j a m s h a i d’s blog

Today i got an email from a friend about this twins. Whats very surprising about them as you can see in the pic below, is that the two little girls are different coloured – one white and the other black!

A mixed-race British mom has given birth to twins – one of each. No, not a boy and a girl, two girls – one black, the other white. The odds of such a birth are about a million to one, experts said. "It was a shock when I realized that my twins were two different colors," Kylie Hodgson, 19, told London's Daily Mail. "But it doesn't matter to us – they are just our two gorgeous little girls." Hodgson and her partner, Remi Horder, 17, were both born to mixed-race parents. Little Kian and Remee share a love of apples and the Teletubbies, their proud mom says. Fertility experts speculate that a sperm containing all-white genes fused with an egg with all-white genes, and a sperm with all-black genes fused with an all-black gene egg to produce the fraternal twins.

Scientists just announced the discovery of this strange new crustacean 900 miles south of Easter Island. According to a report in the journal of the National Museum of Natural History in Paris, divers first found the creature last year at a depth of 7,540 feet. From the Associated Press:

Scientists said the animal, which they named Kiwa hirsuta, was so distinct from other species that they created a new family and genus for it. The animal is white and just shy of 6 inches long — about the size of a salad plate.

In what (the French Institute for Sea Exploration’s Michel) Segonzac described as a “surprising characteristic,” the animal’s pincers are covered with sinuous, hair-like strands.

It is also blind. The researchers found it had only “the vestige of a membrane” in place of eyes, Segonzac said.

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I was astonished to read about Tammet. He can recite the number Pi to its 22514th digit !.
Below is an article about him and his abilities from Wikipedia.

Daniel Paul Tammet (born January 31, 1979) is a British autistic gifted with a facility for mathematics problems, sequence memory, and natural language learning.

He was born with congenital childhood epilepsy. His autism was a result of a series of seizures as a young child.

Experiencing numbers as colors or sensations is a well-documented form of synaesthesia, but Tammet is unique in how specific his mental imagery of numbers is: he claims that in his mind each number up to 10,000 has its own unique shape and feel, and he can “sense” whether a number is prime or divisible, and “see” results of calculations as landscapes in his head.

Tammet holds the European record for remembering and recounting pi, recounting it in a several-hour session to its 22514th digit. [1]

Professor Allan Snyder at the Australian National University said of Tammet: “Savants can’t usually tell us how they do what they do. It just comes to them. Daniel can. He describes what he sees in his head. That’s why he’s exciting. He could be the Rosetta Stone.” He can speak at least English, French, German, Spanish, Lithuanian, Icelandic, and Esperanto. He likes Estonian very much because it is so special and rich in vowels. He has even changed his second name to Estonian-based word Tammet, which comes from the Estonian word Tamm meaning oak. Tammet is making a new language called mänti. Mänti has many features related to Finnish and Estonian.

He was the subject of a documentary in the UK titled The Boy With The Amazing Brain that was broadcast on Five on May 24, 2005 (also broadcast under the title “Brain Man”). It showed highlights of his feat of recalling pi as well as his meeting with Kim Peek, another individual who is famous for having savant skills. In one emotional moment of the show, Peek hugged Tammet and told him “some day you may be as brilliant as me.”

Tammet claims he can learn a new language within a week. For the documentary film about him, Tammet was challenged to learn Icelandic. Within seven days he was conversing well enough in Icelandic to undergo a live television interview about his skills, and chat freely with the hosts. He is a keen and improving golfer. [Read More]

There is a small bottle containing a red fluid on a shelf in Sheffield University’s microbiology laboratory. The liquid looks cloudy and uninteresting. Yet, if one group of scientists is correct, the phial contains the first samples of extraterrestrial life isolated by researchers.Inside the bottle are samples left over from one of the strangest incidents in recent meteorological history. On 25 July, 2001, blood-red rain fell over the Kerala district of western India. And these rain bursts continued for the next two months. All along the coast it rained crimson, turning local people’s clothes pink, burning leaves on trees and falling as scarlet sheets at some points.

Investigations suggested the rain was red because winds had swept up dust from Arabia and dumped it on Kerala. But Godfrey Louis, a physicist at Mahatma Gandhi University in Kottayam, after gathering samples left over from the rains, concluded this was nonsense. ‘If you look at these particles under a microscope, you can see they are not dust, they have a clear biological appearance.’

[ Read More ]

A giant squid measuring 8.62m is on display at London’s Natural History Museum after being caught by a trawler off the coast of Falkland Islands. Such huge squids are very rare and are found at ocean “depths of 200-1000m”. Largest squid ever seen measured 18.5m and was found in 1880. They can weigh as much as 1000kg.

Source: BBC News: Giant squid grabs London audience
Study more about squids at Wikipedia

Once again, about sleep.

This vitnamese man has never slept – not once for the past 33 years. But he is not using any drugs, which I mentioned in my earlier post. It happened after he got a fever in 1973. He is suffering from insomnia, or lets say he is “benefiting” than “suffering”. He lives a healthy life, does more work than others and he is famous too! (dubbed as “creature of the night”)
Read more about it: http://www.thanhniennews.com/features/?catid=10&newsid=12673