Extraordinary claims. Ordinary investigations.

You may do it with a common bread knife and cut board. At least that’s what was done in the indescribable scene above, perhaps one of the most strange happenings in the history of science. And it was filmed. And we have the video.

The white object inside the jar, I must emphasize, is a piece of Albert Einstein’s brain. The Albert Einstein. The knife and board are common kitchen utensils, used to cut bread, I must repeat. Bread from Thomas Harvey, the man cutting a piece of Einstein’s brain to give as a souvenir to Kenji Sugimoto, a Japanese teacher fanatic for the German physicist. Sugimoto soon takes the piece to a Karaoke bar.

How come?

The unbelievable story of how this happened is documented in “Einstein’s Brain” (1994) by Kevin Hull. You can read a detailed (and hilarious) review in Encyclopedia Obscura: Einstein’s Brain, but keep reading to watch the whole thing along with some updates on the story.

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Some years ago I translated to Portuguese a nice piece by Ken Freedman telling “A Brief History of Disembodied Dog Heads”. It was a success, after all, it described the experiences of soviet Dr. S.S. Bryukhonenko with disembodied dog heads kept alive artificially. And with a film to prove the point. How could you not be intrigued and disturbed by this?

The film in question recently inspired a music video by Metallica with nothing less than zombies. And although it almost certainly involves a reenacted (and exaggerated) portrayal of the results achieved by Bryukhonenko, the soviets did achieve some success. That included the creation of two-headed dogs by Vladimir Demikhov.

“Why create two-headed dogs?”, you may ask. And you would be asking the same as a brilliant Cleveland neurosurgeon named Robert J. White. Responsible for many innovative surgery techniques, operating on what he estimates as more than 10,000 brains, White explored the limits of his area going well beyond dogs. Searching for an animal model closer to us, he operated on rhesus monkeys. He wants to make head transplants in humans a reality. Or, as he calls it, “total body transplant”.

Keep reading for an intriguing documentary interviewing White and presenting footage with his experiments with monkeys. And hear the man claiming that head (or total body) transplants are not only possible today, but that figures like Stephen Hawking could be the first to benefit from it.

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NEW YORK and SÃO PAULO (March 17, 2009) – ScienceBlogs.com, the web’s largest science community, announced today the launch of its newest international site, ScienceBlogs Brazil.

ScienceBlogs Brazil brings together the most original and influential voices within the Brazilian science community, some of whom have already won accolades for their blogging. Edited from São Paulo by Carlos Hotta and Atila Iamarino, ScienceBlogs Brazil launches today with 23 Portuguese-language blogs on topics ranging from genetics to the environment. “I think we need people committed to raising scientific awareness in Brazil,” said Carlos Hotta, “and I am certain that ScienceBlogs Brazil will turn our local voices into global ones.”

With its growing science community and emphasis on science as a cornerstone of economic growth under a multi-year, multi-billion dollar Science, Technology and Innovation Plan of Action for National Development, Brazil is emerging as a vital player in global science culture. The country is the fifth most populous in the world and has over 67 million Internet users.

“We are thrilled with the growth of ScienceBlogs around the world and the rich conversation that it engenders,” said Fabien Savenay, Senior Vice President for Seed Media Group, the parent company of ScienceBlogs. “We are excited to now bring this conversation to South America.”

And the most surprising thing must be that this Fortean blogger is now also part of ScienceBlogs Brazil, with 100nexos – in Portuguese, of course. Many of the posts I originally write for 100nexos in Portuguese end up here in English in the science section. And vice-versa.

The paranormal ones usually come from or go to my other project, CeticismoAberto,  meaning “Open Skepticism”, which I’m also very proud to say is the most visited Brazilian website in its genre. That is: a “skeptical” website is the most visited website about ufology and the paranormal in Brazil. It has more than double the pageviews of the second-place.

This week, besides being BoingBoinged two times, I was also thrilled to be recommended by Richard Wiseman. As well as links from Posthuman Blues and the many from Anomalist and others. I can only thank them. And please forgive me for being so full of myself, but I’m amazed that these varied sources I enthusiastically read everyday… they actually read what I write and even suggest it to others.

It’s really unbelievable! I wouldn’t believe it, and yet, the extraordinary evidence is there!

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Boxxy was a happy normal 16-year-old girl who liked anime and played Gaia Online. She did nothing wrong. Nor did she do anything especially right. But for a day last month, she became one of the most searched terms in Google, the most-subscribed channel on Youtube and the reason for an “online civil war” that put one of the major Internet forums offline for a couple of hours.

A month after the phenomenon: keep reading for the Boxxy story, the Boxxy science, from online videos to American presidents.

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That would be how a British tabloid might report this quite interesting episode. Michael Shermer argued in this short video for the Skeptic Society that “there’s no way that aliens, if we ever do encounter them, are going to be bipedal primates, let alone look just like us except for some gnarly stuff in their foreheads or maybe speak English but with an Indian accent.”

“Only one species in the history of life on Earth, over hundreds and hundreds of millions of species, only one has become a bipedal primate”, he argues. And as Shermer wrote on the SkepticBlog, “none other than Richard Dawkins” took an issue with that.

“I would agree with [Shermer] in betting against aliens being bipedal primates and I think the point is worth making, but I think he greatly overestimates the odds against”, wrote Dawkins, who referenced Simon Conway Morris, Edward O. Wilson and particularly the latter mention of…

The Dinosauroid. Dale Russell’s Dinosauroid, a scientific speculation on how the Troodon might have looked liked today if it weren’t extinct along with the rest of the dinosaurs. The end-result, as you can see below, would look like a round-headed biped surprisingly like us. Or so Russell speculated.

Immediately after publication, Russell’s speculation was heavily criticized, as it is to this day. It’s no surprise the Dinosauroid looked like us, as the speculation did have some assumptions that intelligent life would have a tendency to evolve in our direction.

Be sure to read the quick exchange between Shermer and Dawkins on the subject. The British skeptic ends his point like this:

“My guess is intermediate between your two extremes. I agree with you [Shermer] that androids are rare, that is indeed suggested by the fact that they have only evolved once on Earth. I agree with you that science fiction, and the alien abduction subculture, have an unseemly eagerness to imagine androids, which you are right to denigrate. But I suspect that androids are not so very rare as to justify the statistical superlatives that you permitted yourself in the vignette. I have discussed such matters in the last chapter of The Ancestor’s Tale. I think Conway-Morris goes too far in one direction, and you go too far in the other.”

Check also the comments on the post for an interesting discussion. Most people today know Dawkins as one of, and perhaps the main Horseman of Atheism. But before that he was already famous for his excellent science writing, which included no small dose of speculation and all the imagination that goes with that. I am a huge admirer of all of his work, though I do tend to appreciate the science promotion part better.

Another great skeptic also mentioned the Troodon and the idea of a intelligent dinosaur. That was Carl Sagan in “The Dragons of Eden”, another superb work that few people today seem to have read. Ironically, perhaps, “The Dragons of Eden”, as the name already makes clear, is full of references to the Bible. Just as metaphor, of course.

Now, God is certainly a delusion, but perhaps we do have some bipedal intelligent friends out there. Or is it? Do we?

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