All narwhals have two teeth in their upper jaw and a tusk. After the first year of a male narwhal's life, its left tooth grows outward, spirally. There are some narwhals that are double-tusked, but they are not as common. This long, single or double tooth projects from its upper jaw and can grow to be 8.75 feet (2.7 meters) long. Tusks are usually twisted in a counterclockwise direction and are hollow inside. The tusk's function is uncertain, perhaps used as a formidable jousting weapon in courtship and dominance rivalry, in getting food, and/or for channeling and amplifying sonar pulses (which they emit). The tusk is not used in hunting. Long ago, narwhal sightings probably reinforced (or started) the unicorn legends. In fact, when people found the horn of a dead narwhal washed up on shore, they thought that they had found the horn of a unicorn.
Narwhal can dive deep into the sea to around 800 meters, but can also sometimes dive up to 1,500 meters. This makes them one of the deepest diving sea mammals.
Narwhals live in the icy waters of the Arctic seas. The Narwhal's thick skin, called blubber, keep them warm in the cold water. They do not go far away from ice. Narwhals live in groups of between 10 and 100. Narwhals are migrating animals who like to move from one place to live in another place for a while. In summer, groups of them move closer to land, where they can sometimes be seen in the estuaries, deep fjords, and bays of Greenland, Northern Canada and as far eastern Russia. In Winter they move back to the icy waters, where they breathe from small holes in the ice.
Narwhals can hunt under ice and like to eat Arctic fish such as the flatfish Greenland halibut, the polar and Arctic cod, shrimp and squid. They suck in their prey when they get close.
Narwhals are both hunted by polar bears and killer whales. The native Inuit people, sometimes called the Eskimos, are still allowed to hunt the Narwhals for their meat and for the tusks. The tusks are sold with or without carving. The annual value received from Narwhal hunts in Hudson Bay is $530,000, of which $370,000 is for meat, $150,000 for tusks, bones and teeth of males, and $10,000 for teeth and bones of females.
Vailala Madness
The Vailala Madness was a religious movement. It was active between 1919 and 1922. Many people think it was one of the first cargo cults, even though that term was first used in the 1940s. The Vailala Madness was active in the Papuan Gulf, which was a territory of Australia at the time, but now belongs to Papua New Guinea.
The Vailala Madness got its name from the behaviour of people who took part in it. This behaviour included glossolalia (or "speaking in tongues"), shaking, and signs of mental or emotional disturbances . In the indigenous language, people who were taking part in the Vailala Madness called it "iki haveve", or "belly-don't know," which was another way of saying "dizziness."
The people in the movement thought that a 'Ghost Steamer' would come. This ship would be piloted by dead people who were coming back. The dead people would bring with them cargo with tinned food and tools. In one version of the story, the dead people would bring guns to kick the white colonizers out, but not everybody agrees that this was what people in the Vailala Madness actually believed.
Agranulocytosis
Agranulocytosis is a medical condition where there are very few granulocytes (a kind of white blood cell) in the blood. It is a type of severe and dangerous leukopenia (a condition of very low number of white blood cells). If the agranulocytosis is because of a lack of neutrophils (called neutropenia), it is especially bad.
The word agranulocytosis comes from the Greek "a-", meaning "without", the word "granulocyte", referring to a type of blood cell with granules in the cytoplasm, and "-osis", meaning "abnormal condition".
Weilburg
Weilburg is an German town of the Limburg-Weilburg district in the west of Hesse.
Tegan and Sara
Tegan and Sara () is a Canadian indie rock duo, made up of twin sisters Tegan and Sara Quin. They are lesbians. They have released eight albums.
At first they called themselves PLUNK. They released their first album, "Under Feet Like Ours", in 1999 as Sara and Tegan. In 2000 they released "The Business of Art", their second album. They were nominated for four prizes at the 2014 Juno Awards. They are feminists.
Bradshaw Trail
The Bradshaw Trail, nicknamed the Gold Road at one time, is a historic trail which used to be a stagecoach route in Southern California.
This road used to connect San Bernardino, California to gold fields in La Paz, Arizona, known today as Ehrenberg. It was the first road connecting Riverside County to the Colorado River.
The part which remains today is a graded dirt road which crosses southeastern Riverside County and a part of Imperial County, beginning roughly 12 miles/19km east of North Shore and ending about 14 miles/23km southwest of Blythe for a total of 70 miles/113km.
The trail is named for trailblazer William David Bradshaw who first crossed the area in 1862. A former forty-niner, Bradshaw knew that the northern gold mines were rapidly emptying and that miners and other people leaving the area would need a more direct trail from the south across the desert to the new gold strike at La Paz. Without a direct trail, they would have to travel a great distance southeast to Yuma, then north up the river to La Paz. Bradshaw was a smart man; he knew there were lots of chances to make money in a gold boomtown.
Originally 180 miles/290km long, the western end of the trail began east of San Bernardino in the San Gorgonio Pass. Bradshaw and his party travelled southeast to the northern tip of the Salton Sink, turning due east to the foothills of the Orocopia Mountains and an existing stage stop called "Dos Palmas."
Leaving Dos Palmas, the men continued eastward between the Orocopia and Chocolate mountain ranges, briefly passing by the southern end of the Chuckwalla range and ending at the Palo Verde Valley. Once they crossed the Colorado River, the party rode upstream for about four miles to the gold fields. Despite the fact that the trail crossed mostly barren desert, there was lots of water to be found at water holes found at roughly thirty-mile/48km intervals.
Between 1862 and 1877, the Bradshaw Trail was the main route between Southern California and the La Paz gold fields.
The remaining part of the Bradshaw Trail mostly crosses public land. The extreme eastern end of the trail at Ripley does not. Use of a four wheel drive vehicle is recommended to travel across the trail. There are no services on the trail itself.
Another fact to consider is the Chocolate Mountain Aerial Gunnery Range which borders a part of the Bradshaw Trail to the south. This is a live bombing range and is clearly marked.
"See also: Wiley's Well"
Wiley's Well
Wiley's Well is a remote, natural artesian well in the Colorado Desert of Southern California. It is also the name of the area around it.
It is named after Palo Verde storekeeper and postmaster A.P. Wiley. In 1907, Mr. Wiley dug deep into a shallow well dug in 1876 by a stagecoach company which used the nearby Bradshaw Trail. Wiley made the well larger since he hoped that he could attract business to his remote desert store. The well was taken care of by local ranchers and cattlemen for years afterward. However, the rapidly falling level of the water meant a drop of the water's depth to 60'/18m within a dozen years. Today, the well's original depth is only about 20'/6m at best after wet weather. The water in the well is not good for drinking.
In 1985, the Bureau of Land Management drilled a new well 965'/294m deep to support the new Wiley's Well Campground, one of only two developed campgrounds in the Mule Mountains Long-Term Visitor Area. The water is both hot at 90 °F/32 °C and full of minerals. The water is pumped into a cistern to help cool it to drinking temperature.