It’s remarkable the things people will go through in the name of science. In the case of Justin O. Schmidt, the man who developed the “Schmidt pain index,” our gratitude is even more difficult to measure. Schmidt, who published his landmark paper “Hemolytic Activities of Stinging Insect Venoms” in 1983, wanted to know which insect stings are the most painful, and in order to do so, he subjected himself to the pricks of countless creepy crawlies—including on his prick.

Reading his descriptions of the varying severity of insect stings, which are rated on a scale from 0 to 4, is quite a bit like reading the most ghastly wine reviews ever. Check it out:
 

1.0 Sweat bee: Light, ephemeral, almost fruity. A tiny spark has singed a single hair on your arm.
1.2 Fire ant: Sharp, sudden, mildly alarming. Like walking across a shag carpet & reaching for the light switch.
1.8 Bullhorn acacia ant: A rare, piercing, elevated sort of pain. Someone has fired a staple into your cheek.
2.0 Bald-faced hornet: Rich, hearty, slightly crunchy. Similar to getting your hand mashed in a revolving door.
2.0 Yellowjacket: Hot and smoky, almost irreverent. Imagine WC Fields extinguishing a cigar on your tongue.
2.x Honey bee and European hornet.
3.0 Red harvester ant: Bold and unrelenting. Somebody is using a drill to excavate your ingrown toenail.
3.0 Paper wasp: Caustic & burning. Distinctly bitter aftertaste. Like spilling a beaker of Hydrochloric acid on a paper cut.
4.0 Pepsis wasp: Blinding, fierce, shockingly electric. A running hair drier has been dropped into your bubble bath (if you get stung by one you might as well lie down and scream).
4.0+ Bullet ant: Pure, intense, brilliant pain. Like walking over flaming charcoal with a 3-inch nail in your heel.

 
The pepsis wasp, which clocks in at a brain-shattering 4.0 above, is also called the tarantula hawk, for reasons you can best imagine. Here’s a picture of one: if you see it, run quickly in the opposite direction:
 

 
The story of Schmidt is slightly more mundane than the initial impression. As The Straight Dope put it in 2012, “Having spent half an hour on the phone with entomologist Justin O. Schmidt of the Southwestern Biological Institute in Tucson, Arizona, I can confidently report he didn’t volunteer to be stung by every goddamn awful thing in existence. It just sorta happened.” As an entomologist who spends a great deal of time in the field in lush places like Costa Rica, it’s something that happens all too infrequently, whether he wants it to or not. According to Schmidt, the precise valuations listed above are not the product of exacting scientific inquiry and do not appear in his formal papers; rather, they were “wheedled out of him by an editor at Outside magazine, who was trying to goose up a story for that publication in 1996.” (Yeah, yeah, yeah. For fuck’s sake, that just sounds like good editing to me.)

The Straight Dope continues: “One also mustn’t take seriously the wine-review-style descriptions accompanying the sting ratings. For example, the sting of a southern paper wasp is said to be “caustic and burning, with a distinctly bitter aftertaste. Like spilling a beaker of hydrochloric acid on a paper cut.” Such remarks lack empirical basis, Schmidt cheerfully concedes, although if there’s anyone equipped to expound on the fine points of pain, a guy who’s been stung by 150 different species in his lifetime is probably it.”

Still, while we’re at it, it might surprise you to learn that the penis is not the part of the body most sensitive to pain, according to the researches of a man named Michael L. Smith. In his paper “Honey Bee Sting Pain Index by Body Location,” published this year in PeerJ​, it’s up there but not in the top slot.
 

The Schmidt Sting Pain Index rates the painfulness of 78 Hymenoptera species, using the honey bee as a reference point. However, the question of how sting painfulness varies depending on body location remains unanswered. This study rated the painfulness of honey bee stings over 25 body locations in one subject (the author). Pain was rated on a 1–10 scale, relative to an internal standard, the forearm. In the single subject, pain ratings were consistent over three repetitions. Sting location was a significant predictor of the pain rating in a linear model. ... The three least painful locations were the skull, middle toe tip, and upper arm (all scoring a 2.3). The three most painful locations were the nostril, upper lip, and penis shaft (9.0, 8.7, and 7.3, respectively). This study provides an index of how the painfulness of a honey bee sting varies depending on body location.

 
Fellas, if you’re out in the jungle and you find yourself confronting a swarm of pepsis wasps, put on a hockey mask and expose your penis (or possibly your skull—that’s probably a better idea).
 
Here’s the pioneering Dr. Schmidt discussing instinct stings and pain management:
 

 
via Lost at E Minor

 
A chicken is claimed to have caused mass panic amongst the residents of Makurdi, in Nigeria’s capital of Benue last Thursday when it suddenly started speaking.

The chicken was being taken to market, when it allegedly began speaking in fluent Arabic. The incident happened around twelve noon outside the Wadata central mosque.

As a large crowd gathered, the talking chicken was taken into custody at “A” Division police headquarters, near to the mosque. There was considerable panic as people, on foot and in cars, tried to get away from the scene, while others moved towards it.

One eye-witness, a women called Aishetu, told the Nigeria Daily News:

“I heard that police have taken it into custody and that is why the station is so crowded. Everybody wants to see it talk.”

As panic over the talking bird spread, tension grew between groups of herdsmen and farmers at the market, who have have been involved in a recent violent and bloody disputes. Last month, Muslim herdsmen killed hundreds of Christian farmers in Nigeria’s volatile “middle area,” which is a far more disturbing story than any communicative chanticleer.

Police attempted to disperse the crowds by firing shots and throwing tear gas canisters.

Police spokesman, SP. Daniel Ezeala dismissed the claims of a talking chicken by saying:

“How can a fowl talk’” he queried. “There is nothing like that because it is unnatural for animals to talk. It is the handiwork of mischief makers who wanted to displace traders and loot their wares in the market.”

This is not the first time a “talkin"g animal has caused panic, previously a talking fish terrified fishermen by announcing the end of the world. The talking chicken was allegedly slaughtered. It is not known if the poor bird had any final requests…ahem.

H/T Tommy Udo

 
If you ever get fed-up with everyday noise pollution from automobile traffic, construction work or that nauseatingly ubiquitous mall muzak then imagine how such unwanted (and often unnecessary) noise damages marine life.

Mammals, reptiles, fish and invertebrates are suffering from increasing levels of man-made noise pollution coming from ships, oil rigs, and sonar. Now a bio-acoustics laboratory at the Technical University of Catalonia in Barcelona, Spain has developed a kind of “audio Google Earth” for under the water, which allows people to access a where they can listen to the sounds of the deep blue seas. 

The project is called “LIDO” which stands for “Listen to the Deep Ocean Environment” has been developed by French scientist Michel André and his team of researchers. The program aims to monitor undersea sounds to assess the affect of artificial noise on marine wildlife.

A series of microphones have been placed across the world’s seabeds in order to identify which sounds are natural and which are man-made, as the director of the Bio-acoustics Applications Lab Michel André told Euro News:

“We use underwater microphones, that are called hydrophones, which allow us to capture sounds. Once we have captured these sounds, they are analysed in real time through a circuit which tells us whether they come from a cetacean, or whether they come from vessels, to help us understand the interaction between artificial sound and natural sound.”

The hydrophones can be placed on seabeds to a depth of around 1,000 feet. The sound is then transmitted via fibreoptic cables or by radio from moored transmitter stations. This information is available in realtime at the LIDO website.

The project started in 2002 and is now growing rapidly across the globe. LIDO’s aims did prompt concerns from the US and Canadian navies over possible security threats, however a deal was struck between LIDO and the military. Inevitably, even the armed services will have to accept they cannot lay claim to any ownership of the sea’s acoustic world.

Visit Listen to the Deep Ocean Environment LIDO here, read more on the story here, plus video.
 

 
Via Euro News

 
The gift of a bull pizzle to Sigurdur Hjartarson in 1974 was the seminal event of a multi-generational Icelandic wang dynasty. Hjartarson’s cock collection grew impressively in size, climaxing with the 1997 consummation of the Icelandic Phallological Museum. Curation was taken over by the fruit of his loins, his son Hjörtur Gísli Sigurðsson, in 2011, the same year the museum moved from the northern fishing town of Húsavík to the capital Reykjavík, and made news for the acquisition of its first human specimen. Coincidence?
 

 

The Icelandic Phallological Museum contains a collection of more than two hundred and fifteen penises and penile parts belonging to almost all the land and sea mammals that can be found in Iceland. Visitors to the museum will encounter fifty six specimens belonging to seventeen different kinds of whale, one specimen taken from a rogue polar bear, thirty-six specimens belonging to seven different kinds of seal and walrus, and one hundred and fifteen specimens originating from twenty different kinds of land mammal: all in all, a total of two hundred and nine specimens belonging to forty six different kinds of mammal, including specimens from Homo Sapiens. It should be noted that the museum has also been fortunate enough to receive legally-certified gift tokens for four specimens belonging to Homo Sapiens. Besides there are some twenty-three folklore specimens and forty foreign ones. Altogether the collection contains more than 280 specimens from 93 different species of animals.

280 specimens may seem on the smallish side, but size of course doesn’t count for everything, right? Most of the collection comes from outside donors, the museum’s Honorary Members. But just like many an actual pork sword, the Icelandic Phallological Museum is a source of some confusion and frustration. The museum’s own about page says that this upstanding pillar of its community was founded in Húsavík and moved to Reykjavík, but several news articles say the opposite. Other articles (and the museum’s own web site) herald the 2011 endowment of a human specimen, while a forthcoming documentary film follows the preposterous race to become the first human donor. But coaxing out a load of hard facts isn’t my job here today. I’m really just here to show you gratuitous pictures of penises.
 

 

 

 

 

 

Is it ironic or appropriate that I was turned on to this by someone named “Pickles?” Just the tip of the hat to you, Marlee, and if you go, I want something from the gift shop.

 
A Florida—go figure—woman living in a senior community caught her neighbor hand-feeding an alligator. “She would bring food back and forth and feed him and he would hang out there all day with her,” Lynette Miller said.

Miller captured video of the woman in Port St. Lucie last year and says she saw her multiple times feeding the gator. “She nicknamed the gator Puppy Puppy. She would yell at him and he would come,” Miller said.

Other neighbours also saw the gator. “I would hear ‘puppy, puppy, puppy.’ I thought the woman was calling for her husband. But she said ‘no, I am calling for the alligator,’ ” Grace LaPlace said. Neighbours say they saw the woman feeding the gator all different kinds of food including cereal.

If this lady was a character on The Walking Dead I’m pretty sure the other humans would just shoot her.
 

Via Arbroath

 
Now this dog has a dangerous mind. Well dangerous to his owner’s sock drawer…

Redditor “Livelaughshart” posted this amusing image of where all his socks disappeared to during the winter months.

 
Theresa Ritchie of Peterhead, Aberdeenshire is decorating random dogs’ poo with strawberries, whipped cream, icing and sometimes Nutella in a bid to get lazy dog owners to clean up after their pets. Theresa hopes that her arts and crafts dogshit food styling skills will make dog owners aware “that someone is watching them.”

People in Peterhead are regularly stepping on dog mess on the pavements. I wanted to highlight the problem in an amusing way.

This shows people are watching dog owners who can’t be bothered to clean up after their pets. The food idea has showed that dog poo wasn’t being cleaned up by the council. It sometimes lies on the streets for around eight weeks.

I’m not entirely sure Theresa thought this one through. A) wouldn’t this be rather confusing to a toddler or young child? Would they eat it thinking it was a tasty dessert they found on the sidewalk? B) I’m thinking dogs would it eat, too. C) Ants. Lots of ants. Ants would love this… shit.

 
Via Arbroath and Evening Express.UK

 
Cool pictures of musicians with their pet dogs and cats, which show how even the most self-obsessed, narcissistic Rock god has a smidgen of humanity to care about someone other than themselves. Though admittedly, Iggy Pop looks like he’s about to eat his pet dog.
 

Patti Smith and stylist.
 

This is not a doggy bag, Iggy.
 

There’s a cat in there somewhere with Joey Ramone.
 

Tupac Shakur and a future internet meme.
 

Bjork and a kissing cousin.
 

O Superdog: Laurie Anderson and friend.
 
More cats and dogs and musicians, after the jump…
 

 
Okay, so I’m hella late to the game with this one—in Internet “lateness terms” this was passed around last Friday—but for those of you haven’t seen this one yet, this bodypainted rainbow macaw lady was done by artist Johannes Stötter.

It took me a long time until I saw “her.” Start with the tail, that’s one of her legs. Follow it up, see the knee? The left hand is draped over her head. Isn’t that amazing?

Below, a tropical frog painted by Johannes Stötter consisting of five people. Unbelievable.

Via Gizmodo

 
I am a cat lady—please feign a gasp or surprise—but I’ve never been one for animal commemoration unless it’s something super-creepy like an urn on the mantle that you can use to scare away Jehovah’s Witnesses. However, I have discovered some pet portraiture I can totally get into—the hand-painted “Beware of Dog” signs of the Himalayas! These beauties are often found on the gates of Nepali homes, but are now falling out of style in favor of mass-produced signs.

As luck would have it, American traveler Michelle Page has set up a new market for the art at Nepal Art Dogs. You can send in a picture of your beloved creature for a custom portrait! Not only is she expanding the market for these artists, she appears to be doing it ethically, saying, “I pay fair trade wages, the artists get to paint again, pet lovers get a choice of three paintings for each commission, and I get to help Nepali artists make a living.”

So you can actually have your dog/cat/chicken immortalized in this milieu. They’re bright, technically sophisticated, and just plain lovely. Yes, these paintings will do quite nicely as I collect more and more cats…
 

 
More after the jump…