Month: September 2016

There’s a time and place for large, high-quality speakers, but there’s also a time for small speakers that look like cute little animals. Mighty Animal Speakers—a new addition to the Firebox lineup—is a line of audio gadgets that resemble wide-eyed animals. For $27, you can get one of six different creatures: a pug, panda, cat, pig, unicorn, or fox.

Despite their small size, the animals pack a decent punch with 2W speakers. But if you’re not looking to blast any jams, there’s also a built-in microphone so you can make calls—or maybe even pretend you’re holding a conversation with a little cat. The speakers are Bluetooth-enabled and have a USB cable for charging, with a small button on the bottom to turn the device on and off. Owners will enjoy roughly three to four hours of battery life before needing to recharge, which should be plenty of time for adorable partying on the go.

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Welcome to the future. Scientists have created arteries that can be safely implanted and continue growing in their hosts. They published a report of their progress today, September 28, in the journal Nature Communications.

Transplanted organs and tissue face several major obstacles to success. First, there’s ensuring the transplant is right and safe for the recipient. Then there’s the possibility that the recipient’s body will reject the new part. Finally, there’s the need for the implanted materials to cooperate with the cells around them, to grow and work together. Scientists have made major headway on the first two issues over the last few decades. But when it comes to coaxing transplanted parts to grow, we’re really just getting started.

Growth is especially important—and hard to produce—in blood vessel transplants. Scientists have found ways to make it happen, but they involve growing new vessels in the lab from scratch, using each patient’s own cells. The customization process is expensive and time-intensive, which seriously limits its use.

So a team of researchers at the University of Minnesota set out to find another way. They essentially wanted to build a generic or base model of the pulmonary artery—one that could be kept on hand in a hospital and used as needed.

They started with sheep. The team took samples of sheep skin cells and mixed them with a clotting agent and calcium chloride to give them rigidity, then pumped them into a tube-shaped glass mold. As the cells took shape in the tubes, the researchers infused them with nutrient fluids to give them the shape and flexibility they would need. They then transferred the cells to a bioreactor for another five weeks of maturation and stretching.

Once the arteries had grown and stretched to the right size, the team rinsed them in chemicals that stripped out all the original skin cells, a process known as decellularization. All that remained were the newly grown structures themselves; the shapes of blood vessels, with none of the immune system–triggering cells.

The new arteries were then implanted in three 8-week-old lambs. The lambs were patched up, then monitored with regular ultrasound scans 8 weeks, 30 weeks, and 50 weeks after their surgery. After the last scan, the lambs were euthanized and their arteries removed and dissected.

The artificial blood vessels had fared incredibly well. Not only did the lambs’ bodies not reject the grafts, but they seemed to embrace them. The transplanted arteries entered the lambs’ bodies as scaffolds, essentially, yet by the time the animals reached young adulthood the scaffolds were filled and composed of their own cells. The blood vessels grew with their owners, serving them well.

Jeffrey Harold Lawson is a professor of vascular surgery at Duke University. “This appears to be very exciting work and continues to support the emerging field of vascular tissue engineering,” Lawson, who was unaffiliated with the study, told mental_floss. “It is very exciting to see the vessels grow over time with the sheep and repopulate with the hosts’ own cells. If work like this continues to make both preclinical and clinical progress, it could revolutionize the field of pediatric cardiac surgery and potentially avoid reoperative procedures for thousands of young children.”

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To the dedicated detective, everything looks like a clue. Take this approximately 3-million-year-old bees’ nest, for example: Researchers say its very presence speaks volumes about the world in which our early ancestors lived. They published their report today, September 28, in the journal PLOS One.

The ancestor in question is Australopithecus africanus, a small hominid species with both human- and ape-like features that lived in modern-day South Africa. Au. africanus was little to begin with—adult males averaged around 4’6”, females 3’9”—but the first specimen ever found was littler yet. The Taung child, as it came to be known, was first unearthed in 1924, and represented the earliest human ancestor ever found in Africa. Archaeologists found a few more Au. africanus individuals over the next decade, and then the wellspring of remains dried up. We haven’t found any more Australopithecus there since.

But the absence of bodies isn’t the same thing as a dead end. Researchers have simply turned their attention to exploring the world of Australopithecus in other ways: namely, looking at the site itself, at its geology, environment, and all the other fossils found there.

When we think about fossils, we typically think about the remains of plants and animals. But the traces left behind by these organisms can become fossils too. These footprints, burrows, and nests are harder to pin down to a single species, so scientists classify them into groups called ichnogenera.

Fossilized burrows in the ichnogenus Celliforma were most likely made by prehistoric bees. Unlike the humming, social hives of honeybees, each flask-shaped Celliforma nest was dug out of the ground and occupied by a single bee.

These nests are somewhat rare, and they’ve never been seen before in Africa, so researchers were understandably pretty psyched when they found one in Au. africanus territory near the edge of the Kalahari desert.

The nest was in great shape, given its age. The outside was covered with 25 small chambers, each of which would have housed a baby bee millions of years ago. Computed tomography (CT) scans of the entire nest revealed a complex system of tunnels and cells within, as well as traces of tiny plant parts that would have once lined its walls.

The researchers say the nest’s overall structure is most similar to the homes of modern carder bees, which glaze the interior of their nests with a thin layer of clay, smooth it out with a wax-like substance, then add pieces of plants.

The nest’s structure and contents suggest that it was built in light, dry soil—findings that support previous studies, which hypothesized that Au. africanus may have lived in an arid, savannah-like environment.

“Insect traces are rarely considered in detail,” the study authors conclude, “yet they could offer important palaeoenvironmental insights, with the potential to reveal valuable information about hominin palaeoecology.”

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No matter how much potential a movie might have, sometimes a studio just doesn’t get it right the first time. Whether it’s a matter of the wrong script, weak actors, or subpar directing, sometimes the same story needs to be told a few times on the big screen before it’s done justice. Some of the most popular movies of all times have been preceded by earlier versions of the same story—most of which acted like rough drafts for the eventual masterpiece. Check out earlier versions of six iconic films.

1. THE WIZARD OF OZ (1925)

Not only wasn’t 1939’s The Wizard of Oz the first adaptation of Frank L. Baum’s classic children’s book, it actually wasn’t even close. Before Judy Garland slipped on those ruby red slippers, there were numerous attempts to bring the land of Oz to live-action as both shorts and full-length films.

The most fully realized of these early attempts is 1925’s The Wizard of Oz, starring Dorothy Dwan as (appropriately) Dorothy, writer and comedian Larry Semon as the Scarecrow (and the film’s director), and a young Oliver Hardy as the Tin Man—this movie would premiere just a few years before the formation of the Laurel and Hardy tandem. Despite a screenplay co-written by Semon and Baum’s son, the movie itself bears little resemblance to the book—the Scarecrow and Cowardly Lion are simply farmhands in disguise, and there’s no Wicked Witch chasing the group down with winged monkeys.

The movie itself centers on the royal squabbling in Oz, revolving around Dorothy’s destiny as princess and the inevitable conflict against the aptly named Prime Minister Kruel. Instead of wishing to go back to Kansas, Dorothy falls in love with Prince Kynd of Oz, who beat out a guy dressed in a scarecrow costume to win her affections. The movie was savaged by critics and was a financial disaster—one from which Semon never quite recovered. Before long, he was back on the vaudeville circuit, soon ending up in a sanitarium before his mysterious death at 39.

2. FRANKENSTEIN (1910)

Before Boris Karloff and director James Whale famously gave life to Frankenstein’s monster in 1931, Edison Studios took a crack at the Mary Shelley tale in 1910. In this silent short, Frankenstein’s monster is created through an impressive special effects sequence meant to illustrate how the evil lurking in the mind of its creator literally gave birth to this abomination.

Like the Universal movie decades later, the Edison production isn’t exactly faithful to the source material, though it manages to pull off some genuinely frightening moments—especially given the state of the horror genre in 1910. The movie itself, which has a runtime of less than 20 minutes, was thought lost for years, until it reemerged several decades after its release. Destroying old films to recycle the silver in them was common practice back then, so the fact that this ever saw the light of day again is a feat unto itself.

3. BEAUTY AND THE BEAST (1946)

Long before Disney turned Beauty and the Beast into the subject of lunch boxes and Halloween costumes the world over, French director Jean Cocteau gave the classic fairytale life for the first time on the big screen. Beauty and the Beast (released as La Belle et la Bête in France) doesn’t feature singing clocks or teapots, but the quirky fantasy elements are still there. There are some sentient candelabras, magical mirrors, enchanted gloves, and of course the Beast himself, whose animalistic look is achieved through some superb makeup.

The ideas in Cocteau’s Beauty and the Beast were well ahead of their time and have influenced generations of fantasy filmmakers in the years since its release. There’s fantasy, romance, tragedy, and even some horror—all of the elements you need for a Beauty and the Beast adaptation, and it’s one that any fan of the Mouse House needs to experience.

4. THE MALTESE FALCON (1931)

John Huston’s The Maltese Falcon (1941) is seen as the birth of the film noir movement, but it wasn’t the first attempt at adapting Dashiell Hammett’s pulp crime novel. In 1931, Warner Bros. hired director Roy Del Ruth to bring the novel to life in an era before strict Motion Picture Production Codes sanitized Hammett’s original story.

The movie, like the book, delved into the world of crime, violence, and illicit sex. One of the most controversial parts of the original film dealt with the homosexual relationship between Casper Gutman and Wilmer Cook, which was taken straight from the original novel. Unfortunately for the studio, production codes changed drastically when they tried re-releasing the film a few years later, leading to the film being barred from release.

In order to profit off of Hammett’s popular tale again, the studio decided to simply remake the movie—twice. First as an ill-fated comedy retitled Satan Met A Lady, and later again as The Maltese Falcon, famously starring Humphrey Bogart and Mary Astor. While the end result of this version was toned down considerably from the source material, the stylish production, impeccable acting, and tighter script made the original adaption nothing but a memory. 

5. THE TRAPP FAMILY (1956)

The story of the von Trapp family didn’t first come to theaters with The Sound of Music; instead, it was a West German film titled The Trapp Family that originally brought the family’s exploits into pop culture. Based on Maria von Trapp’s memoir, The Story of the Trapp Family Singers, The Trapp Family covers familiar ground: a nun is brought in to care for the family of a wealthy baron, soon turning them into a famous singing group that flees Austria to escape Nazi oppression.

The movie was actually well received by critics and successful enough to spawn a sequel, titled The Trapp Family in America. That title became much more literal as the von Trapp story was soon adapted by Hollywood in 1965 as The Sound of Music, one of the most beloved movies of all time. The film’s musical take on the von Trapp family story—and the fact that it’s not a remake of the original—helped it eclipse The Trapp Family, leaving it a mere footnote in film history.

6. VINYL (1965)

Despite the unfamiliar title, Vinyl is actually a very early adaptation of Anthony Burgess’s dystopian novel A Clockwork Orange, which, of course, was later masterfully filmed by Stanley Kubrick for a 1971 release. There must be something about Burgess’s novel that attracted some of the best artists of the 21st century, because not only did Kubrick give his take on the material, but Vinyl had another genius at the helm: Andy Warhol.

With a cast of novice actors and without the cinematic panache of a Kubrick, Vinyl is more of an experimental oddity than an ideal adaptation of A Clockwork Orange. It’s raw and improvisational as it loosely translated Burgess’s work to the screen. In fact, if you didn’t know it was based on A Clockwork Orange, you’d be hard-pressed to find any shared DNA between the two.