This is absolutely amazing...

Very interesting video of magic tricks.

The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences was established in May 1927 as a non-profit corporation to promote the art of movie making. In the first year, the Academy had 36 members, with Douglas Fairbanks Sr as president. The first Academy Awards, now better known as the Oscars, were presented at a private dinner in the Hollywood Roosevelt Hotel, with less than 250 persons attending. Today, the Academy has over 6 000 honorary members - the Oscar Awards are viewed by more than a billion people on television.

The first television broadcast of the Oscars took place in 1953 - on black and white TV, telecasted throughout the US and Canada. Telecasting in colour begun in 1966, and since 1969, the Oscars have been telecast throughout the world. By the mid-1990s it was telecast in over 100 countries.

The first Oscars

At the first Acadamy Awards, held in May 1929, Best Director awards went to Lewis Milestone for Two Arabian Knights and Frank Borzage for 7th Heaven. The first award for Actor in a Leading Role went to Emil Jannings for his roles in The Last Command and The Way of All Flesh. The first Best Actress award was won Janet Gaynor for her roles in 7th Heaven, Street Angel and Sunrise. The first Best Picture award went to WINGS. All those films were screened in 1927. Those were the days of the silent movies, thus WINGS was the only silent to have won a Best Picture Oscar. It also featured Gary Cooper in a minor role. Swiss-born Jannings grew up in Germany and had a heavy German accent which, with the advent of sound in movies, basically put an end to his Hollywood movie career.
The most popular night in the world

The Academy Award ceremony basically was a non-public affair in 1927 and 1928. But it had created such public interest that the Oscar Presentation Night was introduced in 1929. Until 1954 the Oscars were presented mostly on a Thursday. From 1955 to 1958, they were presented on a Wednesday. From 1959 until 1998 the Oscars were, with a few exceptions, presented on a Monday night. Only since 1999 did the Awards ceremony take place on a Sunday (in March). In total up to 2005, the famous statuettes have been handed out on 32 Monday nights, 21 Thursday nights, 8 Wednesdays, 6 Tuesdays, 2 Fridays, once on a Saturday (1948), and four times on a Sunday.

In 1930, the Academy Awards were held twice: on 3 April and on 5 November. No ceremony was held in 1933. Since 1940 people have been kept on the edge of their seats with the familiar phrase "The envelope please."
The Envelope Please

The record for most acting nominations without a single win is shared by Peter O'Toole and Richard Burton with seven. The most nominated actors for Best Actor and Best Supporting Roles are Jack Nicholson (11), Laurence Olivier (10), and Spencer Tracy (9). No male performer has yet won three Best Actor awards.

Only one actress has won the Best Actress award four times: Katharine Hepburn is the only actress to have won the Best Actress award four times, for Morning Glory (1932/3), Guess Who's Coming to Dinner? (1967), The Lion in Winter (1968), and On Golden Pond (1981). In 1968 Katherine Hepburn was tied with and Barbra Streisand for the Best Actress award.

Anthony Quinn's performance as painter Paul Gaugin in Lust for Life (1956) is the shortest ever to win a Best Supporting Actor Academy Award. He was on screen for only 8 minutes. Judi Dench made the an equally short performance, winning Supporting Actress for her potrayal of Elizabeth I in "Sheakespeare in Love" (1999). More Oscar factoids

In 1997 James Cameron's Titanic received 11 Oscars, sharing the record of the most Oscars awards for a single film with William Wyler's Ben Hur (1959). The closest runner-up is West Side Story with 10 Oscars in 1961.

http://www.didyouknow.org/oscars.htm

Sept . 3, 2009

SALT LAKE CITY - A Salt Lake City woman who held a Guinness World Record for her long fingernails before they broke off in a car crash says it was the most dramatic event of her life.

But Lee Redmond, who lost the fingernails in February, says it's now much easier to do things and her hands seem to fly with the weight of the nails gone.

The 68-year-old won't grow her nails out again, saying it took 30 years the first time and she may not live for another 30.

Redmond hadn't cut her nails since 1979 and entered the Guinness World Records book in 2002 for longest fingernails on a woman.

The Guinness Web site says her nails measured a total of more than 28 feet long in 2008, with the longest nail on her right thumb at 2 feet, 11 inches.

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/32676597/ns/today-today_fashion_and_beauty/

2009-08-27 04:20

Power pistons: General Fusion's reactor is a metal sphere with 220 pneumatic pistons designed to ram its surface simultaneously. The ramming creates an acoustic wave that travels through a lead-lithium liquid and eventually accelerates toward the center into a shock wave. The shock wave compresses a plasma target, called a spheromak, to trigger a fusion burst. The thermal energy is extracted with a heat exchanger and used to create steam for electricity generation. To produce power, the process would be repeated every second.
Credit: General Fusion

General Fusion, a startup in Vancouver, Canada, says it can build a prototype fusion power plant within the next decade and do it for less than a billion dollars. So far, it has raised $13.5 million from public and private investors to help kick-start its ambitious effort.

Unlike the $14 billion ITER project under way in France, General Fusion's approach doesn't rely on expensive superconducting magnets--called tokamaks--to contain the superheated plasma necessary to achieve and sustain a fusion reaction. Nor does the company require powerful lasers, such as those within the National Ignition Facility at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, to confine a plasma target and compress it to extreme temperatures until fusion occurs.

Instead, General Fusion says it can achieve "net gain"--that is, create a fusion reaction that gives off more energy than is needed to trigger it--using relatively low-tech, mechanical brute force and advanced digital control technologies that scientists could only dream of 30 years ago.

It may seem implausible, but some top U.S. fusion experts say General Fusion's approach, which is a variation on what the industry calls magnetized target fusion, is scientifically sound and could actually work. It's a long shot, they say, but well worth a try.

"I'm rooting for them," says Ken Fowler, professor emeritus of nuclear engineering and plasma physics at the University of California, Berkeley, and a leading authority on fusion-reactor designs. He's analyzed the approach and found no technical showstoppers. "Maybe these guys can do it. It's really luck of the draw."

The prototype reactor will be composed of a metal sphere about three meters in diameter containing a liquid mixture of lithium and lead. The liquid is spun to create a vortex inside the sphere that forms a vertical cavity in the middle. At this point, two donut-shaped plasma rings held together by self-generated magnetic fields, called spheromaks, are injected into the cavity from the top and bottom of the sphere and come together to create a target in the center. "Think about it as blowing smoke rings at each other," says Doug Richardson, chief executive of General Fusion.

On the outside of the metal sphere are 220 pneumatically controlled pistons, each programmed to simultaneously ram the surface of the sphere at 100 meters a second. The force of the pistons sends an acoustic wave through the lead-lithium mixture, and that accelerates into a shock wave as it reaches the plasma, which is made of the hydrogen isotopes deuterium and tritium.

If everything works as planned, the plasma will compress instantly and the isotopes will fuse into helium, releasing a burst of energy-packed neutrons that are captured by the lead-lithium liquid. The rapid heat buildup in the liquid will be extracted through a heat exchanger, with half used to create steam that spins a turbine for power generation, and the rest used to recharge the pistons for the next "shot."

The ultimate goal is to inject a new plasma target and fire the pistons every second, creating pulses of fusion reactions as part of a self-sustaining process. This contrasts with ITER, which aims to create a single fusion reaction that can sustain itself. "One of the big risks to the project is nobody has compressed spheromaks to fusion-relevant conditions before," says Richardson. "There's no reason why it won't work, but nobody has ever proven it."

He says it look longer than expected to raise the money for the prototype project, but the company can now start the first phase of building the test reactor, including the development of 3-D simulations and the technical verification of components. General Fusion aims to complete the reactor and demonstrate net gain within five years, assuming it can raise another $37 million.

If successful, it believes it can build a grid-capable fusion reactor rated at 100 megawatts four years later for about $500 million, beating ITER by about 20 years and at a fraction of the cost.

"I usually pass up these quirky ideas that pass my way, but this one really fascinated me," says Fowler. He notes that there are immense challenges to overcome, but the culture of a private startup may be what it takes to tackle them with a sense of urgency. "In the big programs, especially the fusion ones, people have gotten beat up so much that they've become so risk averse."

General Fusion's basic approach isn't entirely new. It builds on work done during the 1980s by the U.S. Naval Research Laboratory, based on a concept called Linus. The problem was that scientists couldn't figure out a fast-enough way to compress the plasma before it lost its donut-shaped magnetic confinement, a window of opportunity measured in milliseconds. Just like smoke rings, the plasma rings maintain their shape only momentarily before dispersing.

Nuclear-research giant General Atomics later came up with the idea of rapidly compressing the plasma using a mechanical ramming process that creates acoustic waves. But the company never followed through--likely because the technology to precisely control the speed and simultaneous triggering of the compressed-air pistons simply didn't exist two decades ago.

Richardson says that high-speed digital processing is readily available today, and General Fusion's mission over the next two to four years is to prove it can do the job. Before building a fully functional reactor with 220 pistons on a metal sphere, the company will first verify that smaller rings of 24 pistons can be synchronized to strike an outer metal shell.

Glen Wurden, program manager of fusion energy sciences at Los Alamos National Laboratory and an expert on magnetized target fusion, says General Fusion has a challenging road ahead and many questions to answer definitively. Can they produce spheromaks with the right densities, temperature, and life span? Can they inject two spheromaks into opposite ends of the vortex cavity and make sure they collide and merge? Will the acoustic waves travel uniformly through the liquid metal?

"You can do a good amount of it through simulations, but not all of it," says Wurden. "This is all very complex, state-of-the-art work. The problem is you're dealing with different timescales and different effects on materials when they're exposed to shock waves."

Los Alamos and General Fusion are collaborating as part of a recently signed research agreement. But Richardson isn't planning on a smooth ride. "The project has many risks," he says, "and we expect most of it to not perform exactly as expected." However, if the company can pull off its test reactor, it hopes to attract enough attention to easily raise the $500 million for a demonstration power plant.

Says Fowler, "Miracles do happen."

http://www.technologyreview.com/business/23102/

18 Aug 2009

Researchers have found a genetic link between physical pain and social rejection, which means that breaking up with a partner really can be painful.

Psychologists at the University of California, Los Angeles say the human body has a gene which connects physical pain sensitivity with social pain sensitivity.

The findings back the common theory that rejection 'hurts' by showing that a gene regulating the body's most potent painkillers - mu-opioids - is involved in socially painful experiences too.

Their study indicates that a variation in the mu-opioid receptor gene (OPRM1), often associated with physical pain, is related to how much social pain a person feels in response to social rejection.

People with a rare form of the gene are more sensitive to rejection and experience more brain evidence of distress in response to rejection than those with the more common form.

Researchers collected saliva samples from 122 participants to assess which form of the OPRM1 pain gene they had and then measured sensitivity to rejection in two ways.

First, participants completed a survey that measured their own sensitivity to rejection. They were asked, for example, how much they agreed or disagreed with statements like "I am very sensitive to any signs that a person might not want to talk to me."

Then the emotions of 31 people among the group were tested when they were excluded during a virtual ball-tossing computer game.

Study co-author Prof Naomi Eisenberger said: "Individuals with the rare form of the pain gene, who were shown in previous work to be more sensitive to physical pain, also reported higher levels of rejection sensitivity and showed greater activity in social pain-related regions of the brain when they were excluded."

This is the first time that it has been proved that genes involved in physical pain are linked to mentally painful times like social rejection and breaking up with a lover.

Co-author Baldwin Way said: "These findings suggest that the feeling of being given the cold shoulder by a romantic interest or not being picked for a schoolyard game of basketball may arise from the same circuits."

Prof Eisenberger said this overlap in the neurobiology of physical and social pain makes perfect sense.

She said: "Because social connection is so important, feeling literally hurt by not having social connections may be an adaptive way to make sure we keep them.

"Over the course of evolution, the social attachment system, which ensures social connection, may have actually borrowed some of the mechanisms of the pain system to maintain social connections."

The research is published by the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/science/science-news/6049700/
Why-a-broken-heart-really-does-hurt.html

A species of crustacean with no eyes and venom-injecting fangs has been discovered in an underwater volcanic cave in the Canary Islands off the coast of North Africa.

Researchers discovered the new animal during a diving expedition through the world's longest submarine lava tube, called the Tunnel de la Atlantida, or "tunnel to Atlantis." The divers were searching for specimens of a closely related crustacean species that they'd discovered 25 years ago in the same cave. But after capturing several of the sea creatures, the researchers noticed something peculiar.

"Some animals were much more active in swimming around than others in the small sample bottles," said marine biologist Tom Iliffe of Texas A&M University at Galveston, who was part of the team that discovered the new species. "On closer examination, and subsequently with DNA testing, we confirmed that they were actually two different species."

Their findings appear this month in a special edition of Marine Biodiversity. The new crustacean has been named Speleonectes atlantida, which means "cave swimmer of Atlantis." It's a very apt name, Iliffe said, because the creature is a very active swimmer, gliding through the water an undulating fashion.

Because the crustacean lives in near-total blackness of the cave, its body is almost transparent. Through its clear skin, 20 to 24 nearly identical body segments can be seen.


"These animals are crustaceans, but they look more like a centipede," he said, "with a highly segmented body and a well developed head with specialized appendages." These specialized mouthparts include a set of hollow-tipped fangs filled with venom. Although the poison is strong enough to kill small shrimp and other marine animals, Iliffe said it's not toxic enough to harm people.

The new crustacean is a member of the class Remipedia, which researchers think is one of the oldest groups of crustaceans on Earth. Because Remipedia have been found in the Atlantic, the Caribbean and also in Australia, scientists speculate that the animals may have originated when the continents of Europe, Africa and the Americas were close together.

"So it's thought remipedes could be at least 200 million years old," Iliffe said in a press release, "a time when dinosaurs roamed the Earth." On the same expedition, Iliffe's team also discovered two new species of tiny worms, each smaller than a grain of rice.

http://www.paranormalstories.com/index.asp

Aug 26, 2009

LONDON - British police say they're on the trail of a burqa-clad bandit, or bandits, who robbed three different locations in the past two months.

Police said Tuesday that three armed men, one wearing a full-body veil, stole tens of thousands of pounds (dollars) worth of watches from a jewelers in Banbury, 80 miles (130 kilometers) northwest of London.

Monday's theft follows two incidents in which an assailant wearing a black burqa robbed travel agents in the English towns of Dunstable and Luton, both about 45 miles (70 kilometers) away.

The first robbery occurred in early July. Another occurred about a month later.

Detective Constable Steve Guerin says police aren't sure whether there's a connection between the robberies, but they seem "strikingly similar."

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/32572636/ns/world_news-weird_news/

SOUTHEAST, N.Y. - An 83-year-old driver chased a pickup truck for 15 miles from New York into Connecticut, helping police catch the drunken driving suspect who had rear-ended his car.

The incident last weekend started on Interstate 684 in Southeast, N.Y.

Frank Canale of Scarsdale, N.Y., pursued the man all the way to his driveway in Danbury, Conn., and stayed there until police arrived. He says he feared the man could kill someone.

His daughter, Lori Canale-Smith of Pleasantville, called police on her cell phone during the chase.

By the time they finished filing police reports in two states, the pair missed the wedding they were heading to when the accident happened.

Police say the truck's driver was charged with driving under the influence and driving without a license.

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/32579528/ns/us_news-weird_news/

Aug 28, 2009

FORT COLLINS, Colo. - Colorado State University has withdrawn recognition of a sorority after an investigation into several alleged incidents of hazing, including being deprived of sleep and being made to eat cat food.

University officials on the Fort Collins campus temporarily suspended Zeta Phi Beta sorority in April and permanently withdrew recognition Aug. 5.

A police report obtained by The Rocky Mountain Collegian newspaper says pledges told authorities they were forced to eat cat food and perform "strenuous physical activity" that made one student seek medical attention.

Colorado State spokeswoman Dell Rae Moellenberg says university police investigated the allegations and contacted the district attorney, who won't file any charges.

A call for comment to the sorority's national office wasn't immediately returned. Zeta Phi Beta's Web site says the sorority was founded in 1920 by students seeking to depart from the traditional coalitions for black women.

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/32594722/ns/us_news-life/

North Korea has opened its first pizzeria after a decade of clandestine international research.

By Peter Foster in Beijing
Published: 9:41AM GMT 16 Mar 2009

It has taken almost 10 years of work, but North Korea has acquired the technology to launch a project very dear to its leader's heart - the nation's first "authentic" Italian pizzeria.

The launch of Pyongyang's first Italian restaurant meanwhile brings to fruition a ten-year effort by Kim Jong-il - a renowned gourmand and lover of western food - to create the perfect pizza and pasta in his homeland.

Last year a delegation of local chefs was sent by Kim to Naples and Rome to learn the proper Italian techniques after their homegrown efforts to mimic Italian cuisine were found by Kim to contain "errors".

In the late 1990s Kim brought a team of Italian pizza chefs to North Korea to instruct his army officers how to make pizza, a luxury which is now being offered to a tiny elite able to afford such luxuries in a country that cannot feed many of its 24 million inhabitants.

Despite the food shortages high-quality Italian wheat, flour, butter and cheese are being imported to ensure the perfect pizza is created every time.

"Our people should be also allowed to enjoy the world-famous food," the manager of the Pyongyang eatery quoted Kim as saying, according to the Tokyo-based Choson Sinbo newspaper.

The paper, which is often seen as a mouthpiece for the communist regime, added the restaurant had proved to be a major hit after it opened in the capital Pyongyang in December.

"I've learned through TV and books that pizza and spaghetti are among the world's famous dishes, but this is the first time that I've tasted it," Jung Un-Suk, 42, told the newspaper, "They have unique flavours," she said.

The news that Kim's dream of making genuine Italian food available in the capital has been realised comes as North Korea threatens to test-launch a rocket which the US believes is capable of striking America.

Last week North Korea notified international aviation and maritime agencies of its plan to launch a "communications satellite" between April 4-8, further heightening tensions in the region.

On Monday Japan and South Korea announced their intention to demand UN action against North Korea if it test-fired a Taepodong-2 missile in defiance of UN resolutions imposed after Pyongyang tested its atomic bomb in 2006.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/asia/northkorea/4999429/North-Korea-launches-perfect-Italian-pizza.html

19 August 2009

AHMEDABAD: A city-based restaurant
claimed to have made the world's longest dosa, 32.5-ft-long in less than 40 minutes.

"We have made the world's largest dosa, 32 feet and five inches long, in record time of less than 40 minutes," CMD of Sankalp chain of restaurants, Kailash Goenka, said.

"We already hold the Guinness record for making the world's largest dosa — 30 feet long in February 2006. Today we broke our own record and prepared a 32.5-feet-long dosa," Goenka said.

The dosa was named after "Quick Gun Murugun", an upcoming movie that highlights the merits of vegetarianism.

A team of 16 chefs
and eight helpers practiced for the past 10 days to get the correct length.

"In our team, we have 16 chefs who worked in tandem to prepare the dosa. It required proper coordination among the men for spreading the batter across the hot plate simultaneously," one of the chefs Swami Goda.

Another member of the team, Sajjan Singh, said it was difficult to handle the dosa on a 35-feet-long hot plate (tawa) and to maintain a steady temperature across the length.

Sankalp restaurant first entered the Guinness Book of Records in March 1997 by making a 25-feet-long dosa

Thu, July 23, 2009
By Tan Ee Lyn

HONG KONG (Reuters) - Chinese researchers have managed to create powerful stem cells from mouse skin and used these to generate fertile live mouse pups.

They used induced pluripotent skin cells, or iPS cells -- cells that have been reprogrammed to look and act like embryonic stem cells. Embryonic stem cells, taken from days-old embryos, have the power to morph into any cell type and, in mice, can be implanted into a mother's womb to create living mouse pups.

Their experiment, published in Nature, means that it is theoretically possible to clone someone using ordinary connective tissue cells found on the person's skin, but the experts were quick to distance themselves from such controversy.

"We are confident that tremendous good can come from demonstrating the versatility of reprogrammed cells in mice, and this research will be used to... understand the root causes of disease and lead to viable treatments and cures of human afflictions," said Fanyi Zeng of the Shanghai Institute of Medical Genetics at Shanghai Jiao Tong University.

"It would not be ethical to attempt to use iPS cells in human reproduction. It is important for science to have ethical boundaries," she said, adding that their study was "in no way meant as a first step in that direction".

No one has ever cloned a human being and while many stem cell experiments in mice have been replicated in humans, not all have.

Led by Qi Zhou at the Chinese Academy of Sciences's State Key Laboratory of Reproductive Biology, the team created iPS cells, using mouse fibroblasts, which are cells found in connective tissue in the skin.

Stem cells are the body's master cells, giving rise to all the tissues, organs and blood. Embryonic stem cells are considered the most powerful kind of stem cells as they have the potential to give rise to any type of tissue.

But they are difficult to make and require the use of an embryo or cloning technology. Many people also object to using human embryonic stem cells and many countries limit funding for such experiments.

From the skin cells, the Chinese scientists created 37 stem cell lines, and of these, three generated live births.

"One line can generate such competent mice that the longest living one we have is nine months," Zeng told Reuters.

"It has generated now more than 100 of second-generation (mice) and more than 100 third-generation (mice). It really demonstrates how fertile and strong the system is."

The Chinese experiment generated questions and caution from other stem cell researchers not connected to the study.

"These investigators have, for the first time, unequivocally demonstrated that the iPS lines they have generated are truly pluripotent," wrote Andrew Laslett, group leader of Human Embryonic Stem Cell Technology at the Australian Stem Cell Centre in Melbourne, Australia.

Pluripotent is a term meaning the cells can give rise to all the tissues in the body.

"Moreover, the long-term stability of both the iPS cell lines and the long-term health of the mice generated using this procedure are yet to be reported. It will be interesting to see whether mice generated in this fashion have a higher propensity for tumour formation," Laslett wrote.

http://www.qualityhealth.com/news/chinese-experts-grow-live-mice-skin-cells-15670?utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=reutersnews&rf=32471

Buck Wolf, About.com

This massive treat weighs 1,224 pounds -- which sets a new high-batter mark for giant baked objects, according to Guinness World Records. The previous biggest cupcake weighed "only" 151 pounds. The new champ, created by GourmetGiftBaskets.com, measured 4 feet tall and 10 feet wide. Proceeds from the sale of the cupcake went to Susan G. Komen's Passionately Pink for the Cure.

http://weirdnews.about.com/od/suggestedreading/ig/Weird-News-Photo-Extravaganza/cupcake.htm

By Matthew Moore
Published: 2:04PM BST 21 Aug 2009

The work currently stretches to more than 364,000 verses and could in theory go on forever – or as long as users of the micro-blogging updates keep posting.

While many of the lines come out as garbled nonsense ("goodnight my lovely, and good luck with that!/Just hanging out with the dog and cat") unworthy of a 1950s Beat poem, the juxtaposition of conflicting thoughts occasionally throws up some poignant rhymes.

For instance, one verse reads: "Open your heart and i'll make you smile/give her an inch and she'll take a mile".

Ever pairings that seem entirely unconnected can produce unexpectedly coherent thoughts, such as: "Trust in God gives joy and peace/wake up and smell the cork grease".

Andrei Gheorghe, the 22-year-old developer who created the program behind the project over a weekend, said that he does not consider himself an artist but aimed to set up a "playground" to tap into the creative consciousness of the internet.

"I found the lyrics to be sometimes interesting, other times weird. It is fully automatic so I just let it run, without any involvement from me," he said.

"I soon found that people were very excited to be part of this and consider it some form of artistic expression of the collective consciousness of Twitter."

He added: "The fact that it offers equal chances for anyone to be featured in the poem is one of its interesting points."

The Longest Poem in the World, as he has titled it, works by pulling in updates from the public Twitter timeline and attempting to match them with tweets that the program previously harvested.

"If it finds one, then both tweets are pushed to the poem. If not, the tweet is added to that database waiting for a 'brother' later on," he explained.

Mr Gheorghe, who works for the Romanian interactive web agency MB Dragan, consulted a pronunciation dictionary to draw up the program's rhyming rules.

He said he has no plans to curtail the poem, which is capable of producing around 4,200 verses a day and is constantly updating.

The longest single-author poem in English is reputed to be My Blah Story by US writer Nigel Tomm, which stretches to 23,161 lines. The early English epic poem Beowulf comes to just over 3,000 lines, while Samuel Taylor Coleridge's The Rime of the Ancient Mariner runs to 625 lines.

Below is an extract from Mr Gheorghe's Twitter poem, the full version of which can be found at http://www.longestpoemintheworld.com/

The Longest Poem in the World

working on a group project at school right now... and feeling sleepy!!!
Getting my car washed. Incredibly claustrophobic and creepy.
contemplating going to rocks and ropes tomorrow...
loves this weather ........rain lightning and rain perfect combo.
Going to the inlaws. Swimming and food.
Take a bath and kill the sleepy mood
I have found my lost mind and it is driving me crazy. :-D
I'm lying in bed and can't get up because of lazy.
and now i'm full back in my thinking room with The Times on the air.
blah still some packing to do. and i don't even care
Prince Dance Group performing next... They're fully painted up and ready to go...
Back from Lincoln, nice to see the sun shine and sky and stuff! Good shoot though.
is being a real man and watching Deadliest Catch... :D
I just had brownies and tempe. Weird match.
Sticks And Stones May Break My Bones, But Words Will Never Hurt Me
And Nancy's brother Positive Phillip =P.
Every morning I have more and more names. How do I stop this?
well f--- u i guess im going riding with petey and chris
Ice cream, bagels, peaches, and dates. Stuffing my face
At the studio wit hit boy and chase

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/twitter/6067114/Longest-poem-in-the-world-written-on-Twitter.html

7-12-09
Daily Telegraph (London)

Japanese engineer Takuo Toda's paper airplane was certified in May as the Guinness Book record-holder for the longest flight from a single folded sheet of paper: 27.9 seconds. And in Witcham, England, in July, Jim Collins won the World Peashooting Championship, using a "traditional" instrument blowing at a target 12 yards away, but noncompeting ex-champion George Hollis once again drew the most attention with his homemade, gyroscopic-balancing, laser-guided peashooter, with which he won three previous championships.

http://www.newsoftheweird.com/archive/nw090816.html

Origins: The Reverend Sylvester Graham, a Presbyterian minister who
became a social reformer and a ferocious advocate of healthful living, is the man who put the 'graham' into the treat we now know and love as graham crackers. Sylvester Graham (1794-1851) believed physical lust was harmful to the body and caused such dire maladies in the sexually overheated as pulmonary consumption, spinal diseases, epilepsy, and insanity, as well as such lesser ailments as headaches and indigestion.

He also thought too much lust could result in the early death of offspring, who would have been conceived from weakened stock.
Graham believed a strict vegetarian diet would aid in suppressing carnal urges; to this end, he advocated a regimen devoid of meat and rich in fiber as a way of combating rampant desire. His famed "Graham bread" was fashioned from the coarsely ground wheat flour he espoused and came to bear his name:

The Reverend Sylvester Graham, an eccentric Presbyterian minister from Connecticut, promoted a strict, abstemious diet that won him countless converts during America's health craze of the 1820s and 1830s. Convinced that eating meat and fat leads to sinful sexual excess, the good reverend urged total vegetarianism. He also warned that mustard and ketchup cause insanity, urged followers to drink only water, and recommended sleeping with one's windows open regardless of the weather. More reasonably, he touted the merits of a high-fiber diet and promoted the use of homemade unsifted wheat flour instead of refined white flour.1

Although Graham had his adherents during his lifetime, he was mostly regarded as a bit of a nut. Still, there were those who followed his recommendations and happily incarcerated themselves in "Graham boarding houses" in New York and Boston as part of the health craze he inspired. A high-fiber vegetarian diet wasn't the only thing he pushed; he was also strongly against the use of tobacco or alcohol and advocated fresh air, exercise, and a good night's sleep, all excellent components of a healthy lifestyle.

Who actually produced the first 'graham crackers' so named because they were made of the unsifted wheat flour that Sylvester Graham promoted is the subject of dispute. Some sources assert Graham himself invented the snack in 1829; others claim the graham cracker did not come into being until 1882, thirty-one years after Graham's death. (The latter date appears to be based on the year recipes for graham crackers started appearing in cookbooks.)

Many bakers tried to market the crackers, but it wasn't until 1898 that the National Biscuit Company (now Nabisco) made any real inroads into the market with their Nabisco Graham Crackers product. Nabisco achieved even greater success with their Honey Maid line, introduced in 1925, which boosted the original graham flavor through the addition of honey.

Today's graham crackers are made with bleached white flour, a deviation that would have set Sylvester Graham to spinning in his grave he regarded refined flour as one of the world's great dietary evils.

http://www.quizilla.com/quizzes/result/3387587/294684/

There is a book out very recently that claims the red color of strawberry milkshakes comes from a tropical beetle ground up for its red coloring.

Origins: Next time you're browsing the supermarket in search of the
makings of that night's dinner, pause a moment to read the ingredients labels of your favorite red-colored ingestibles and cosmetics. Chances are, you'll discover a notation for cochineal, carmine, or carminic acid, pigments whose origins might surprise and possibly disgust you.

Cochineal and its close cousin carmine (also known as carminic acid) are derived from the crushed carcasses of a particular South and Central American beetle. These popular colorants, which today are used to impart a deep red shade to fruit juices, gelatins, candies, shampoos, and more, come from the female Dactylopius coccus, a beetle that inhabits a type of cactus known as Opuntia.

Dactylopius coccus was the source of a red dye used by Aztecs and Mexican Indians for centuries before the arrival of the Spaniards. Those indigenous peoples would collect cochineal insects, briefly immerse them in hot water to kill the beasties and dissolve the females' waxy coating, and then dry them in the sun. The desiccated insects would then be ground to a fine powder.

The Spaniards immediately grasped the potential of the pigment, so these dried insects became one of the first products to be exported from the New World to the Old. Europeans took to the beautiful, bright scarlet colour immediately both for its vibrant hue and for its extraordinary colorfast properties, ensuring that boatloads of cochineal insects would make the trans-Atlantic trek.
Today cochineal has been surpassed as a dye for cloth by a number of synthetic pigments, but is still widely used as a coloring agent for a number of foodstuffs, beverages, and cosmetics (because many of those synthetic dyes proved dangerous to humans when taken internally or allowed to leach into the body through the skin). It takes about 70,000 insects to make one pound of cochineal.

While cochineal is used in a wide variety of foods, it is not found in kosher products because Jewish dietary laws prohibit the inclusion of insects or their parts in food. The "ewww!" factor nothwithstanding, cochineal is a safe food colorant aside from a few rare cases of allergic reaction.

Another red dye used in foods, FD&C Red Dye #40 (alternatively known as Red #40), is often mistakenly assumed to be a euphemism for cochineal or carmine. It's not it's bug-free and is actually derived from coal.

Our distaste at the thought of ingesting bugs is based on cultural factors rather than the properties or flavors of the insects themselves. Western society eschews (rather than chews) bugs, hence the widespread "Ewww!" reaction to the news that some of our favorite foods contain extract of beetle.

http://www.quizilla.com/quizzes/result/3387587/294683/

Two Chinese women who work at the same factory were shocked to discover they were both married to the same man.

Cui Bin, 42, of Zhengzhou, has been jailed for three months for bigamy after the story came out, reports Dahe Daily.

He had first married Zhang Dandan and the couple had a daughter together - but he was desperate to have a son.

"I always wanted to have a boy, but due to China's one baby per family policy I had to find another woman secretly," he admitted.

He met Wang Na, married her and they had a son together - and he divided his time between the two households making up excuses for his absences.

Meanwhile, Zhang and Wang had become friends through a shared love of karaoke, never dreaming their were married to the same man.

Wang knew her friend had a daughter and that her husband was a builder who worked away from home. Zhang knew Wang Na was newly married but had not visited her home.

The truth came out when Wang grew suspicious after hearing her husband on the phone to another woman. She rang back the number and could not believe her ears.

"I called back the number and the woman who answered said she was Cui's wife. We recognised each others voices immediately on the phone and were quite outraged at Cui," said Wang.

http://www.ananova.com/news/story/sm_3445017.html?menu=news.quirkies

Aug 21, 3:16 PM (ET)

CAPE GIRARDEAU, Mo. (AP) - A southeast Missouri man was accused of biting off the ear lobe of a love rival. The Southeast Missourian reported that a 23-year-old man was charged with felony assault and burglary and was jailed on $50,000 bond.

Police said the suspect and the victim were arguing over a woman just before midnight Tuesday. The suspect allegedly displayed a butcher knife, but the victim and the woman pushed him out the door.

A fight allegedly began after the suspect knocked loudly at a window. Police said the two men fell to the ground and the suspect bit off the victim's ear lobe.

Police recovered the severed lobe, but doctors were unable to reattach it.

Some years back, an email began circulating about an anthropologist named Susan McKinley who came down with a rash after returning from South America. After seeing many doctors and receiving treatments that did not alleviate the pain in her breast, she was finally sent to a dermatologist with her breast bandaged up. The dermatologist, as well as Ms. McKinley was horrified to find larvae growing underneath her bandages. While this story is absolutely false, it is partially based on true accounts. The story stemmed from a medical article about a Nigerian woman who suffered from Furuncular Myiasis of the breast where the larvae of the Tumbu fly had buried itself.

http://purpleslinky.com/offbeat/five-true-urban-legends/

As NASA celebrates the 40th anniversary of man's first trip to the moon, the space agency is taking some hits for failing to preserve the best historical record of the Apollo 11 flight.

NASA acknowledged on Thursday that the original TV footage of the moon landing on July 20, 1969, was accidentally erased. Someone wanted to make room on the videotape reel that stored the footage. So, did NASA's goof rob future generations from watching what was arguably mankind's greatest achievement?

Not hardly. Remember at NASA, failure is not an option.

A Hollywood post-production house was enlisted to lend some movie magic and restore the images by digitally stitching together copies of the flight retrieved from various sources around the world. The restoration undertaken by Lowry Digital, based in Burbank, Calif., is still under way and won't be completed until September. The first phase, however, was released on Thursday and Lowry's rescue work has won rave reviews.

The Associated Press reported that "some of the details seem new because of their sharpness. Originally, astronaut Neil Armstrong's face visor was too fuzzy to be seen clearly. The upgraded video of Earth's first moonwalker shows the visor and a reflection in it."

It must be noted that anyone who saw Armstrong's moonwalk will remember the images weren't that clear to begin with. TV sets back then didn't offer the sharpest images--at least compared with the picture quality offered today. Moreover, the pictures were transmitted from the moon at 10 frames per second, with 320 lines of resolution for the live telecast.

With the original one-inch videotape recordings "degaussed, re-certified, and reused" NASA had to do some sleuthing to dig up copies. The best were narrowed down to four sources, including one from a handheld camera that was pointed at a monitor within Mission Control, according to a statement from the company.

One of the biggest hurdles for Lowry's technicians to overcome was that all four source materials were in different formats, frame rates, and resolutions.

That means blending different levels of brightness, contrast, and clarity.

Lowry's technology uses temporal image processing that collects information from clips and uses them to determine the correct contrast, resolution, and noise level in each frame, the company said.

The process uses imaging algorithms that have been "fine-tuned over the course of more than 400 major feature film restorations" including "Casablanca," Lowry said.

At NASA's request, some flaws will be kept in the restored version. Dust particles on the lens of the camera that taped Armstrong coming down the lunar module's ladder were visible in the original telecast. NASA officials think they too should be preserved.

The idea is not to enhance the record of the landing, but to re-create it.

by Greg Sandoval

I had a dream once, that me and a few friends were out and about in a familiar place, a place we would sometimes sit wating on a taxi to take us home after a night out! Well anyway... in my dream we were there, looking about us! When suddendly i looked down, saw two men, in black(leather jackets) One in the passenger seat, and one in the driver seat... We didnt noticed at first, but the man in the passenger seat was pointing a bright red light at us... wasnt until a few seconds later we realised it was a lazer gun! My friends and I, started running as fast as we could but I got shot on the middle of my back! As soon as i got shot, my soul spirit or whatever shot away up in the air going extreamly fast, but suddendly stopped for a few seconds... Then i heard not one voice, but alot of voices saying to me "It's not your time yet, it's not your time" and then my spirit shot back down into body and i woke up and everyone crying around me!

It was a wierd dream, and ussally i wouldnt take any notice of dreams.. but this one freaked me out cause it felt so real!

March 20, 2008
http://jeannehannah.typepad.com

This is the week of bizarre divorce news, I guess. Yesterday, it was the $48.6 million award to Heather Mills [plus $70,000/year in child support, school tuition, and about $50,000/year for a nanny] in her divorce from Sir Paul McCartney. With all the rancor of that divorce, I foresee no happy co-parenting there!

Today, I read a report of a Connecticut divorce . . . something about 'til death do we part . . .

Karen Finnegan sued Joseph Finnegan for divorce in July 2007 after 26 years of marriage. Joe's defense was simple: He claimed that when his heart stopped in June 2004, his temporary death dissolved his marriage. His death was "temporary" because cardiopulmonary resuscitation revived him.

In fact, Joe claimed that he later died two additional times, in 2004 and 2005. He therefore filed a motion captioned "Motion to Dismiss on the Grounds that the Defendant is No Longer Married to the Plaintiff Having Been Previously Completely, Although Not Permanently Dead."

A Connecticut statute provides that a marriage is dissolved by the death of one of the parties.

Joe's motion failed. First, he provided no evidence, documentary or otherwise, to support his claim of being previously dead. Second, the Merriam Webster Dictionary defines "death" as "permanent cessation of all vital functions." Medline Plus, an online medical dictionary, defines "death" as "the irreversible cessation of all vital functions as indicated by the permanent stoppage of the heart, respiration, and brain capacity: the end of life." A statute included in the Probate Code defines "death" as "(1) irreversible cessation of circulatory and respiratory functions, or (2) irreversible cessation of all functions of the entire brain, including the brain stem."

Since Joe's death wasn't permanent or irreversible, his motion was denied. I guess we'll have to wait for Finnegan's Wake.

From The Times
April 6, 2009
Richard Owen in Rome
http://www.timesonline.co.uk

Medieval knights hid and secretly venerated The Holy Shroud of Turin for more than 100 years after the Crusades, the Vatican said yesterday in an announcement that appeared to solve the mystery of the relic’s missing years.

The Knights Templar, an order which was suppressed and disbanded for alleged heresy, took care of the linen cloth, which bears the image of a man with a beard, long hair and the wounds of crucifixion, according to Vatican researchers.

The Shroud, which is kept in the royal chapel of Turin Cathedral, has long been revered as the shroud in which Jesus was buried, although the image only appeared clearly in 1898 when a photographer developed a negative.

Barbara Frale, a researcher in the Vatican Secret Archives, said the Shroud had disappeared in the sack of Constantinople in 1204 during the Fourth Crusade, and did not surface again until the middle of the fourteenth century. Writing in L'Osservatore Romano, the Vatican newspaper, Dr Frale said its fate in those years had always puzzled historians.

However her study of the trial of the Knights Templar had brought to light a document in which Arnaut Sabbatier, a young Frenchman who entered the order in 1287, testified that as part of his initiation he was taken to “a secret place to which only the brothers of the Temple had access”. There he was shown “a long linen cloth on which was impressed the figure of a man” and instructed to venerate the image by kissing its feet three times.

Dr Frale said that among other alleged offences such as sodomy, the Knights Templar had been accused of worshipping idols, in particular a “bearded figure”. In reality however the object they had secretly venerated was the Shroud.

They had rescued it to ensure that it did not fall into the hands of heretical groups such as the Cathars, who claimed that Christ did not have a true human body, only the appearance of a man, and could therefore not have died on the Cross and been resurrected. She said her discovery vindicated a theory first put forward by the British historian Ian Wilson in 1978.

The Knights Templar were founded at the time of the First Crusade in the eleventh century to protect Christians making the pilgrimage to Jerusalem. The Order was endorsed by the Pope, but when Acre fell in 1291 and the Crusaders lost their hold on the Holy Land their support faded, amid growing envy of their fortune in property and banking.

Rumours about the order’s corrupt and arcane secret ceremonies claimed that novices had to deny Christ three times, spit on the cross, strip naked and kiss their superior on the buttocks, navel, and lips and submit to sodomy. King Philip IV of France, who coveted the order’s wealth and owed it money, arrested its leaders and put pressure on Pope Clement V to dissolve it.

Several knights, including the Grand Master, Jacques de Molay, were burned at the stake. Legends of the Templars’ secret rituals and lost treasures have long fascinated conspiracy theorists, and figure in The Da Vinci Code, which repeated the theory that the knights were entrusted with the Holy Grail.

In 2003 Dr Frale, the Vatican’s medieval specialist, unearthed the record of the trial of the Templars, also known as the Chinon Parchment, after realising that it had been wrongly catalogued. The parchment showed that Pope Clement V had accepted the Templars were guilty of “grave sins”, such as corruption and sexual immorality, but not of heresy.

Their initiation ceremony involved spitting on the Cross, but this was to brace them for having to do so if captured by Muslim forces, Dr Frale said. Last year she published for the first time the prayer the Knights Templar composed when “unjustly imprisoned”, in which they appealed to the Virgin Mary to persuade "our enemies” to abandon calumnies and lies and revert to truth and charity.

Radiocarbon dating tests on the Turin Shroud in 1988 indicated that it was a medieval fake. However this had been challenged on the grounds that the dated sample was taken from an area of the shroud mended after a fire in the Middle Ages and not a part of the original cloth.

After the sack of Constantinople it was next seen at Lirey in France in 1353, when it was displayed in a local church by descendants of Geoffroy de Charney, a Templar Knight burned at the stake with Jacques de Molay.

It was moved to various European cities until it was acquired by the Savoy dynasty in Turin in the sixteenth century. Holy See property since 1983, the Shroud was last publicly exhibited in 2000, and is due to go on show again next year.

The Vatican has not declared whether it is genuine or a forgery, leaving it to believers to decide. The late John Paul II said it was “an icon of the suffering of the innocent in every age.” The self proclaimed heirs of the Knights Templar have asked the Vatican to “restore the reputation” of the disgraced order and acknowledge that assets worth some £80 million were confiscated.

The Association of the Sovereign Order of the Temple of Christ, based in Spain, said that when the order was dissolved by Pope Clement V in 1307, more than 9,000 properties, farms and commercial ventures belonging to knights were seized by the Church. A British branch also claiming descent from the Knights Templar and based in Hertfordshire has called for a papal apology for the persecution of the order.

Astonished surgeons have removed a two-inch long fir tree growing inside a patient's lungs.

Doctors thought Artyom Sidorkin, 28, had cancer when he began coughing up blood and complaining of agonising chest pains.

But as they operated to remove a tumour the medics were amazed to discover the perfectly formed spruce thriving inside the lung.

"I blinked three times and thought I was seeing things," said surgeon Vladimir Kamashev at Izhevsk Hospital in Russia.

Doctors believe that Artyom breathed in a tiny seed which then began growing in his lung and that the sharp pains were the plant's needle-like leaves digging into his lung.

"It was very painful. But to be honest I did not feel any foreign object inside me," he explained.

(http://www.ananova.com)

By Jenny Hope
Last updated at 12:44 AM on 18th April 2009

Next time you find yourself drenched in an unexpected downpour, look on the bright side - it'll be a memorable experience.

While wet weather may make us feel gloomy, it sharpens the memory and improves our recall, psychologists say.

But those who feel in a good mood because it's a sunny day are able to remember less well, according to memory tests carried out by Australian researchers.
Enlarge cloudy weather

Heading for cover under threatening skies. Psychologists have found that people performed better in memory tests when the weather was bad

Professor Joe Forgas, who led the research, said: 'It seems counter-intuitive but a little bit of sadness is a good thing.

'People performed much better on our memory test when the weather was unpleasant and they were in a slightly negative mood. On bright sunny days, when they were more likely to be happy and carefree, they flunked it.'

The tests were carried out on shoppers at a store in Sydney, where researchers randomly placed ten small ornamental objects on the check-out counter.

They included plastic animal figures, a toy cannon, a pink piggy bank and four small matchbox-sized vehicles, including a red London bus and a tractor.

On bright sunny days when people were more likely to be happy and carefree, they did less well in the tests

On rainy days, sad music was played in the store including requiems or slow pieces by Chopin.

When it was bright and sunny, customers heard cheery music such as Bizet's Carmen and Gilbert and Sullivan tunes.

This was done to 'further influence them towards negative or positive moods', said researchers at the University of New South Wales School of Psychology.

After shopping, customers were asked how many of the objects they could remember.

Their scores were three times higher when the weather was bad and they were feeling grumpy, compared with those tested on sunny days. The results were published in the Journal of Experimental Psychology.

A report on the findings said: 'They point to a growing body of evidence that the way people think, the quality of their judgments and the accuracy of their memory are all significantly influenced by positive and negative moods.'

Professor Forgas said: 'We predicted and found that weather-induced negative mood improved memory accuracy.

Shoppers in a negative mood showed better memory and higher discrimination ability.'

He said a worse mood helped to focus people's attention on their surroundings and led to a more thorough and careful thinking style, while happiness increased confidence and forgetfulness.

He said: 'Being happy tends to promote a thinking style that is less focused on our surroundings.'

'In a positive mood we are more likely to make more snap judgments about people we meet.

'We are more forgetful and yet we are paradoxically far more likely to be over-confident that our recall is correct.

'Mild negative mood, in turn, tends to increase attention to our surroundings and produce a more careful, thorough thinking style.

'Accurately remembering mundane, everyday scenes is a difficult and demanding task, yet such memories can be of crucial importance in everyday life, as well as in forensic and legal practice.

'Surprisingly, the influence of mood states on the accuracy of real-life memories is still poorly understood.'

(http://www.dailymail.co.uk)

07 May 2009 by Colin Barras

Anaconda, a giant rubber "snake" that floats offshore and converts wave energy to electricity, is a step closer to commercialisation. An 8-metre long, 1/25th scale version is currently undergoing tests in a large wave tank in Gosport, UK, and a full-size working version could be a reality in five years.

Harnessing the power of waves is an attractive proposition because they are much more energy dense than wind. But wave power remains the poor relation of the renewable energy sector due to the difficulties of cheaply operating machinery in the harsh marine environment. The world's first commercial wave farm only began operating last year, off the northern coast of Portugal.

A variety of other designs are in testing around the world, but none are as unusual as the Anaconda. The rubber snake is filled with freshwater – to help deter sea creatures from setting up a home inside – and sealed at both ends to create a semi-rigid balloon that floats at the sea's surface.
Wave pulse

The tube is anchored at one end and as waves wash along its length they exert pressure on the snake that is transmitted by the water inside. This forces Anaconda's walls to expand outwards into the wave troughs where they are under less pressure, forming "bulge waves" that travel along the Anaconda's length.

These waves are similar to those that pass through the human circulatory system and can be felt as the pulse in the wrist and neck, says Rod Rainey of Atkins Global, co-inventor of the Anaconda. When each bulge wave reaches the end of the snake it keeps a turbine spinning to generate electricity.

The snake is made from a rubber-based material similar to that used to make dracones – flexible containers that are filled with diesel or water and towed behind ships for quick and cheap transportation.

Other than the turbine, Anaconda has no moving parts and unlike other wave power devices it needs only one tether to the ocean floor. That lowers construction costs and reduces the need for maintenance – an expensive undertaking in offshore settings where corrosion and accessibility are problems, explains Rainey.
Full-size snake

Des Crampton, CEO of Checkmate Seaenergy, the firm commercialising the flexible wave harvester, says a full-size Anaconda 200 metres long could generate enough energy to power 1000 average homes. "Anaconda captures more energy than all existing wave energy devices," he says.

Rainey and retired physicist Francis Farley began work on the concept in 2007, and tested mini Anacondas last yearMovie Camera. The first full-size Anacondas could become operational in 2014.

That would leave Anaconda several years behind competing technologies, such as the Pelamis systemMovie Camera currently operational off the Portuguese coast. But paradoxically, Rainey thinks success for Pelamis will be crucial for the future of Anaconda. "It will deeply upset the investment community if Pelamis fails," he says.

(http://www.newscientist.com)

Monday, 18 May 2009

A skydiver from Staffordshire has survived a 6,000ft free fall in Russia.

James Boole, from Tamworth, said he was supposed to have been given a signal by another skydiver to open his parachute, but it came two seconds too late.

Mr Boole, who was filming the other skydiver for a television documentary, landed on snow-covered rocks and suffered a broken back and rib.

"I really thought that I was going to die - an incredible feeling of sadness and just how unfair that was," he said.

"What went through my mind was my wife and my daughter."

James Boole
Mr Boole said he could not make sense of his survival

Mr Boole, who has made 2,500 jumps, is now back at home in a body brace.

He said: "(The other flyer) took us so close to the ground where I thought I was dead.

"When I finally looked at the ground and realised how low I was, I knew there was no time for me to get a full parachute above my head.

"For the first 48 hours after the accident I thought maybe I am dead and this is some kind of after-life limbo, or some other reality, because I couldn't make sense of it - how I was still here to come through this?"

His wife, Kristina, who is also a skydiver, said: "For the moment I'm thinking just of him to recover, so not about jumping or anything like that.

"But yeah (I) would like him to stop doing that."

(http://news.bbc.co.uk)

Gloucester Daily times
June 02, 2009

By Ethan Forman
Staff writer

DANVERS — You've heard of snakes on a plane, but on Sunday there were about 10,000 bees on a plane at Beverly Airport.

A swarm of honeybees landed on the wing of a plane used for flight school training, parked on the tarmac of the airport's west side off Burley Street.

It was the type of landing the owner of Beverly Flight Center, Arne Nordeide, had never witnessed.

"I never saw anything like it," Nordeide said.

Nordeide called Danvers police, who put him in touch with a local bee removal expert, Al Wilkins of Middleton.

Wilkins arrived and used a specially designed vacuum to suck the bees off the wing and from the ground below the plane. Wilkins has relocated the bees to hives where they will produce honey.

"I thought they were crash-landed in the airport," said Wilkins, who has been removing bees from houses and structures since 1978.

Nordeide said the bees were spotted buzzing around the wing of the Piper Warrior aircraft around 11 a.m. This plane does not sit around much — it flies five to six hours a day.

"The plane had already flown around 8 a.m.," Nordeide said, "and all of a sudden, they (the bees) decided to land."

At first, the bees swarmed over the left side of the aircraft, then landed on top of the left wing. The weather was hot, Nordeide said, so that may be why they went under the wing.

At this time of year, Wilkins said, his phone is buzzing with calls to remove bee swarms, which happen when an old queen bee leaves the hive with a group of followers in search of a place to make a new nest. The queen leaves the hive to make way for a new queen about to hatch in special cells inside.

"That's how they propagate," said Wilkins, who estimated the swarm at 10,000.

Wilkins said the windy day may have forced the swarm down as it came across the airport. The queen, who is not used to flying long distances, may have stopped to rest, and the other bees congregated around to protect her. The bees usually have a destination picked out in advance.

Wilkins, the past president of the Essex County Bee Association, and his wife, Linda, live on Mill Street in Middleton, and in April their hives were plundered by a black bear. A motion-activated camera captured an image of the bear milling about their backyard. It destroyed about eight hives, costing them hundreds of dollars.

"This is replacing the hives (the bear) ate," Wilkins said of the bees he picked up in Danvers.

Wilkins, who also raises exotic birds, is not taking any more chances. He has relocated his hives from his yard to a farm in Boxford, to a location in Seabrook, N.H., and to the Essex Agricultural and Technical School in Danvers.

(http://www.gloucestertimes.com)

ScienceDaily (June 23, 2009) — We humans prefer to be addressed in our right ear and are more likely to perform a task when we receive the request in our right ear rather than our left. In a series of three studies, looking at ear preference in communication between humans, Dr. Luca Tommasi and Daniele Marzoli from the University "Gabriele d'Annunzio" in Chieti, Italy, show that a natural side bias, depending on hemispheric asymmetry in the brain, manifests itself in everyday human behavior.

One of the best known asymmetries in humans is the right ear dominance for listening to verbal stimuli, which is believed to reflect the brain's left hemisphere superiority for processing verbal information. However, until now, the majority of studies looking at ear preference in human communication have been controlled laboratory studies and there is very little published observational evidence of spontaneous ear dominance in everyday human behavior.

Tommasi and Marzoli's three studies specifically observed ear preference during social interactions in noisy night club environments. In the first study, 286 clubbers were observed while they were talking, with loud music in the background. In total, 72 percent of interactions occurred on the right side of the listener. These results are consistent with the right ear preference found in both laboratory studies and questionnaires and they demonstrate that the side bias is spontaneously displayed outside the laboratory.

In the second study, the researchers approached 160 clubbers and mumbled an inaudible, meaningless utterance and waited for the subjects to turn their head and offer either their left of their right ear. They then asked them for a cigarette. Overall, 58 percent offered their right ear for listening and 42 percent their left. Only women showed a consistent right-ear preference. In this study, there was no link between the number of cigarettes obtained and the ear receiving the request.

In the third study, the researchers intentionally addressed 176 clubbers in either their right or their left ear when asking for a cigarette. They obtained significantly more cigarettes when they spoke to the clubbers' right ear compared with their left.

According to the authors, taken together, these results confirm a right ear/left hemisphere advantage for verbal communication and distinctive specialization of the two halves of the brain for approach and avoidance behavior.

They conclude: "Our studies corroborate the idea of a common ancestry - in humans and other species - of lateralized behavior during social interactions, not only for species-specific vocal communication, but also for affective responses."

A group of Bulgarian women are suing a drinks firm over an ad which shows a woman in a bikini under the slogan: 'the watermelon season is here'.

The watermelon ad /Europics

The ad, featuring a model in a melon-coloured bikini, has infuriated women's groups who say the country's men are already bad enough without any encouragement.

Now a group of 13 women are suing manufacturers Peshtera.

"You can't walk down the street now without some a**hole shouting, 'Hey - nice watermelons' and trying to see if they are ripe," a spokeswoman said.

"The advert encourages sexism and is causing women real harm and humiliation," said one woman.

The claim has already been filed with local justice authorities.

"This advert deeply and permanently discriminates against us as women, illegally infringes our personal lives, and violates European law on equal treatment of sexes in the provision of services," it states.

19:00 02 July 2009 by Michael Marshall

Sheep living on a remote island off the coast of Scotland have been shrinking for 20 years. Now it seems shorter winters caused by climate change are responsible.

Soay sheep are a primitive breed of domestic sheep, which live on the island of Hirta, in the St Kilda archipelago, without human interference. From 1955 onwards, the population has been closely studied.

Over the last 20 years, the average size of the sheep has been getting smaller, but it has been unclear why – particularly as natural selection would tend to drive the development of bigger bodies.
Sheep stats

To explore the effects of environmental change and natural selection, Timothy Coulson of Imperial College London and colleagues modified the Price equation, which is used to describe how natural selection changes a population from one generation to the next.

Coulson's team extended the equation so that it could reproduce the effects of a variable environment: how weather and seasons have changed from one year to the next, for example. They also modified it so that they could split the population up into different age groups, and describe changes in them separately.

This modification allowed them to pin down the factors that have affected the size of the sheep.

Natural selection pushes the sheep to get bigger, as the smallest individuals tend not to survive through hard winters to reproduce, they found.

However, this size increase is largely offset by the so-called "young mum effect" – the tendency for female sheep in their first breeding seasons to have offspring that are smaller than they themselves were at birth. The study is the first to take this effect into account.
Dearth of deaths

Over and above these factors, the modelling revealed that one of the most powerful influences on size was the gradual warming of the climate, driven by changes to the North Atlantic Oscillation ocean current, which has led to shorter winters on the island. As a consequence, the vulnerable smaller sheep were more likely to survive the winter, pushing average size down over successive generations.

"Because fewer sheep are dying, I think that means the environment is getting better for them," says Coulson. "The winters are less harsh than they used to be."

Kaustuv Roy, an evolutionary biologist at the University of California San Diego, who was not involved in the study, is impressed. "Their results are really useful, because they tease apart the different processes. It's a really nice study," he says.

Roy adds the team's modification of the Price equation could be used widely. "They've come up with a new approach, which people will definitely apply to other systems," he says.

Journal reference: Science, DOI: 10.1126/science.1173668 (in press)

ScienceDaily (July 1, 2009) — Scientists from Texas are batty over a new discovery which could lead to the single most important medical breakthrough in human history—significantly longer lifespans. The discovery, featured on the cover of the July 2009 print issue of The FASEB Journal, shows that proper protein folding over time in long-lived bats explains why they live significantly longer than other mammals of comparable size, such as mice.

"Ultimately we are trying to discover what underlying mechanisms allow for some animal species to live a very long time with the hope that we might be able to develop therapies that allow people to age more slowly," said Asish Chaudhuri, Professor of Biochemistry, VA Medical Center, San Antonio, Texas and the senior researcher involved in the work.

Asish and colleagues made their discovery by extracting proteins from the livers of two long-lived bat species (Tadarida brasiliensis and Myotis velifer) and young adult mice and exposed them to chemicals known to cause protein misfolding. After examining the proteins, the scientists found that the bat proteins exhibited less damage than those of the mice, indicating that bats have a mechanism for maintaining proper structure under extreme stress.

"Maybe Juan Ponce De León wasn't too far off the mark when he searched Florida for the Fountain of Youth," said Gerald Weissmann, M.D., Editor-in-Chief of The FASEB Journal. "As it turns out, one of these bat species lives out its long life in Florida. ... this chemical clue as to why bats beat out mice in the aging game should point scientists to the source of this elusive fountain."

(http://www.sciencedaily.com)

A student has been suspended from school in America for coming to class dressed as a pirate.

But the disciplinary action has provoked controversy – because the student says that the ban violates his rights, as the pirate costume is part of his religion.

Bryan Killian says that he follows the Pastafarian religion, and that as a crucial part of his faith, he must wear 'full pirate regalia' as prescribed in the holy texts of Pastafarianism.

The school, however, say that his pirate garb was disruptive.

Pastafarians follow the Flying Spaghetti Monster, and believe that the world was created by the touch of his noodly appendage. Furthermore, they acknowledge pirates as being 'absolute divine beings', and stress that the worldwide decline in the number of pirates has directly led to global warming.

Pastafarianism gained wide attention when its key prophet, Bobby Henderson, wrote to the Kansas School Board during the height of the controversy over 'Intelligent Design' being taught in science classes. His letter, also published on his website, demanded equal time be given to the teachings of the Flying Spaghetti Monster as was given to ID and evolutionary theory.

Since then, the Flying Spaghetti Monster has gained countless followers worldwide, although there are those who remain spagnostic.

The school, in North Buncombe, North Carolina, remains adamant that their decision to suspend Killian for a day has nothing to do with his religion, and quite a lot to do with his repeated refusal to heed warnings against wearing pirate outfits.

http://www.metro.co.uk/weird/article.html?in_article_id=43272&in_page_id=2

When Colt Langstaff returned to his home in Cool, California, on Monday, the first thing he noticed was that his garden fence had been knocked down, there was an unfamiliar pickup truck parked on his drive, and his personal belongings were scattered over his lawn.

The second thing he noticed was the naked man wrapped only in a sheet coming out of his backdoor. The naked gentleman asked Langstaff what he was doing there. Langstaff pointed out that is was his home, at which point the naked man ran away.

It was at that point that things began to get really strange.

The Mountain Democrat ('California's oldest newspaper') gives some details from the police report, following the eventual arrest of the naked man, identified as Terence Michael Dean, 37. It is a tribute to what went on that day that the fact its protagonist is called Colt Langstaff and lives in a town called Cool is by far the most boring thing about this story (which we sincerely hope is true).

After the naked sheet guy fled, Langstaff went into his house to discover that all the taps were running, causing a small flood. Why were the taps running? It's unclear, but it was possibly something to do with the many packages of meat that Langstaff found lying in the sink and bath.

It was just after Langstaff noticed the bathroom meat that the police arrived.

Several other features of the crime scene immediately called attention to themselves. The trails of potting soil were one element. The first soil trail led to the front door, where a rudimentary shrine had been created, featuring a statue of the Bhudda on top of a bongo drum. The second trail of soil led to the suspect's truck.

The origin of the soil was quickly traced by the detectives to around 100 houseplants that had been ripped from their pots, and placed near the truck. The truck was also observed to contain a considerable amount of Langstaff's property, notably his toaster, some pictures, and of course a number of empty potting soil bags.

Now, at this point, readers familiar with this type of crime will probably be asking themselves, 'hey, shouldn't there be teddy bears on plant stands as well?' You will be relieved to know that no fewer than three plant stands holding teddy bears were also discovered in the vicinity of the truck.

Inside the house, the lit candles in the living room were perhaps less impressive than the contents of the kitchen – namely some burned matches, a bowl of unpopped popcorn, a bowl of water with Langstaff's car keys in it, and paper note floating in a cup of water that read 'I love Cherry.'

At this point, the sheriff's deputies were told that a naked man had introduced himself to one of Langstaff's neighbours, asking to be taken to a hospital. Upon arriving at the neighbour's residence, they identified a naked man wrapped in a towel and smoking a cigarette as the likely suspect, and arrested him.

Reassuringly, Dean has now been released on $25,000 bail.

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Mr. Wang’s body explodes in the cremation chamber! A Chinese man, killed by a weather rocket, was thought to have died from getting struck by lightning until his body exploded at his own funeral.Wang Diange was attending a wake in his home when an explosion took off half of his roof and left him dead in the wreckage. Because it had been a stormy day, family members and the police assumed that lightning was what killed Wang and left half of his home in ruins.

However, as Wang was being placed into the cremation chamber at his own funeral, his body exploded, causing the chamber’s oven doors to fly off their hinges. Only then, spectators discovered a small piece of twisted metal, which led them to what really killed Mr. Wang:

A small weather rocket filled with silver iodide—shot into the sky in order to break up hail into rain—failed to explode in the atmosphere, and instead had fallen through Wang’s roof and acted like a bullet, instantly killing Wang as it was lodged into his body.

Three years later, the Weather Bureau has only given the Wang family 80,000 yuan (approx. $12,000USD) as a compensation for their loss.

(http://allweirdnews.com)

German police confirm that they today have taken a seven month baby away from a couple in Bavaria and local child welfare investigators are looking into them after the couple put the child up for sale on Internet auction site Ebay. The description read, “Male baby almost 8 months old, sleeps well through the night and does not cry much.” “Good for infertile couple or single man/woman wanting a child.”

The baby boy was put on sale on Tuesday at a starting price of one euro (1.58 dollars) and was withdrawn from the site around two and a half hours later, police said. There had been no posted offers but the couple may have recieved numerous offers via email. The mother said it was meant as a joke, but police and state officials failed to see the funny side, putting the baby into state care and charging both parents for attempted child trafficking. Police cheif Wesley Offerman is quoted as saying, “We all find our kids annoying sometimes but selling them is not the answer.”

(http://allweirdnews.com)

The world's largest palace has 1788 rooms. It was built for the Sultan of Brunei.

The world's largest recorded gathering of people was at a Hindu religious festival in India in 1989. It was attended by about 15 million people.

Abraham Lincoln went to school for less than a year. He taught himself to read and write.

The longest recorded swim was 2938 km down the Mississippi River in 1930. The swimmer spend 742 hours in the water.

Humans are no match for some animals. The rhinoceros beetle can carry 850 times its own weight on its back. The Emperor moth can detect smells 11 km away. The cheetah can run at 70 km/h. The Polyphemus moth eats 86,000 its own birth weight in 48 hours. The cries of South American howler monkeys can be heard 16 km away.

The longest jail sentence passed was in the United States - 10,000 years for a triple murder.

It is impossible to sneeze with your eyes open. Try it!

Levi Strauss made the first pair of blue jeans in 1850. They were intended as work trousers for American miners looking for gold.

In Ancient Rome only important people wore purple clothes. This is because the purple dye came from a particular kind of shellfish and was very expensive.

(http://www.thatsweird.net)

It's the stuff nightmares and horror movies are made of.

A holidaymaker got a nasty shock when he learned that the strange bleeding bumps on his head were not bites or shingles, but live maggots.

Aaron Dallas, from Colorado, looked for medical help when the unusual lumps appeared on his scalp after a holiday to Belize during the summer.

One doctor thought they might have been caused by a gnat bite. Another believed his problem was shingles.

But then the bumps took on a life of their own and began to move.

A doctor discovered five bot fly larvae living inside Aaron Dallas's head, near the top of his skull. This was a few weeks after a mosquito had apparently placed them there.

"I'd put my hand back there and feel them moving. I thought it was blood coursing through my head. I could hear them. I actually thought I was going crazy," said Dallas, of Carbondale.

Bot flies rely on mosquitoes, stable flies, and other insects to carry their eggs to a host - and in this case the host was Dallas.

"It was weird and traumatic," he said. "I would get this pain that would drop me to my knees."

After their discovery the parasites were removed by a doctor. Dallas's wife teased him about it afterwards, but didn't find the experience funny.

"It's much funnier to everyone else. It makes my stomach turn over. It was cruel,'' he said.

Bot fly infections are fairly routine in parts of Central and South America.

- July 20, 2007 (http://www.thatsweird.net)

A victim of horrific facial disfigurement - known as "the man with no face" - has been given new hope by the advancement of medical science.

Jose Mestre, from Lisbon, Portugal, has been losing his face to a huge growth for the past 35 years, distorting it out of all recognition - and it's still growing.

The tumor on 51-year-old Jose's face is a collection of blood vessels that have expanded, producing a raised red area on the skin.

Jose was born with a strawberry-coloured birthmark on his upper lip. At puberty it began growing, eventually smothering his lips, nose and one of his eyes. Now it is 33cm long and weighs 3kg.

But Jose's religious faith - as a Jehovah's Witness he refuses to accept a blood transfusion - has prevented him from having surgery to remove the growth.

Jose's rare condition was the subject of a Discovery Channel TV documentary 'The Man With No Face', part of the 'My Shocking Story' series.

It reveals how top medical experts in London have now held out hope of helping Jose, a well-known figure around the streets of Lisbon.

A leading British surgeon has offered to treat Jose using ultrasound waves to coagulate the blood before the operation.

This should remove the risk of heavy bleeding - satisfying his religious beliefs about blood transfusions in the process.

Dr Iain Hutchison, of St Bartholomew's in London, is confident an operation with a harmonic scalpel could make him look a lot more normal.

Discovery Channel said: "Surrounded by a loving family, it seems incredible that he has not been treated and his face was allowed to grow so big. However, through years of medical misinformation, some misdiagnosis, lack of finances, and reluctance to undergo treatment due to religious beliefs, the growth has continued to obliterate his face."

My Shocking Story follows Jose on a journey through Europe to seek medical advice for one last chance to stop his face from suffocating him.

In this journey of a lifetime he travels by train, via Paris, to Britain, to meet the top experts in London. He goes through a series of tests, consultations, and meets other patients with a similar affliction. In London he also spends time with his sister Guida and the rest of his family, enjoys being a tourist in London, while making the biggest decision of his life.

Jose's dream is to live a long and normal life. Following the showing of the Discovery documentary he continues to adhere to his 'no blood transfusion' religious principles. But he has agreed to go back to the London hospital in 2008, when doctors hope to carry out specialist surgery to begin removing parts of his tumor, without the need for blood transfusions.

- December 24, 2007. (http://www.thatsweird.net)

It must have been a driver's worst nightmare - cruising down the highway and suddenly running smack into millions of angry swarming bees.

The bees were on the loose in California after a truck in which they were being transported flipped on its side on the highway.

The California Highway Patrol said eight to 12 million of the honey bees escaped from the crates in which they were stored.

The truck was carrying over 400 beehives with 30,000 bees in each.

The bees stung police officers, fire crews, and tow truck drivers trying to corral them after the accident.

"People were being stung left and right. It was an ugly, ugly scene," one police officer said.

The great escape happened near Sacramento and the insects swarmed over an area of Highway 99.

For seven hours authorities brought in handlers who used smoke in a bid to calm the bees and coax them back into the hives.

Several beekeepers driving past the accident stopped to help the emergency services deal with the bees.

The highway had to be closed for a period.

Police did not know what caused the tractor trailer carrying the bees to flip over while entering the highway on its way to Yakima, Washington. But they said they believe the driver may have been driving too fast.

The bees had been used to pollinate crops in the San Joaquin Valley.

The honeybee is the world's premier pollinator and is invaluable to farmers for pollination.

But there has been a shortage of them in recent times because of "Colony Collapse Disorder". US beekeepers have been losing thousands of their bees, puzzling scientists. This has led to a rise in honey prices and has also threatened fruit and vegetable production.

After a seven-hour clean-up operation at Sacramento, police were unable to say how many bees remained unaccounted for. But they were not getting any calls from panicked drivers. "No news is good news," one officer said.

- March 28, 2008 (http://www.thatsweird.net)