Death waits you! You have made a covenant with death, and with Hell you are in agreement. You’re all going to die! Don’t you realize? Can’t you see? You’re all going to die! Death awaits you all! – Reverend Otto Witt in Zulu

As part of our continuing series, “Science Made Stupid,” we begin this week with a global wrap-up of various portents of DOOM! These items, all from within the last week, are brought to us by the benign and blessed boffins of science.

DOOM FROM NEAR-EARTH ORBIT! Asteroid zips past Earth, but satellite is expected to hit “Space scientists and government officials are tracking two massive objects that are hurtling toward Earth, but only one, a dead satellite the size of a bus, is expected to hit somewhere on the globe.”

DOOM FROM OUTER SPACE! Alien Impact Poisons Canadian Town

DOOM FROM OUTER-OUTER SPACE! Extragalactic meteor spotted over Russia

DRY DOOM FROM THE DEEP! The Ocean’s Biological Deserts Are Expanding

YET MORE DOOM FROM THE DEEP! New Fault Found in Europe; May "Close Up" Adriatic Sea

ATOMIC DOOM! Drought could force nuclear shutdowns

THE “NO PROBLEM. WE’VE DONE THIS THOUSANDS OF TIMES” DOOM! Journey to the centre of the earth “One thing that occurs to me is that smashing things into each other at the speed of light might not be an entirely safe thing to do. Could there not be, as some have already suggested, a very big explosion? Might Switzerland disappear into a black hole? The answer is: almost certainly not.”

WOE AM US. MAN HAS DONE THE DOOM-DAH-DOOM-DOOM! Scarred Earth to enter the ‘Anthopocene Epoch’ You know, if we’d all just kill ourselves the Earth could get back its original unblemished complexion.

But then again, maybe it is not all our fault. Maybe it is the fault of ….

DOOM GERMS! Natural Gas Formation By Bacteria Linked To Climate Change And Renewable Energy So perhaps we’re off the hook as Doom-Masters of the Universe after all. Perhaps the burning question about global warming might well be, “What farted?”

“This invention is a training system that enables a human being to acquire sufficient hyperspace energy in order to pull the body out of dimension so that the person can walk through solid objects such as wooden doors…. It is the object of this invention to create a training system that allows a person to develop the ability to walk around out of dimension, passing through solid objects. This invention is based on one of the most remarkable relationships between the water molecule and the boundary between space and hyperspace. The mass of the water molecule is equal to the energy of the water molecule at this boundary. Because the body is composed of 67% water, the body sits on the boundary such that any additional increase in energy would move the body out of dimension into hyperspace.” Just the thing for… [See item below].

DUDE. Marijuana Withdrawal As Bad As Withdrawal From Cigarettes Show me a stoner who smokes 20 joints a day and I’ll not only show you a withdrawal problem, I’ll show you a problem with getting off the couch. Unless, of course, he discovers on his body… [See item below]. 

YOU ARE LUNCH! “The Human Bot Fly lays its eggs on a horsefly or a mosquito, something that will attempt to land on a human. This carrier finds a human and lands on him or her. The eggs rub off onto the human, whose body heat hatches the eggs. The larvae drop onto the skin and burrow right the fuck in. Where they live. Under your skin. Eating.” — The 5 Most Horrifying Bugs in the World | Cracked.com [HT: Morgan]

LAUDED CHINA skull find “far from the greatest” Absolutely. As everyone knows Ali was the greatest,

THE WUSS STUFF: Astronauts exmined for drinking… Only drunk the day before… What gives with all this harping on astronauts drinking. Is MADD planning on going into outer space with breathylizers? If they we’re gonna strap me on that much fuel and light it, I’d demand a couple of Tequila shooters. What wimps we’ve become. I don’t recall that astronauts ACTUALLY get to take the wheel and drive the Space Shuttle up the gravity well.

IN OTHER NASA NEWS, Boris Karloff is in the house! Nanotech: NASA Wants To Slice Your Brain With Nanoknife

QUALITY control mechanism tags defective sperm cells inside the body — replacing previous mechanism known as “The Vagina.”

THE “NO SHIT SHERLOCK” AWARDS announces a four-way tie!

• Sports machismo may be cue to male teen violence
• Farming Has Significantly Changed The Hydrology And Chemistry Of The Mississippi River
• Blood Flow May Be Key Player in Neural Processing: Scientific American, and last, but by no means least,
• Republicans differ on global warming

YOUR DAILY “Dose-O-Doom!”® First the global freezing, then the ozone hole, then the alar scare, then the warming, then the comet strike, then the supernova explosions, then Rogue Black Holes Roam Milky Way, then the Massive Gas Cloud Speeding Toward Collision With Milky Way, then Troublemaking Solar Cycle Kicks Off, then Only science can save us from climate catastrophe (Translation: “Worship us like gods or we will let you all die!”), and now, now this, the FINAL INSULT! → Earth’s getting ‘soft’ in the middle….I tell you if this keeps up, sooner or later every single person alive on the Earth today is going to be dead, dead, dead!

“Give me a condor’s quill! Give me Vesuvius’ crater for an inkstand! Friends, hold my arms!For in the mere act of penning my thoughts of this Leviathan,they weary me, and make me faint with their outreaching comprehensiveness of sweep, as if to include the whole circleof the sciences, and all the generations of whales, and men,and mastodons, past, present, and to come, with all the revolving panoramas of empire on earth, and throughout the whole universe,not excluding its suburbs.Such, and so magnifying, is the virtue of a large and liberal theme! We expand to its bulk. To produce a mighty book, you must choose a mighty theme. No great and enduring volume can ever be written on the flea,though many there be who have tried it.” — “On Leviathan” Herman Melville

 

“Each [howler monkey] has an outsized hyoid bone, at the base of its tongue, allowing it to brace tongue against larynx in ways not possible to other animals. In human beings, the more discreet equivalent of this bone makes speech possible. In howler monkeys, it facilitates an excruciatingly loud noise, which is used by male and female alike to announce their territory. These are, according to the Smithsonian Institute (you see, I’m checking everything now), the loudest animals in the world.How loud? You can hear them five kilometres away, through dense tropical foliage. On a modern, wind-swept university campus, you can probably hear them even farther.” — David Warren

A man is in the photograph which the Mars explorer Spirit it stopped transmitting data in 2004 sent.First, puhlllleeeeze. A man? It’s a tiny rock only a few inches high. It’s only a few feet from the rover Here’s the image from NASA.     

Oh, yeah, “exploring” in the name of Science. You pervert!

I collected data to test whether biological market theory could account for exchanges of male-to-female grooming and sexual activity in longtailed macaques. I explored male-to-female grooming, rates of sexual activity, and grooming–mating interchanges, which were male-to-female grooming bouts that directly involved mating. Male-to-female grooming mainly occurred when females were sexually active, and males groomed females longer per bout when mating, inspection, or presentation of female hindquarters was involved.

Wink wink …. nudge nudge….

Moreover, male-to-female grooming was associated with an increase in female rates for all forms of sexual activity, where in contrast, female-to-male grooming was associated with decreased rates of mating in the groomed males. Males did not preferentially mate with swollen females or invest more grooming in them during grooming–mating interchanges, as swellings did not seem to be a reliable indicator of female fertility. Rank status was correlated with grooming payment during grooming–mating interchanges in favour of higher-ranked males and females. In support of a biological market interpretation, the amount of grooming a male performed on a female during grooming–mating interchanges was related to the current supply of females around the interaction.

— From the “Pethouse” of journals: ScienceDirect – Animal Behaviour : Payment for sex in a macaque mating market

Tanzania refugees seen eating endangered species

Hungry refugees in Tanzania are eating chimpanzees and other endangered species in order to supplement their meager diet, an international conservation group said on Tuesday.

YUM! Larva Chocolate looks sick, tastes sweet Those Japanese again. Masters of imitation.

WHO SAYS mixed marriages can’t work? Equal level of commitment and relationship satisfaction found among gay and heterosexual couples

HERE TODAY. Gone tomorrow. New monkey species is already endangered

MIGHT HAVE something to do with this story. Island Monkeys Do Not Recognize Big Cat Calls Perhaps the first case of a self-endanged species.

CHILDHOOD Suspicions about Fish Sticks confirmed Scientists find missing link – and it’s a fish finger

IS Transcranial Magnetic Stimulation A New Treatment Of Bulimia Nervosa? Don’t know but the question itself makes me want to throw up.

DISMAL science meets doomsday science. Hilarity ensues. Economists help climate scientists to improve global warming forecasts

ANOTHER enduring gift to the world from Russian space science: Cockroaches conceived in space onboard the Russian Foton-M bio satellite have developed faster and become hardier than ‘terrestrial’ ones, a research supervisor said on Thursday.

BLOCK that metaphor! Alzheimer’s Molecule Is A Smart Speed Bump On The Nerve-cell Transport Highway One might also say that a hemorrhoid is a speed bump on the Hershey Highway, but one would be wrong.

FART STUDY? That’s Phase 2: Sweden to study belching cows

A Swedish university has received 3.8 million kronor ($590,000) in research funds to measure the greenhouse gases released when cows belch…. Project leader Jan Bertilsson said that the cows involved in the study will have different diets and wear a collar device measuring the methane level in the air around them. “This type of research is already being conducted in Canada so we will be in contact with Canadian agricultural researchers in the near future,” he said.

How Hi-Tech Enhances Productivity