Connecticut citizens use fountain as toilet.

From Yahoo! News:

NEW LONDON, Conn. – Officials in New London, Conn., turned off the water at the city's new waterfront fountain over the weekend, because people have been using it as a toilet.

The fountain was activated last month and features a sculpture of a whale's tail with water spilling over it, which visitors are encouraged to run through.

City Councilor Michael Buscetto III tells The Day of New London that since the fountain opened, police have responded to calls of people urinating, defecating and showering in the fountain water. He said some people who have cut themselves have also used the fountain to rinse off blood.

City Manager Denise Rose says police are developing a plan to better keep an eye on the area.

Stink bug epidemic spreads across U.S.

From Daily Mail:

Few of us ever come to terms with the idea of bed bugs infesting their house and home.

But now a new threat is on the rise that is arguably worse - stink bugs.

Sightings of the brown marmorated stink bug have been reported in 33 states so far this year, a rise of eight since fall alone.

The pest appears to be spreading from its traditional home in the mid-Atlantic coast throughout America, experts said.

The only areas to escape the epidemic are the Rockies and the Plains but everywhere else homeowners have found thousands of the dime-sized creatures infesting their homes in beds and in sofas.

Stink bugs are named after the smell they emit whenever they are squashed or crushed.

Like bed bugs they do not transmit disease and are not poisonous.

They do however bite you, eat your plants and vegetables and emit an appalling stench when they are squeezed that resembles decaying garbage.

They are also almost impossible to get rid of and have wings which means they fly off when you try to catch them.

Fast food meat contains 12% ammonia-treated scraps.

From ABC News:

How much meat is in your Taco Bell taco filling? How much is in your McDonald's Quarter Pounder or your Burger King Whopper? And is this meat really meat--or something else?

These questions took center stage in January when a California woman sued Taco Bell, claiming its taco filling is only 35 percent ground beef. The rest, she alleges in her class action suit, consists of edible padding: binders, extenders, preservatives, additives and other non-meat ingredients. Taco Bell says not only is its filling 88 percent ground beef, but that this beef is no different from what you'd buy at your local supermarket for use at home. The company has fought back with a counterattack ad campaign. Where's the truth?

Kantha Shelke, chief science officer of Corvus Blue LLC, a Chicago food science and nutrition research firm, says it's frankly impossible for a consumer to know how much meat is in a food item at Taco Bell, McDonalds, Burger King or any other fast food restaurant. That's because such disclosure is not required. Even when an item is touted as being "all-beef," it may be only 70 percent meat and not run afoul of regulations.

Non-meat ingredients in meat items include ones that add flavor or promote consistency, and binders. "American consumers think they're being cheated out of their money when they hear that term," says Shelke. "But logically speaking, binders are a very natural thing. They prevent water from coming out during cooking. When you make meatloaf at home, you use breadcrumbs for the same reason—to hold the moisture."

As for the meat itself, some of it can be…well, not exactly what you think of when you think of meat.

Bill Marler, an plaintiffs' attorney specializing in food safety lawsuits, says that it's common for up to 10 percent to 12 percent of that juicy burger you're about to pop into your mouth to be "ammoniated beef product"—scraps and trimmings left over from slaughter that used to be relegated for use in pet food.

They no longer are, thanks to a treatment process that uses ammonium hydroxide to protect meat made from scraps against bacterial contamination, thus rendering it fit--at least according to regulators--for human consumption.

The product is produced by Beef Products Inc. of South Dakota, whose website says that if you're eating a hamburger in a "quick-service restaurant" (the food industry's preferred term for fast food), "...chances are you'll be eating product produced by BPI."

Movie popcorn has fat of 12 hamburgers.

From HealthZone.ca:

Let's cut straight to the facts: A medium-sized bag of popcorn with butter could get you up to 97 grams of fat, depending on how liberally the topping is applied.

That's more than what most men should consume in a day, and is between 130 and 200 per cent of the average woman's daily allotment.

Cineplex Odeon disputes the 97-gram tally. Nutrition sites estimate a medium bag of popcorn without butter rings in at 60 grams of fat. Adding butter (especially without tracking the amount) sends the snack into the stratosphere.

For some people, 97 grams is almost two days worth of fat — in a snack.

“I almost fell off my chair,” says registered dietitian Shannon Crocker, who provided comparisons to underscore just how much fat movie goers could consume while munching handfuls of popcorn.

“That amount of fat is the same as what's found in 12 hamburgers from McDonalds. Or in 10 slices of sausage mushroom melt pizza from Pizza Pizza. Or in five large hot fudge sundaes from Dairy Queen.”

Cineplex Entertainment, which runs the Queensway Cinemas from which we purchased this bag of popcorn, is the largest movie theatre chain in the country with 132 theatres and 1,366 screens that entertain more than 70 million people a year. In 2010, Cineplex sold 7 million pounds (kernel weight) of popcorn.

Man dies after falling into tortilla-mixing machine.

Holy guacamole! Item!

New York City police say a man was killed after falling into a commercial-size machine used for mixing tortillas.

Police say they received a 911 call at 2:30 a.m. Monday of an unconscious man at the commercial site in Brooklyn. When they arrived they discovered that the 22-year-old victim had fallen inside the waist-high machine. He was pronounced dead at the scene.

Police say no criminality is suspected.

Japan tests urinal games.

The last time I pissed on Sega, it was on a terrible Sonic the Hedgehog game. Item!

Japanese entertainment company Sega has taken Japanese toilets to an entirely new level by installing urine-controlled games in Tokyo urinals.

Four types of "Toylets" games are available to be played during a test period ending this month in four male bathrooms in pubs and game arcades.

The project is aimed at drawing attention to digital advertisements.

Each urinal is fitted with a pressure sensor and a small digital LCD display that is placed at eye level.

Digital advertisements are shown after the games.

One of the games included is "Graffiti Eraser," in which a user tries to aim at the pressure sensor in the urinal to erase virtual graffiti on the display.

The game "Mannekin Pis" measures the volume of the user's stream.

Another game known as "The North Wind and The Sun and Me" uses the strength of a urine stream to determine the extent to which a virtual girl's skirt gets blown up by a digital wind.

"Splashing Battle!" puts two users against each other in terms of stream strength.

Players who are proud of their high scores are able to download them onto a flash drive.

Full-time foreign visitors to Japan are often baffled by the complexity of Japanese high-tech toilets. Some of the high-tech toilets feature computerized control panels, usually with Japanese language instructions as well as pictograms.

The "Toylets" will be available at limited locations until January 31.

A Sega spokesman said in a statement that they have "no concrete plans to make them into actual products."

Bees in Brooklyn producing cherry syrup instead of honey.

These little guys need to bee-have! Har har. Oh, my stinging puns! From the NY Times:

Cerise Mayo expected better of her bees. She had raised them right, given them all the best opportunities — acres of urban farmland strewn with fruits and vegetables, a bounty of natural nectar and pollen. Blinded by devotion, she assumed they shared her values: a fidelity to the land, to food sources free of high-fructose corn syrup and artificial food coloring.

And then this. Her bees, the ones she had been raising in Red Hook, Brooklyn, and on Governors Island since May, started coming home to their hives looking suspicious. Of course, it was the foragers — the adventurers, the wild waggle dancers, the social networkers incessantly buzzing about their business — who were showing up with mysterious stripes of color. Where there should have been a touch of gentle amber showing through the membrane of their honey stomachs was instead a garish bright red. The honeycombs, too, were an alarming shade of Robitussin.

“I thought maybe it was coming from some kind of weird tree, maybe a sumac,” said Ms. Mayo, who tends seven hives for Added Value, an education nonprofit in Red Hook. “We were at a loss.”

An acquaintance, only joking, suggested the unthinkable: Maybe the bees were hitting the juice — maraschino cherry juice, that sweet, sticky stuff sloshing around vats at Dell’s Maraschino Cherries Company over on Dikeman Street in Red Hook.

“I didn’t want to believe it,” said Ms. Mayo, a soft-spoken young woman who has long been active in the slow-food movement. She found it particularly hard to believe that the bees would travel all the way from Governors Island to gorge themselves on junk food. “Why would they go to the cherry factory,” she said, “when there’s a lot for them to forage right there on the farm?”

It seems natural, by now, for humans to prefer the unnatural, as if we ourselves had been genetically modified to choose artificially flavored strawberry candy over strawberries, or crunchy orange “cheese” puffs over a piece of actual cheese. But when bees make the same choice, it feels like a betrayal to our sense of how nature should work. Shouldn’t they know better? Or, perhaps, not know enough to know better?

A fellow beekeeper sent samples of the red substance that the bees were producing to an apiculturalist who works for New York State, and that expert, acting as a kind of forensic foodie, found the samples riddled with Red Dye No. 40, the same dye used in the maraschino cherry juice.

No one knows for sure where the bees might have consumed the dye, but neighbors of the Dell’s factory, Ms. Mayo said, reported that bees in unusually high numbers were gathering nearby.

Man arrested with 2,060 diamonds in stomach.

Talk about dirty diamonds... From Time:

Using laxatives and plenty of bananas, police in India have recovered 2,060 diamonds and precious stones from the stomach of an alleged jewel smuggler from Sri Lanka.

According to the Times of India, a "reliable informant" phoned authorities in the Indian city of Chennai in the early hours of Oct. 26 and said the suspect would arrive on an Air India flight later that morning. "That was the only information available and no other clue, but we zeroed in on him as soon as he came out of the airport and tried to board a taxi,'' Chennai suburban police commissioner S R Jangid said.

Police searched the man's two pieces of luggage to no avail, and grew suspicious as he struggled to sit still during questioning. The Sri Lankan blamed his discomfort on hemorrhoids. But the Indian super-sleuths couldn't be fooled. "The police," the paper reports, "took him to Chromepet Government Hospital. When doctors examined him, they found the stones lodged in his gut."

The man later admitted to acting as a human courier on three previous occasions, and he claimed to have received $225 each time. In this instance, he had placed the jewels into 42 condoms and swallowed them two and a half hours before his flight.

After police fed him laxatives, it took him six hours to eject the stones, estimated to be worth between $337,000 and $674,000. If only passing a stone were always so lucrative. . .

DC overrun with stink bugs.

I remember when they used to be called "congressmen." From NBC:

Smelly, pesky bugs known as stink bugs have been swarming the Washington, D.C. area -- and when you try to kill them, they just smell worse.

"When you try to kill them, before death, they stink," said Michael Raupp, an entomology professor at the University of Maryland. "They want to find a place to chill out for the winter. They're not coming in for warmth, they're coming in for refuge.

"They'll invade your attack and come in for the winter time. But on a nice warm day in February, they're going to say, 'Oh, spring,' and come down and be all over your windows and your baseboards and things like that."

Some frustrated area residents have gone as far as using their vacuum cleaners to combat these stinky critters. Scientists call their kind halyomorpha halys. They smell so badly because when threatened, they release a smelly defensive chemical.

Two men convicted of sperm donor racket.

From The Independent:

Two men were facing jail today after being convicted of running an illegal fertility company providing women with access to sperm donors.

Nigel Woodforth, 43, ran the operation from the basement of his home in Reading, Berkshire, with 49-year-old Ricky Gage.

A jury at Southwark Crown Court, south London, convicted both men of three counts each of providing sperm without a licence or third party agreement.

The pair, who earned £250,000 from the enterprise, will be sentenced next Friday.

Judge Deborah Taylor told the men: "The court is considering a custodial sentence and/or a fine in relation to these matters."

Nearly 800 women signed up to use the online service provided by the company, operating under various names including Sperm Direct Limited and First4Fertility.

Their website introduced would-be donors to women trying to conceive.

It is the first time anyone has been prosecuted under the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Act 1990.

The men were reported to the HFEA after one woman who used their service complained about their unprofessional standards.

Cockroach brains could be rich store of new antibiotics.

From the Burrill Report:

To some people, cockroaches are the filthy, disgusting insects that scurry frantically when the lights are turned on in a seedy apartment kitchen or bathroom. But new research has found that they could be a health benefit rather than a health hazard.

Researchers have discovered powerful antibiotic properties in the brains of cockroaches and locusts that could lead to novel treatments for multi-drug resistant bacterial infections. They found that the tissues of their brain and nervous system were able to kill more than 90 percent of MRSA and pathogenic Escherichia coli, without harming human cells.

“Superbugs such as MRSA have developed resistance against the chemotherapeutic artillery that we throw at them,” says Naveed Khan, associate professor of molecular microbiology at the University of Nottingham and supervisor of the research. “They have shown the ability to cause untreatable infections, and have become a major threat in our fight against bacterial diseases. Thus, there is a continuous need to find additional sources of novel antimicrobials to confront this menace.”

Researchers have identified up to nine different molecules in the insect tissues that were toxic to bacteria. “We hope that these molecules could eventually be developed into treatments for E. coli and MRSA infections that are increasingly resistant to current drugs,” says Simon Lee, the researcher who presented their findings at a recent meeting of the Society for General Microbiology. “These new antibiotics could potentially provide alternatives to currently available drugs that may be effective but have serious and unwanted side effects.”

Warrior worms discovered in snails.

Just what the world needs - warrior worms. From EurekAlert:

Scientists at UC Santa Barbara have discovered a caste of genetically identical "warrior worms" –– members of a parasitic fluke species that invades the California horn snail. The findings are reported in the early online version of the Proceedings of the Royal Society B.

"We have discovered flatworms in colonies with vicious, killer morphs defending the colony," said Armand M. Kuris, professor of zoology, in the Department of Ecology, Evolution and Marine Biology. "These flukes have a strongly developed social organization, much like some insects, mammals and birds." The tiny warrior worms are only a couple of millimeters in length, yet they are powerful thanks to relatively large mouths.

These worms form colonies in snails. Reproductive worms and soldier worms cooperate to grow and defend their colony within the snail. These two types of individuals look and behave differently, explained first author Ryan F. Hechinger, assistant research biologist with UCSB's Marine Science Institute. The warrior worms attack other invasive parasites trying to invade the snail.

uris calls the worms parasitic "body snatchers," because they castrate the snail, making it unable to reproduce. The snail, which is only an inch and a half long, houses thousands of worms. A mature colony of this type of worm weighs 25 percent of the weight of the host snail.

The worms are produced through asexual reproduction and their relationships are even more dramatic than those among honeybees. For example, worker bees and queen bees are related as sisters through sexual reproduction. "The fluke castes described by our research team are genetically identical," said Hechinger. "They are clones."

Many other species of flukes probably have colonies of clones with castes, said Kuris. He expects international research to expand in this direction, now that this example has been discovered.

Bedbugs found in Empire State Building.

From Huffington Post:

It survived the Depression, a bomber crash and King Kong's climb, but can the Empire State Building withstand a bedbug infestation? Officials say exterminators had to clean out an employee changing room in the tower's basement after bedbugs were found there last week.

The officials tell The New York Daily News that an employee had the bedbugs on his clothes and brought them into the building, but that the problem is now under control.

Tourists visiting the skyscraper say they are disgusted by the bloodsucking pests.

Bedbugs have been discovered recently in New York City theaters, clothing stores, office buildings, housing projects and posh apartments.

The city fielded 11,000 complaints about bedbugs last year.

Scientists closer to creating electricity from sewage.

From Oregon State University:

CORVALLIS, Ore. – Engineers at Oregon State University have made a significant advance toward producing electricity from sewage, by the use of new coatings on the anodes of microbial electrochemical cells that increased the electricity production about 20 times.

The findings, just published online in Biosensors and Bioelectronics, a professional journal, bring the researchers one step closer to technology that could clean biowaste at the same time it produces useful levels of electricity – a promising new innovation in wastewater treatment and renewable energy.

Engineers found that by coating graphite anodes with a nanoparticle layer of gold, the production of electricity increased 20 times. Coatings with palladium produced an increase, but not nearly as much. And the researchers believe nanoparticle coatings of iron – which would be a lot cheaper than gold – could produce electricity increases similar to that of gold, for at least some types of bacteria.

“This is an important step toward our goal,” said Frank Chaplen, an associate professor of biological and ecological engineering. “We still need some improvements in design of the cathode chamber, and a better understanding of the interaction between different microbial species. But the new approach is clearly producing more electricity.”

In this technology, bacteria from biowaste such as sewage are placed in an anode chamber, where they form a biofilm, consume nutrients and grow, in the process releasing electrons. In this context, the sewage is literally the fuel for electricity production.

Tons of fat clogging London's sewers.

From Raw Story:

A team of workers sporting breathing apparatus and carrying shovels has started clearing around 1,000 tonnes of fat from sewers around London's Leicester Square, a water company said Tuesday.

Cooking fat being poured down drains under one of the city's main tourist attractions is thought to be causing blockages.

Leicester Square borders London's Chinatown and its bustling restaurants and cafes, as well as the West End and Soho entertainment districts.

The clean-up, which could take up to two months, is described as the biggest ever of its kind by Thames Water, the firm organising it.

Danny Brackley, one of those involved in the clean-up, said they could not even access the sewers at first as they were blocked by a four foot (1.2 metre) thick wall of solid fat.

70,000 mozzarella cheese balls confiscated.

The blue cheese shroud of Turin... From HuffPo:

ROME (AP)-- Italian police confiscated some 70,000 balls of mozzarella in Turin after consumers noticed the milky-white cheese quickly developed a bluish tint when the package was opened, authorities said Saturday.

Agriculture Minister Giancarlo Galan ordered ministry laboratories to investigate what he called a "disturbing" development.

State TV said a woman in Turin called police after noticing that the mozzarella, made in Germany for an Italian company, turned blue after contact with air, and that several merchants in Turin had received similar complaints. Later in the day another consumer, in Trento, a city 200 kilometers (125 miles) to the east in northern Italy, made a similar discovery, authorities said.

Samples were sent to laboratories that normally deal with anti-doping testing in sport to see if they could detect any foreign substances.

Results were expected in a few days.

Health Minister Ferruccio Fazio alerted German authorities and the European Commission to the apparently tainted mozzarella, the health ministry said.

No cases of illness were immediately reported.

Coozer-Bits.

Hero: Man saves dozens of people from suicide.

Tech: Top 10 stupid Hollywood hackers.

Science: Prehistoric mammal hair found in amber.

Health: How to slow hair loss.

Gross: Woman finds mutant blob in Capri Sun.

D'oh: Sand drives army to ditch Velcro in favor of the simple button.

Lame: GOP operative embezzles $1m from Bloomberg.

Coozer-Bits.

List: 30 ways you can spot fake online reviews.

Gross: HIV-like virus found in illegally imported meat.

Awesome: Escaped convicts disguised as sheep. (Not a baaa'd idea!)

Yipes: Southern Iceland evacuated due to volcanic activity.

Eats: Why many people hate cilantro (and its soapy bug smell).

Cigarettes may contain pig blood.

I wonder if cloves contain cloven hoofs. From News.com.au:

Cigarettes may contain traces of pigs' blood, an Australian academic says with a warning that religious groups could find its undisclosed presence "very offensive".

University of Sydney Professor in Public Health Simon Chapman points to recent Dutch research which identified 185 different industrial uses of a pig - including the use of its haemoglobin in cigarette filters.

Prof Chapman said the research offered an insight into the otherwise secretive world of cigarette manufacture, and it was likely to raise concerns for devout Muslims and Jews.

Religious texts at the core of both of these faiths specifically ban the consumption of pork.

"I think that there would be some particularly devout groups who would find the idea that there were pig products in cigarettes to be very offensive," Prof Chapman said today.

"The Jewish community certainly takes these matters extremely seriously and the Islamic community certainly do as well, as would many vegetarians.

"It just puts into hard relief the problem that the tobacco industry is not required to declare the ingredients of cigarettes ... they say 'that's our business' and a trade secret."

The Dutch research found pig haemoglobin - a blood protein - was being used to make cigarette filters more effective at trapping harmful chemicals before they could enter a smoker's lungs.

Drunk man tried to revive roadkill.

From Ananova:

A US man has been charged with public drunkenness after he tried to give mouth-to-mouth resuscitation to roadkill.

Police arrested Donald Wolfe, 55, after witnesses reported seeing him trying to revive a long dead possum, reports the Philadelphia Inquirer.

One reported seeing Mr Wolfe kneeling before the animal and gesturing as though he were conducting a seance.

Another reported seeing him give mouth to mouth resuscitation to the carcass on a highway north-east of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.

State police trooper Jamie Levier said the animal had been dead a while.

Trooper Levier says the Brookville man was "extremely intoxicated" and "did have his mouth in the area of the animal's mouth, I guess".

A possum is about the size of a domestic cat. The animals are known for feigning death when threatened, hence the phrase "playing possum".