Nomophobia - fear of being without your phone

Nomophobia is the fear of being out of mobile phone contact. The term, an abbreviation for "no-mobile-phone phobia", was coined during a study by the UK Post Office who commissioned YouGov, a UK-based research organisation to look at anxieties suffered by mobile phone users.

The study found that nearly 53% of mobile phone users in Britain tend to be anxious when they "lose their mobile phone, run out of battery or credit, or have no network coverage". The study found that about 58% of men and 48% of women suffer from the phobia, and an additional 9% feel stressed when their mobile phones are off. The study sampled 2,163 people. Fifty-five percent of those surveyed cited keeping in touch with friends or family as the main reason that they got anxious when they could not use their mobile phones.

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World’s oldest mammal - a giant bowhead whale that had a 130-year old harpoon stuck in its neck.

A giant bowhead whale caught off the coast of Alaska in 2007 had a harpoon point embedded in its neck that showed it survived a similar hunt more than a century ago.

Biologists claim the find helps prove the bowhead is the oldest living mammal on earth.

They say the 13-centimetre arrow-shaped fragment dates back to around 1880, meaning the 50-ton whale had been coasting around the freezing arctic waters since Victorian times. The weapon fragment lodged in a bone between the whale's neck and shoulder blade comes from a 19th century bomb lance.

Because traditional whale hunters never took calves, experts estimate the bowhead was several years old when it was first shot and about 130 when it died in 2007.

Calculating a bowhead whale's age can be difficult, and is usually gauged by amino acids in the eye lenses.

It is rare to find one that has lived more than a century, but experts now believe the oldest were close to 200 years old.

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Baby born without blood

You can hardly tell today, but when six-month-old Olivia Norton was born, doctors were shocked by her 'ghost white' body.

Olivia was born with a condition so rare it is likely to be written in to medical textbooks – she was born without blood.

The condition known as fetomaternal haemorrhage meant Olivia's blood ran back into her mother's system, leaving her with such a low heamoglobin count it couldn't actually be considered blood.

Fetomaternal haemorrhag is found in around one every 5000 babies, and can occur spontaneously or due to trauma.

Doctors gave Olivia less than two hours to survive, but thanks to rapid blood transfusions, her skin returned to a normal shade of pink within hours.

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Flying car cleared for takeoff

                                       AFP ©

Drivers hoping to slip the surly -- and traffic congested -- bonds of Earth moved a step closer to realizing their dream, as a US firm said it had successfully tested a street-legal plane.

Massachusetts-based firm said their production prototype "Transition" car-plane had completed an eight-minute test flight, clearing the way for it to hit the market within a year.

The two-seater craft, which has the rounded features of a Fiat 500 and collapsible wings, is on presale for $279,000 and some 100 vehicles have already been ordered.

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Largest rat in the world

The Gambian pouched rat, also known as the African giant pouched rat, is a nocturnal pouched rat. It is among the largest muroids in the world, growing up to about 0.9 metres (3 ft) long including their tail which makes up half their length. It is widespread in Sub-Saharan Africa.

The Gambian pouched rat has very poor eyesight and so depends on its senses of smell and hearing. Its name comes from the large, hamster-like pouches in its cheeks. It is not a true rat but is part of a uniquely African branch of muroid rodents. It typically weighs between 1 and 1.4 kilograms. It is omnivorous, feeding on vegetables, insects, crabs, snails, and other items.

Unlike domestic rats, it has cheek pouches like a hamster. These cheek pouches allow it to gather up several kilograms of nuts per night for storage underground. It has been known to stuff its pouches so full of date palm nuts so as to be hardly able to squeeze through the entrance of its burrow.

This outsized African rodent is also believed to be responsible for the current outbreak of monkeypox in the United States.

They are trained to detect land mines and tuberculosis with their highly developed sense of smell.

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Titanoboa - the largest snake

Titanoboa snake was discovered by a team of North American scientists at the University of Toronto. It's the latest fossil to emerge from Colombia's Cerrejon coal mine in 2005.

The giant serpent is closely related to today's boas and anacondas, snakes that kill their prey with suffocating coils. Titanoboa's fossilised vertebra showed that it was a whopping 13 metres (42 feet) long. It was also a hefty creature and weighed in at over 1.3 tons. That's almost thirty times as heavy as the anaconda, the bulkiest species alive today. Its superlative measurements mean that Titanoboa was not only the largest snake in history, but also the largest land-living vertebrate following the demise of the dinosaurs.

It lived some 58-60 million years ago, when the Cerrejon basin was a giant floodplain, criss-crossed by rivers and nestled within a large tropical rainforest. This is exactly the type of habitat that anacondas thrive in today, and it's likely that Titanoboa shared a similar lifestyle. It may well have been aquatic and hunted similar prey, like crocodiles. Indeed, other fossils from the Cerrejon pit include early relatives of fishes, turtles and crocodiles - all suitable prey for Titanoboa.

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Longest Wedding Dress

The Guinness World Record for the wedding dress with the longest tail in the world was made in Bucharest on March 20, 2012. The 2,750 meter long train broke a previous record of 2,488 meters. It is made of 4,700 meters of material using 1,857 needles, taking 100 days to make.

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Malaysia’s first upside-down house.

                  Photo: Rumah Terbalik

Imagine walking down an ordinary street and coming upon an upended house balanced on a front gable. From the outside, it looks exactly like its neighbors, traditional Sabah village residences. A wheelbarrow leans against a wall and a sedan is parked in the adjacent carport. All typical except they are upside down.

Inside, a TV, microwave, tables, chairs and sofas dangle above visitors who navigate the home’s ceilings, steering around light fixtures and ceiling fans. Playing cards and comic books strewn along the floor, a cigarette in an ashtray, make it seem as though the family has just left the room. Even the washing machine and sewing machine hang overhead. Literally everything in the 1,500-square-foot, two-bedroom home is topsy turvy. But in this house it is the visitors who feel they are ones turned on end.

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Mosquito Laser

The mosquito laser is a device invented by astrophysicist Lowell Wood to kill large numbers of mosquitoes to reduce the chance of people being infected with malaria. Although originally introduced in the early 1980s, the idea was not substantially researched until decades later. In 2007, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation requested Intellectual Ventures LLC to find a way to fight and eventually end malaria. Intellectual Ventures resurrected the idea of using lasers to kill mosquitoes and now has a working prototype.

The device works by using infra-red Light Emitting Diode (LED) lamps on a fence post to create a field of light. This field of light reflects from retroreflective material on another fence post, much like that used on roads and highway signs, and bounces back to its source. This field of light is monitored by charge-coupled devices (CCDs) similar to the ones used in consumer digital cameras. These cameras are situated on both fence posts and detect shadows in the light between the posts. Once an insect is detected, a non-lethal laser is fired at it. This non-lethal laser is used to determine the size of the insect, and the frequency at which its wings are beating.

The information gathered by the non-lethal laser can be used to determine the type of insect and even its gender because wing beat patterns are unique to each species and gender. This is important in preventing malaria because only female mosquitoes bite humans.

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