
Behold the fearsome echizen kurage — the latest threat from the briny deep.
These jellyfish are six feet wide, they weigh up to 450 pounds, they’re covered in poison tentacles, and they’re totally b0rking the food supply of Asia. For reasons that no scientist can figure out, they have in recent months been massing at levels 100 times larger than normal off the coasts of China Japan and North Korea. They’re getting caught in fisherman’s nets and ruining their hauls, such that incomes in some fisherman regions are down 80 percent. In a delightfully Godzilla-class move, the three governments are convening a joint “jellyfish summit” this month to figure how to fight this gelatinous menace.
In the meantime, the locals are making the best of it, as the British Times reports, because …
… rather than just complaining about jellyfish they are eating them. [snip]
Coastal communities are doing their best to promote jellyfish as a novelty food, sold dried and salted.
Students in Obama have managed to turn them into tofu, and jellyfish collagen is reported to be beneficial to the skin.
Some speculate that heavy rains in China have sparked the jellyfish invasion; others wonder about global warming. If it’s the latter — man, one could scarcely ask for a better argument in favor of signing Kyoto. “What, you want to get killed by a quarter-ton jellyfish?”
(Thanks to Andrew Griffin for this one!)
I'm Clive Thompson, a writer on science, technology, and culture. This blog collects bits of offbeat research I'm running into, and musings thereon.
Currently, I'm a contributing writer for the New York Times Magazine and a columnist for Wired magazine. I also write for Fast Company and Wired magazine's web site, among other places. Email or AOL IM me (pomeranian99) to say hi or send in something strange!
A long German word for “noticing when ads are being customized based on your surfing history”
“El Ajedrecista” — an analog chess-playing computer from 1912
“How did you find my site?” and Vannevar Bush’s memex
» visit the Collision Detection archives
May 20, 2011 » 02:28 PM
From Christopher Kennedy’s very droll book “Neitzsche’s Horse”.
July 28, 2010 » 07:35 AM
“Wr” - S
July 06, 2010 » 10:05 AM
My Xbox broke, and I was trying to Google some possible technical solutions, when I noticed that Google appears to be encouraging me to make a typo. I suppose it’s possible that Google’s algorithms know that typing “wont” instead of “won’t” would produce better results.
June 29, 2010 » 05:00 PM
On the other hand, when I tried the test for multitasking, I was pretty abysmal. I performed worse than people who identify themselves as heavy multitaskers, and those who identify as low multitaskers.
June 29, 2010 » 04:58 PM
I finally got around to trying out the interactive “test your distractability and multitasking” page at the New York Times, which they put up alongside their story earlier this month about how computer distractions are eroding our lives.
According to the test, I guess I have good focus — I’m not very distractable!
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