During my illness I stumbled across this one page story from Scary Tales No. 41 (Charlton Comics, Nov. ’83). I found the gag clever enough that I’ve scanned the whole thing in to share.
There were no art or writing credits that I could find, although the penciling looks familiar.
You can click the image to view a slightly larger version.
I’ve really been enjoying the fantasy design of Daniel Simon, but I’m a sucker for most things futuristic with a retro tinge.
My lovely cartoonist has begun her own blog, so far mostly dealing with the gag comic we’ve been hammering away at for a while now.
You should check it out.
I’m flat-out stealing this from the venerable AnyCheese, [well, her buzz feed anyhow] but this story exploded my thinker.
A 42-year-old HIV patient with leukemia appears to have no detectable HIV in his blood and no symptoms after a stem cell transplant from a donor carrying a gene mutation that confers natural resistance to the virus that causes AIDS, according to a report published Wednesday in the New England Journal of Medicine.
“The patient is fine,” said Dr. Gero Hutter of Charite Universitatsmedizin Berlin in Germany. “Today, two years after his transplantation, he is still without any signs of HIV disease and without antiretroviral medication.” – More from CNN
They do point out later in the article that the process is prohibitively dangerous to use in all but the most extreme of situations, and that the process itself kills one in three patients. My thoughts are that the skeptics can tell it to Christiaan Barnard.
I’m not arguing for a technocracy, but when are we going to get The R&D Candidate?
Jessica was asking me about the deco posters I occasionally use as desktop wallpapers, and if they were obtained at the recently mentioned Vintage Venus. While I love the stuff at VV, the posters she’s got in mind are actually the work of talented fellow, Steve Thomas.
My favourite work is definitely his series of planetary travel posters:
Full size images, as well as more great travel posters are available at Steve Thomas’ site.
I’m stealing this link from my brother’s twitter stream (@c0dyskinner) – thirty beautiful info-graphics from Designer Daily.
One item, The Genealogy of Pop/Rock Music, I’m seriously considering ordering for the lovely Jessica May – it’s the kind of thing your eyes can swim in for days.
Most interesting article I’ve read today:
Trees retaliate when their fig wasps don’t service them
Figs and fig wasps have evolved to help each other out: Fig wasps lay their eggs inside the fruit where the wasp larvae can safely develop, and in return, the wasps pollinate the figs.
But what happens when a wasp lays its eggs but fails to pollinate the fig?
The trees get even by dropping those figs to the ground, killing the baby wasps inside, reports a Cornell University and Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute study published in the Proceedings of the Royal Society. – More at PhysOrg.com
An oldish video:
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Nhj3Z9o6t0g]
Also:
The author initially conceived of the idea for the squeeze machine from her observations in animal science. Cattle being held in a squeeze chute, while waiting in line for veterinary attention, often appeared somewhat agitated during the waiting; some of the animals, however, seemed to relax once pressure was applied to large areas of their bodies… In working with children, we have found that 5 minutes of sustained use of the squeeze machine is the minimum typically required to obtain a readily detectable calming effect.
Is ours a future full of relaxed autistic people encased in squeezy robotic exoskeletons?
The Great Sunflower Project is a pretty simple idea. They’ll send you some sunflower seeds if you’ll spend fifteen minutes, twice a month, watching your blooms and recording how many bees come and go.
They crunch the numbers at their site and you get some nifty flowers – sounds fair to me, and anything that helps stop colony collapse disorder seems like a good idea.
Between The Great Sunflower Project and that recent DARPA balloon spotting competition it sounds like distributed data collection is really starting to catch on, which has me thinking: there have to be some heuristics that can be applied to already existing webcams (traffic cams, monument cams, etc) to determine if that area is suffering a disaster – sort of an early warning zombie detection system.
Oh Science, you knew just what I wanted!
Sinornithosaurus, a VENOMOUS dinosaur!
A feathered predator that lived 125 million years ago has been revealed as the first-known venomous dinosaur, which paralysed its prey with poison in a similar way to some snakes. – TimesOnline
I was a little concerned that the new understanding of feathered dinos wouldn’t catch on with the public, people just don’t want a softer dinosaur, but give them venom – and apparently teach them the crane kick from the end of The Karate Kid – and I think we’ve got a contender.
More from the article:
David Burnham, of the University of Kansas, said: “You wouldn’t have seen it coming. It would have swooped down behind you from a low-hanging tree branch and attacked from the back. Once the teeth were embedded in your skin the venom could seep into the wound.
“The prey would rapidly go into shock but it would still be living, and it might have seen itself being slowly devoured by this raptor.”
Meeeeerrry Christmas!