that they have learnt to shoot at divers in wetsuits who have simulated terrorists in exercises. If divers or windsurfers are mistaken for a spy or suicide bomber and if equipped with special harnesses carrying toxic darts, they could fire. The darts are designed to put the target to sleep so they can be interrogated later, but what happens if the victim is not found for hours?

The full story is published on The Observer site. A Simpsons episode predicting that dolphins would turn on mankind and take over the world was first transmitted in November 2000. We’re also reminded of Grant Morrison’s recent graphic novel We3. Pitched as ‘The Fantastic Journey meets Terminator‘, We3 features an unlikely trio of weaponised lab animals attempting to find their way home when the research project they’re part of gets closed down.

The Onion, however, got the final word back in 2000 with this headline: “Dolphins Evolve Opposable Thumbs: ‘Oh, Shit,’ Says Humanity”

The 200-foot-long toy rabbit lies on the side of the 5,000 foot high Colletto Fava mountain in northern Italy’s Piedmont region. Viennese art group Gelatin designed the giant soft toy and say it was “knitted by dozens of grannies out of pink wool”. Group member Wolfgang Gantner said: “It’s supposed to make you feel small, like Gulliver. You walk around it and you can’t help but smile.” And Gelatin members say the bunny is not just for walking around – they are expecting hikers to climb its 20 foot sides and relax on its belly. The press release reads:

The toilet-paper-pink creature lies on its back: a rabbit-mountain like Gulliver in Lilliput. Happy you feel as you climb up along its ears, almost falling into its cavernous mouth, to the belly-summit and look out over the pink woolen landscape of the rabbit’s body, a country dropped from the sky; ears and limbs sneaking into the distance; from its side flowing heart, liver and intestines. Happily in love you step down the decaying corpse, through the wound, now small like a maggot, over woolen kidney and bowel. Happy you leave like the larva that gets its wings from an innocent carcass at the roadside. Such is the happiness which made this rabbit. i love the rabbit the rabbit loves me.

Yu-huh. The giant rabbit is expected to remain on the mountain side until 2025 and will look pretty sinister when the inevitable rot sets in. Story via Ananova.

Joslin constructs the sculptures out of

antique ceremonial collars, antlers, bone, brass, velvet, antique hardware, glass eyes, universal joints, springs, brass standoffs, casters, sculpted/painted leather, mink collar, saxophone keys, antique shoehorn, beads, lamp fittings, glove leather, music wire, cast pewter feet… I find things anywhere that I find myself… in obscure junk shops, flea markets, attics, taxidermy supply houses, speciality hardware distributor … or walking through the woods.

The creatures range in height from 1 inch to nearly 6 feet tall.

Taxidermy and the use of deceased animals in art seem to be enjoying a bit of a renaissance – one that has very little to do with either Damien Hirst or moth-eaten ancestral homes (thank god). Rei Kawakubo’s Dover Street Market features the work of taxidermist Emma Hawkins whilst BST has previously written about the art of Nathalie Edenmont and Pinar Yolacan. Perhaps it is a reaction both to the interiors minimalism of the 90s and a celebration of skill and intricacy in art. Maybe we’ve just got our curiosity back.

There are more of Joslin’s recent sculptures on her homepage. The ‘Lula’ sculpture pictured is reproduced here by kind permission of the artist.

More balls of fluff on the site. For more zeitgeisty fun with Google Image Search, try a search on the word ‘me‘.

The scientists, from Darwin’s Crocodylus Park, a tourism and research centre, are now collecting blood from the animals in the hope of developing an antibiotic for humans.

Due to their ultra-violent lifestyle, the crocodile’s immune system is much more powerful than that of humans. Says one of the scientists on the trial, “They tear the limbs off each other and despite the fact they live in this environment with all of these microbes, they heal up very rapidly and normally almost always without infection.”

Another explains, “If you take a test tube of HIV and add crocodile serum it will have a greater effect than human serum. It can kill a much greater number of HIV vital organisms.” The crocodile immune system works differently from the human system by attacking bacteria as soon as an infection occurs in the body. Sounding like something out of a video game, the scientists say, “The crocodile has an immune system which attaches to the bacteria and tears it apart and it explodes. It’s like putting a gun to the head of the bacteria and pulling the trigger.”

The study hopes to extract enough crocodile blood to isolate the powerful antibodies and eventually develop an antibiotic for humans. However, the crocodile’s immune system may be simply too powerful for humans and may need to be synthesised for human consumption.

The scientists admit that, “There is a lot of work to be done. It may take years before we can get to the stage where we have something to market.”

Reuters has the full story.

‘Zombie Dogs!’ screams the New York Post in typically hysterical fashion (free subscription required). However, the headlines mask what is a hugely exciting advance in medical science.

Scientists at Pittsburgh’s Safar Center for Resuscitation Research succeeded in reviving the dogs after three hours of clinical death. They developed a technique in which the subject’s veins are drained of blood and filled with ice-cold salt solution. The animals are considered to be clinically dead as they stop breathing and have no heartbeat or blood activity. Three hours later, their blood is replaced and they are brought back to life with an electric shock (maybe the NYP has a point). Plans to test the technique on humans should be realised within a year, say the Safar Center.

The use for humans would not be to create an army of zombies, but to put subjects in this suspended state for long enough to perform life saving surgery. A few hours would be enough to save the lives of battlefield casualities and victims of stabbings or gunshot wounds, who have suffered huge blood loss. According to one doctor involved in the trial, “The results are stunning. I think in 10 years we will be able to prevent death in a certain segment of those using this technology.”

The news makes all those cryogenically frozen folk – like Walt Disney (maybe)- look less silly after all.