discoverynews:

Deadly Spiders Spark Fear, Death in India

Mysterious thumb-sized spiders rampage through northeast India leaving two dead and several others with painfully swollen bites.

“It looks like a new species. We haven’t been able to identify it,” said ecologist L.R. Saikia of India’s Dibrugarh University in the Associated Press.

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Image: Strdel/AFP/Getty Images - Professor Ratul Rajkhowa of the Department of Zoology of Cotton College holds a dead spider that was the alleged species that killed two people in the northeastern Indian state of Assam on June 4, 2012.

reuters:

Wisconsin’s Scott Walker became the first governor in U.S. history to survive a recall election on Tuesday in a decisive victory that dealt a blow to the labor movement and raised Republican hopes of defeating President Barack Obama in the November election.

Unions and liberal activists forced the recall election over a law curbing collective bargaining powers for public sector workers passed soon after Walker took office in 2011.

With nearly all of the votes counted, Republican Walker won by 8 percentage points over Democratic challenger Milwaukee Mayor Tom Barrett, a bigger victory for the governor over the same challenger than two years ago.

Republicans around the country were elated by the result in a state that President Obama won by 14 percentage points in 2008.

READ MORE: Scott Walker makes history surviving recall election

theatlantic:

This Graph Is Disastrous for Print and Great for Facebook—or the Opposite!

If you work anywhere near media, you’ll want to take a long look at this graph. It tells you where Americans direct our attention (in BLUE) and where advertisers pay money to capture our attention (in RED). 

• Takeaway #1: We still love TV. 
• Takeaway #2: Advertisers still love print.
• Takeaway #3: Audiences move faster than advertisers.

According to this chart — adapted from a Mary Meeker slideshow excerpted by Bill Gross — we spend more time engaging with mobile devices than reading print. But print publications still get 25-times more ad money than mobile. Either the eyeballs are moving faster than the advertisers, who will eventually stop paying for print … or the ad teams don’t think a minute spent around mobile ads is worth a minute spend around print ads. Those aren’t mutually exclusive.

We can take this chart in a lot of directions. Could print see another mass exodus of money? Is mobile advertising about to explode?

Read more.

discoverynews:

The Stages of the Transit of Venus Explained

The marathon event lasts nearly seven hours and includes a handful of key events.

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Editor’s note: Please submit images of the transit of Venus here. Include your name, where you took the image and with what filters, cameras, etc. We will use the images in a slideshow and post some on our Tumblr here.

If you want to stay anonymous, of course that is ok, too.

Also, here are some tips on how to photograph the historic event.

theatlantic:

It’s a Tragedy We’re Not Spending More on Infrastructure

In light of Friday’s shockingly awful jobs report, it should be more apparent than ever just how absolutely, positively psychotic it is that the United States is not spending more money on infrastructure right now.

Public construction spending, including state, federal and local projects, has been on a staggered decline since early 2009.* Yep, even with stimulus funding. In the meantime, the country has more than a million unemployed construction workers sitting around, and their industry just shed 28,000 jobs in May, at least on a seasonally adjusted basis. 

The cruel irony of this situation? There’s never been a better time for us to build.

Read more. [Image: FRED]

discoverynews:

American ‘Cannibal Apocalypse’?

Benjamin Radford looks at the history and phenomena of cannibalism.

Cannibalism has occasionally been practiced by murderers; serial killer Jeffrey Dahmer infamously killed and ate parts of several victims during the late 1980s and early 1990s, and in 1994 an Ohio man named Henry Heepe killed his mother, dismembered her, and cooked some of her body parts. Heepe said he killed his mother because he believed she was a “vampire devil.”

Perhaps the strangest case was that in 2006 of German Armin Meiwes, who solicited for — and found — a willing victim to cannibalize. Meiwes posted an online ad “looking for a well-built 18- to 30-year-old to be slaughtered and then consumed.” A man named Bernd Jürgen Brandes volunteered, and Meiwes ate Brandes over the course of the next ten months. Despite his victim’s participation Meiwes was convicted of murder and sentenced to life in prison.

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discoverynews:

Jurassic Squid Ink Same as Modern Squid Ink

Ink from 160-million-year-old giant squid is essentially identical to today’s squid ink.

The discovery suggests that the ink and the ink-screen escape mechanism of squid have not evolved much (if at all) since the Jurassic Period. The finding, published in the latest Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, might just prove that if it isn’t broken, nature isn’t going to fix it.

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