Scientists create monkeys with DNA of three parents.

From Daily Mail:

Scientists have produced four baby monkeys who each have three biological parents.

They used an IVF procedure designed to stop the spread of incurable inherited diseases.

Scientists believe the breakthrough could lead to the first genetically engineered children within a few years.

It has provoked an ethical storm, however. Critics say it is a step towards an era of hybrid children and warn that it erodes the sanctity of life.

The technique is intended to help women who carry genetic diseases. It involves transferring healthy DNA from the mother's egg cell into an egg donated by another woman.

Children conceived by the technique would inherit DNA from three sources - their mother, the donor and their father.

Teabagging case results in Australian military court being declared invalid.

I always knew teabagging would be the end of the rule of law. From News.com.au:

The new Australian Military Court, a centrepiece of reforms to the military justice system, has been declared constitutionally invalid.

High Court judges have unanimously ruled that legislation establishing the court required it to exercise the judicial power of the Commonwealth.

This was despite it being specifically declared not to be a court under the constitution and that it was to operate more in the manner of a tribunal.

For that reason it was constitutionally invalid, the judges said.

The decision means a former sailor, Brian Lane, won't face trial before the military court on charges of committing an act of indecency and assaulting a superior officer.

The High Court ordered that a writ of prohibition be issued barring the court from proceeding to try the charges against Mr Lane.

The charges relate to incidents in August 2005 when he was alleged to have been photographed placing his genitals on an army sergeant's forehead - a practice known as "teabagging" - while the sergeant was asleep.

Up to half of US population may get swine flu.

From ABC News:

Thirty to 50 percent of the entire U.S. population could be infected with swine flu this fall and winter, according to a report from the President's Council of Advisors on Science and Technology.

As many as 1.8 million people may end up in the hospital, and 30,000 to 90,000 could die, with a concentration among children and young adults, the presidential panel of the nation's leading scientists said today in outlining what it called a plausible scenario. That's more than twice the annual average of deaths typically associated with the seasonal flu, and those occur mainly in people older than 65.

"We're going to have people hospitalized and we will, unfortunately, have more deaths," said Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius.

The report says this swine flu is a "serious threat to our nation and the world." Because it's a new strain of the flu, people do not have a built-in immunity.

Follow-Up: Wal-Mart given okay to build near Civil War battlefield.

Wal-Mart welcomed the decision and will look to open stores on Indian burial grounds, burnt-down orphanages, and Ground Zero. From Yahoo! Finance:

Officials in central Virginia approved a Walmart Supercenter early Tuesday near one of the nation's most important Civil War battlefields, a proposal that had stirred opposition by preservationists and hundreds of historians.

The Orange County Board of Supervisors voted 4-1 to grant the special permit to the world's biggest retailer after a majority of more than 100 speakers said they favored bringing the Walmart to Locust Grove, within a cannonball's shot from the Wilderness Battlefield.

Historians and Civil War buffs are fearful the Walmart store will draw traffic and more commerce to an area within the historic boundaries of the Wilderness, where generals Ulysses S. Grant and Robert E. Lee first met in battle 145 years ago and where 145,000 Union and Confederate soldiers fought and more than 29,000 were killed or injured. One-fourth of the Wilderness is protected.

But they could not sway supervisors, who said they didn't see the threat.

"I cannot see how there will be any visual impact to the Wilderness Battlefield," Supervisor Chairman Lee Frame said, casting a vote for the special use permit the retailer needs to build. "I think the current proposal ... is the best way to protect the battlefield."

The retailer said construction could begin in a year.

Nearly 400 people crowded into Orange County High School to attend the board's hearing. Some came dressed in period costume, including a dead ringer for Lee.

Cranberry juice doesn't help fight UTI's.

From EurekAlert:

Current clinical evidence for using cranberry juice to combat urinary tract infections is 'unsatisfactory and inconclusive', according to Raul Raz.

"An apple a day..." Not all medical problems require a state-of-the-art solution, and it would be nice to think that products from the corner shop could treat a widespread and uncomfortable ailment. Cranberry juice and related products have been touted as a simple solution for urinary tract infections, but Raul Raz, a member of F1000 Medicine, finds little to support this claim.

Urinary tract infections (UTIs) are a common complaint. Between 10% and 20% of women will suffer a UTI at least once, and a third of these will experience it recurrently. Some recent studies support the use of cranberry as a preventative, but Dr Raz, Director of Infectious Diseases at the Technion School of Medicine in Israel, and his associate Faculty Member, Hana Edelstein, advise the medical community that "cranberry should no longer be considered as an effective [preventative] for recurrent UTIs".

Cranberry contains hundreds of compounds, and it has been difficult to determine which might be responsible for any therapeutic effect, hindering its adoption. Raz and Edelstein point to differences in clinical trial design and the lack of standardization for doses and formulation. There is a range of potential side-effects including stomach upsets and weight gain. Cranberry can also interact badly with other medicines such as Warfarin, commonly used to treat heart disease.

Rush documentary in the works!

This sounds amazing. From Blabbermouth:

According to the RUSH fan site RushIsABand.com, RUSH documentary filmmakers Sam Dunn and Scot McFadyen were recently interviewed by Classic Rock magazine's Jerry Ewing about the first-ever feature film documentary on Geddy Lee, Alex Lifeson and Neil Peart.

"Geddy had been in [Dunn and McFadyen's previous documentary] 'Metal: A Headbanger's Journey' and we were thinking about other bands we could work with," explains McFadyen. "We felt that RUSH had always been overlooked by the critics so we met them on tour and they liked what we said. We started working on it, then IRON MAIDEN came about so we took a break to do that and raised the financing for the RUSH film. We've started on it now and done a load of interviews so now we're editing with a load of archival footage."

"We've been lucky. Not only have we had access to [RUSH management] SRO's archives but also Geddy, Alex and Neil's own personal archives," enthuses director Dunn. "I was just at Geddy's house this week. Going through his personal collection of memorabilia. I dug up some gems I don't think RUSH fans have ever seen so we're hoping to offer something new."

As RUSH fans themselves, Dunn admits this is making him feel like a kid let loose in a candy store.

"Well, Geddy's definitely the premier band archivist," Dunn says. "He has a massive collection of photographs and clippings. We even got our hands on Neil's handwritten lyric sheets from back when they were making 'Fly By Night', '2112' and 'A Farewell To Kings', and I don't think they've ever been seen before."

Queens park hosts naval battle with togas and tomatoes.

Even by NYC standards, this is pretty bizarre.

Queens gladiators emerged spattered but victorious last Thursday as cultural institutions from across the city converged in Flushing Meadows Corona Park for a fiery battle royale as surreal as anything since perhaps the spectacle of the 1964 World’s Fair.

Teams from the Queens Museum of Art, the Brooklyn Museum, the Bronx Museum of the Arts and Manhattan’s El Museo del Barrio joined a mystery team representing Staten Island for “Those About to Die Salute You,” an artistic face-off between the boroughs.

The frenzied, hour-long fight in a World’s Fair-leftover reflecting pool involved tomato projectiles, foam bats and more pyrotechnics than were probably allowed.

[...] Tableaux from the evening were not what one would see at a typical art show: a nude man in his 60s changing out of a tomato-soaked toga between two parked cars; a heavy metal band playing in the museum. Hundreds of people showed up in togas, some with the proper, two-layer Roman look, some with golden laurels, some in bedsheets with garden ivy in their hair.

More here.

Aussie town dumps Japan sister city over dolphin massacre.

Good job by Broome. Hopefully more attention will be paid to what's going on in places like Taiji. From AFP:

An Australian town with deep historical ties to Japan has severed its sister city relationship with a Japanese village to protest an annual dolphin slaughter, civic leaders said Monday.

Councillors in the remote West Australian town of Broome voted unanimously to end sister city ties with Taiji at a meeting on Saturday because they felt the dolphin cull was unacceptable, said Broome's mayor, Graeme Campbell.

The decision was taken reluctantly, he said, as Broome's links to the southern Japanese village dated back to the late 1800s, when Japanese migrants pioneered the Australian town's pearl diving industry.

"It's a sad day for Broome, given the historical and cultural contribution made by many people from Japan to the town and the number of people living here who still have relatives in Taiji," he told AFP.

"It's very disheartening and sad for those people. It was a unanimous decision by council, none of us can condone the slaughter."

Animal welfare activists accuse Japan of slaughtering some 2,000 dolphins every year in waters near Taiji by driving them close to the shore then hacking them to death.

The cull is the subject of a recently released US documentary called "The Cove", in which filmmakers covertly recorded dolphins being killed near the village.

Campbell said the documentary had resulted in Broome being inundated with protests against the sister city relationship.

Rare lemurs hunted, eaten amid civil unrest.

No, starving refugees aren't eating the lemurs, but rich morons who are taking advantage of lax conservation enforcement. From National Geographic:

Rare lemurs are being hunted as an exotic delicacy in the midst of Madagascar's political unrest, conservationists say.

Since a March coup d'etat in the island country, long-nurtured conservation measures have quickly fallen by the wayside—making lemurs the targets of hunting gangs.

The criminals are fueling demand for a new bush-meat delicacy in the country's upscale restaurants, according to the nonprofit Conservation International.

No one knows how many lemurs have been killed, but species such as the golden crowned sifaka—considered endangered by the International Union for Conservation of Nature—are being targeted.

Man hospitalized after superglue public toilet seat prank.

From FOX News:

CAIRNS, Australia — A man who used a public toilet in a shopping mall was taken to a hospital to have the toilet seat removed from his backside after someone smeared it with glue in what an official condemned Monday as a sick joke.

Police urged possible witnesses to come forward after the 58-year-old man was humiliated in the northeastern city of Cairns by the prank.

An ambulance was called to help the man after he was found stuck by fast-acting adhesive glue to a toilet seat on Saturday in the busy shopping mall.

Paramedics removed the seat from the toilet and took him to a hospital, where medical staff used industrial solvents to get it off.

Cairns local government official Di Forsyth said the man, who was not identified, was not injured but was "extremely embarrassed" by his experience.

"I'm disgusted that a gentlemen has had to go through that because someone thinks it's funny," Forsyth said. "It's a sick joke."

UK government to create a pint glass that won't shatter in pub fights.

I like that the British gov't isn't trying to curb binge drinking and pub violence, but taking steps to prevent beer spillage. From Daily Mail:

Last orders have been called for the traditional pint glass, after the Government deemed them too dangerous to handle.

The Home Office has called in a team of designers to create a safer beer glass in a bid to reduce the number of violent assaults.

Pint glasses made from safety or shatterproof glass, have been introduced into pubs and clubs around Britain recently.

The popular shaped glasses are easy to stack and have a bulge below the rim to prevent them from chipping.

However, there are still around 87,000 violent incidents involving glassware each year, which costs an annual estimate of £100m in NHS, police and court costs.

Consultancy Design Bridge won the pitch to create a range of 'safer drinking vessel prototypes' that will be unveiled in December.

'The challenge is to not only develop a safer pint glass, but to ensure they are attractive to industry, manufacturers and consumers,' a spokesman from the Government funded Design Council said.

Under the 'Designing Out Crime' initiative, the firm will focus on two areas, looking at what can be added to the glass to make it safer, and ‘a complete paradigm shift’, which could look at using new materials or forms.

Magician provokes riot.

Well, at least he didn't try pulling a rabbit out of the boy's pants. From Ananova:

An Indian conjuror needed an armed guard out of town after his 'magic' provoked a riot.

Rajeev Patel had been performing on the street in Berhampur, eastern India, when he asked a young boy to join him for a special magic trick.

Witnesses said he then pulled down the boy's pants and asked him to hold a piece of clay before saying he would change it into a sweet.

One man in the crowd said: "We were all shocked when he just pulled the boy's pants down but if that wasn't enough he didn't even manage to do the spell and a lot of people though he was just putting it on so he could look at the boy's backside.

"They got furious and started shouting at him and then when he said he would try it again they just went mad."

"He failed and the crowd turned violent," added a police spokesman, after officers took two hours to quell a riot and give the hapless magician an armed guard out of town.

More on The Goldblum and Alex from Lost.

Judgmental article rife with jealousy and spelling errors (corrected below). Item!

There were rumors back in June that actor Jeff Goldblum, 56, had met an unfortunate fate and had died while shooting a film. As everyone probably knows by now, Goldblum was part of a celebrity death hoax that spread around the internet.

Goldblum is not only very much alive, but is being seen flirting and cuddling his 21-year- old girlfriend, actress Tania Raymonde.

Their thirty-five-year age difference is not something new in Hollywood, or in the history of dating and mating, but it brings up the question; "how much of an age difference is too much?"

The old guideline for socially acceptable age differences in western culture was, the arbitrary, " half-your-age-plus seven," rule. Under this mathmatical formula you would take Goldblum's 56 years and divide by half (28) and then add seven more years for good measure. This would mean that it was fine if Raymonde was 35 years old. This would be a more familiar twenty-one-year age difference.

Anecdotally, most people can point to some successful relationship that they know where there has been a difference of 15 or 20 years. But when that number climbs upwards, people might begin thinking of Anna Nicole Smith and J. Howard Marshall. Motives come into question when the age difference becomes far greater; especially if the elder partner has their money, social, or professional status at risk.

KFC unleashes sandwich that uses fried chicken as bread.

For those in poverty-stricken countries who wait for hours on bread lines - IN YOUR FACE! USA! USA! From Consumerist:

This is perhaps man's greatest achievement or evidence of our civilization's impending doom. Maybe it's both.

Meet the KFC "double down." Although no mention of it is made on KFC.com and we have never seen an ad for it ourselves, we are being lead to believe that it is real by Foodgeekery.com. They have crappy cell phone camera footage of a commercial (from Omaha, apparently) for the mysterious beast, as well as photographic evidence of it in the wild.

The sandwich consists of two fried chicken fillets wrapped around bacon, cheese and Colonel's sauce. It apparently tastes like you think it would.

More advertisers bolt from Glenn Beck.

From Huffington Post:

Glenn Beck returns to Fox News Channel on Monday after a vacation with fewer companies willing to advertise on his show than when he left, part of the fallout from calling President Barack Obama a racist.

A total of 33 Fox advertisers, including Wal-Mart Stores Inc., CVS Caremark, Clorox and Sprint, directed that their commercials not air on Beck's show, according to the companies and ColorofChange.org, a group that promotes political action among blacks and launched a campaign to get advertisers to abandon him. That's more than a dozen more than were identified a week ago.

While it's unclear what effect, if any, this will ultimately have on Fox and Beck, it is already making advertisers skittish about hawking their wares within the most opinionated cable TV shows.

Man attacks woman with axe over missing chicken leg.

Police are calling it fowl play. Item!

A Bogota man attacked a woman with an axe for selling him an incomplete chicken - one leg was missing, the man said.

"The children of the man came to buy a chicken, we sold it completely. Two hours later the man came and claimed I stole part of the chicken," victim Maria Ortiz told RCN news.

"He called me a #*$~%* and said he would kill me. I really feared for my life," the vendor added.

And right she was. The angry costumer followed Ortiz to her home and attacked her with an axe. Luckily, the victim came away with minor injuries at her arm and head.

The man was arrested for attempted murder.

Hedgehog joke wins comedy prize.

I guess the porcupine joke was too prickly. From BBC:

Comedian Dan Antopolski has won a prize for the funniest joke of this year's Edinburgh Fringe.

The funnyman, who has previously been nominated for the Perrier award, picked up the trophy from TV channel Dave.

Nine comedy critics sat through thousands of jokes before choosing 27 for viewers to vote on.

The winning joke was a one-liner from 36-year-old Antopolski's show Silent But Deadly - "Hedgehogs. Why can't they just share the hedge?"

Cockney slang added to some London ATMs.

Would you like to see your Jack Palance before ending this transaction? From Ananova:

A cash machine operator has introduced Cockney rhyming slang to a number of its ATMs.

People wanting cash out of Bank Machine's ATMs in East London can choose to have their instruction given to them in rhyming slang, reports BBC online.

Customers will be asked to enter their Huckleberry Finn, rather than their Pin, and will have to select how much sausage and mash or cash they want.

The company plan to trial the rhyming slang in five cash machines for three months.

Ron Delnevo, managing director of Bank Machine, said: "We wanted to introduce something fun and of local interest to our London machines.

"Whilst we expect some residents will visit the machine to just have a look, most will be genuinely pleased as this is the first time a financial services provider will have recognised the Cockney language in such a manner."

Wal-Mart battles to build superstore on Civil War site.

But what better way to honor thousands of dead military than with half-price chinos? From ABC News:

On the same ground where a Civil War battle was fought almost a century and a half ago, Wal-Mart is now waging a fight to build a new superstore. But the proposal has been met with opposition from around the country, with Washington lawmakers and Hollywood actors trying to fend off the company's plans.

The dispute will come to a head on today, when the Orange County board of supervisors will vote on the matter.

At issue is the proposed superstore's proximity to the Wilderness battlefield, where on May 5, 1864, more than 160,000 soldiers fought a battle in the midst of the Civil War.

Critics say the new Wal-Mart would be too close to the battlefield. Not to mention, Wal-Mart already has four stores in a 20-mile radius of the area. Multiple members of Congress, including Sen. Jim Webb, D-Va., have come down against the proposed store.

Robots learn to lie.

What could go wrong? From Live Science:

In an experiment performed in a Swiss laboratory, 10 robots with downward-facing sensors competed for "food" - a light-colored ring on the floor. At the other end of the space, a darker ring - "poison" - was placed. The robots earned points for how much time they spent near food as opposed to poison.

The experimenters, engineers Sara Mitri and Dario Floreano and evolutionary biologist Laurent Keller, also gave the robots the ability to talk with each other. Each robot can produce a blue light that can be seen by the others and which can give away the position of the "food" ring. Over time, the robots evolved to deceive each other about the food ring.

Their evolution was made possible by the artificial neural network that controlled each of the robots. The network consisted of 11 "neurons" that were connected to the robot's sensors and 3 that controlled its two tracks and its blue light. The neurons were linked via 33 connections - "synapses" - and the strength of these connections was each controlled by a single 8-bit gene. In total, each robot's 264-bit genome determines how it reacts to information gleaned from its senses.

Researchers devised a system of rounds in which groups of ten robots competed for "food" in separate arenas. After 100 rounds, the robots with the highest scores - the fittest of the population, in the Darwinian sense - "survived" to the next round..

At the start, the robots produced blue light at random. However, as the robots became better at finding food, the light became more and more informative and the bots became increasingly drawn to it. The red ring is large enough for just eight robots, so they had to jostle each other for the right to "feed". The effects of this competition became clear when Mitri, Floreano and Keller allowed the emission of blue light to evolve along with the rest of the robots' behavior.

As before, they shone randomly at first and as they started to crowd round the food, their lights increasingly gave away its presence. The more successful robots became more secretive. By the 50th generation, they became much less likely to shine their lights near the food than elsewhere in the arena.

Tom Ridge confirms Bush raised terror alerts for political gain.

So I bought all that duct tape for nothing? From US News:

Tom Ridge, the first head of the 9/11-inspired Department of Homeland Security, wasn't keen on writing a tell-all. But in The Test of Our Times: America Under Siege...and How We Can Be Safe Again, out September 1, Ridge says he wants to shake "public complacency" over security. And to do that, well, he needs to tell all. Especially about the infighting he saw that frustrated his attempts to build a smooth-running department.

Among the headlines promoted by publisher Thomas Dunne Books: Ridge was never invited to sit in on National Security Council meetings; was "blindsided" by the FBI in morning Oval Office meetings because the agency withheld critical information from him; found his urgings to block Michael Brown from being named head of the emergency agency blamed for the Hurricane Katrina disaster ignored; and was pushed to raise the security alert on the eve of President Bush's re-election, something he saw as politically motivated and worth resigning over.

People tend to walk around in circles.

From Daily Mail:

It's a recurring scene in desert movies - a group of lost people try to find their way through the dunes but end up walking round in circles.

Now scientists have shown that the old cliché really is true, and that without help from the sun or stars people are unable to walk in a straight line.

Researchers in Germany left six volunteers in a forest and asked them to keep going in the same direction. On cloudy days - with no sun to guide them - the volunteers ended up walking in circles and crossing their paths without realising it.

In a second experiment, volunteers were left in the Sahara for several hours with water and food.

Again, they were able to keep to a straight path only when the sun was visible. As soon as it went behind clouds they wandered aimlessly in loops.

Dr Jan Souman, who led the study, said: 'Those stories about people who end up walking around in circles when lost are true.

'People cannot walk in a straight line if they do not have absolute references, such as a tower or a mountain in the distance or the sun or moon, and often end up walking in circles.'

[...] Dr Souman, of the Max Planck Institute for Biological Cybernetics in Tubingen, added: 'One explanation offered in the past for walking in circles is that most people have one leg longer or stronger than the other - which would produce a systematic bias in one direction.'

But the researchers disproved that by showing that blindfolded volunteers walked in circles but without any preference for going clockwise or anti-clockwise.

Tobacco may cure norovirus.

From Yahoo! News:

Scientists have developed a vaccine for the common viral infection norovirus from a novel source: a tobacco plant.

The new vaccine was "manufactured" in a tobacco plant using a bioengineered plant virus.

This plant biotechnology opens the door to faster, more inexpensive ways to bring vaccines to the public quickly, especially in times when viruses mutate into unpredictable new strains, said Charles Arntzen, who reported on the vaccine at the American Chemical Society annual meeting, in Washingtopn, D.C.

[...] The new vaccine for norovirus is a step in that direction. Norovirus is a dreaded cause of diarrhea and vomiting that may be the second most common viral infection in the United States, behind the flu.

Zoo sued for teaching dolphins to splash.

Free Willy... from personal liability suits! From News.com.au:

A woman is suing a Chicago-area zoo for a 2008 fall near a dolphin exhibit, accusing zookeepers of encouraging the mammals to splash water and then failing to protect spectators from wet surfaces.

In her suit filed earlier this week, Allecyn Edwards said she was injured while walking near an exhibit at Brookfield Zoo, where a group of Atlantic bottlenose dolphins were performing, media said.

Officials "recklessly and willfully trained and encouraged the dolphins to throw water at the spectators in the stands, making the floor wet and slippery", but failed to post warning signs or lay down protective mats or strips, the suit said, according to the reports.

Ms Edwards is demanding more than $50,000 for lost wages, medical expenses and emotional trauma from the Chicago Zoological Society and the Forest Preserve District of Cook County, which operate the zoo in Chicago's southwest suburbs.

PS3 finally realistically priced.

From Yahoo! Tech:

After months of rumors and anticipation, Sony Corp. is slashing the price of the PlayStation 3 by $100 in hopes of boosting sales of the console ahead of the important holiday season.

Sony Corp. said Tuesday it will cut the price of the currently available 80 gigabyte PlayStation 3 effective immediately, to $299. It is also launching a slimmer, lighter model with a 120 GB hard drive in early September; that version will also cost $299.

Sony also cut the price of its existing 160 GB PlayStation 3 by $100, to $399. All price cuts apply worldwide.

Sales of the PlayStation 3, which launched in 2006 and cost as much as $600 at the time, have fallen behind rival consoles. Last week, market researcher NPD Group said U.S. retail stores sold about 122,000 units of the console in July, compared with nearly 203,000 for Microsoft Corp.'s Xbox 360 and more than 252,000 for the Nintendo Co.'s Wii.

Video game software makers hope Sony's price cut will boost game sales ahead of the holidays. So far this year, the industry has suffered from weak sales because of the recession and lackluster game release schedules, which have kept consumers waiting to spend money on new titles.

Medical super glue being developed from sea worms.

Want your bones fixed with worm gunk? From the Press Association:

A team of US scientists have created a glue derived from an industrious marine worm that could help surgeons repair shattered bones.

Scientists hope the new bonding material will one day replace the metal wires, pins and screws used to hold bone fragments in place.

To create it, researchers copied a natural glue secreted by the sandcastle worm, which cements together sand grains and sea shell fragments to build a protective home.

The biodegradable adhesive is both super-strong and unaffected by water. Like the worm's glue on which it is based, it sets in response to changes in acidity.

Currently nails, wires, pins and metal screws are used to support broken bones until they can bear weight.

Glue would have the advantage of avoiding metal hardware in the body and make it easier to fasten small bone fragments.

The inch-long sandcastle worm, Phragmatopoma californica, overcame several engineering challenges to evolve its underwater adhesive.

Dr Russell Stewart, from the University of Utah in Salt Lake City, who led the research, said: "We recognised that the mechanism used by the sandcastle worm is really a perfect vehicle for producing an underwater adhesive. This glue, just like the worm's glue, is a fluid material that, although it doesn't mix with water, is water soluble."

Seeds of life found on comet for first time.

From the NY Times:

For the first time, a building block of proteins — and hence of life as we know it — has been found in a comet.

That adds to the prevailing notion that many of the ingredients for the origin of life showered down on the early Earth when asteroids (interplanetary rocks orbiting the inner solar system) and comets (dirty ice balls that generally congregate in the outer solar system beyond Neptune) made impact with the planet.

In the new research, scientists at the Goddard Space Flight Center, in Greenbelt, Md., detected the amino acid glycine in comet bits brought back in 2006 by the NASA space probe Stardust.

“It tells us more about the inventory of organics in the early solar system,” said Jamie Elsila, an astrochemist at Goddard who led the research.

Amino acids are small molecules that, when strung together into chains, form a diversity of proteins. For four decades, scientists have found a multitude of amino acids in some meteorites, the bits of asteroids that land on Earth. More recently, astronomers reported that amino acids might float throughout the cosmos, a belief resulting from their detection of the color signatures of glycine, the simplest of the amino acids, in distant interstellar gas clouds.

Some doubts remain about that claim, but if it is true, it would then not be surprising that when the clouds condense into stars and planets, the building blocks of life might be readily available there.

Popcorn may be good for you.

Yeah, but is it worth the kernel skins getting stuck in your gums? (I hate that.)

Popcorn could help prevent cancer, research suggests.

Scientists discovered the snack food contains 'surprisingly large' levels of health-boosting antioxidants called polyphenols.

Polyphenols in fruit and vegetables are thought to help reduce the risk of heart disease, cancer and other diseases.

The U.S. study was led by the chemist Dr Vinson from the University of Scranton in Pennsylvania. It is the first to establish that snack foods and some wholegrain breakfast cereals are a good source of polyphenols.

He said: 'We really were surprised by the levels of polyphenols we found in popcorn. I guess its because it's not processed. You get all the wonderful ingredients of the corn undiluted and protected by the skin. In my opinion it's a good health food.'

More here.

Average video gamer is 35, fat, and depressed.

I've been depressed ever since Aeris died. From Daily Mail:

Playing video games is often regarded as a pastime for children and teenagers.

But the average age of players is now 35 - and it seems they have similar problems to their younger counterparts, according to researchers.

Adults who spend hours in front of a games console every day are more likely to be fat and depressed than those who don't, a U.S. study found.

They also rely more on the internet - rather than flesh and blood friends and colleagues - for social support.

[...] Women players reported greater levels of depression and lower health status than the female non-players.

Male video game players reported greater levels of obesity and spent more time on the internet than male non-players.

And both sexes of video game players said they were more reliant on the internet for social support than non-players.

Virgin Mary shows up on a Guanabana tree.

Image is a Guanabana. If I were the holy virgin, I wouldn't want to sit on one of those things! From Colombia Reports:

The holy virgin has appeared again. Inhabitants of Ocaña, Norte de Santander department, on Wednesday discovered the image of Our Lady of Grace of Torcoroma, a village near Ocaña, on a Guanabana tree.

Within a couple of hours, the house of the Torrado family where the virgin appeared, had turned into a pilgrimage site. Hundreds of faithful, who believe the appearance announces good times, have visited the tree since the early morning hours of Wednesday.

"I believe the virgin appeared and she appeared for a reason," visitor Esperanza Quintero told Canal RCN.

The Catholic Church has not yet confirmed the validity of the virgin.

Man arrested for drive-by feces attack.

Here's the poop:

A 39-year-old construction worker has been arrested for throwing his own faeces at women passers-by from a motorcycle in two separate attacks in western Japan, police said today.

The man turned himself in yesterday after making the second drive-by attack in Settsu, a satellite city near Osaka, and was detained on suspicion of assault, a municipal police spokesman said.

The worker, identified as Tatsuya Moriguchi, committed a similar assault in the same city on August 3, the police official said.

"The suspect has told investigators he did it because he felt frustrated when his work didn't go well,'' the official said.

"I have no idea what kind of penalty he may face. I have not heard about such a case before.''

NYC sues Exxon $300m for polluting Queens.

Kill one person and you're a murderer. Kill tens of thousands of people and you're a successful corporation.

The city has taken one of the world’s largest oil companies to court and is seeking hundreds of millions of dollars in damages for contaminating the drinking water under southeast Queens.

Opening arguments began last week in Manhattan federal court for the city’s lawsuit against ExxonMobil, accusing the oil giant of negligence and nuisance for using the chemical methyl tertiary butyl ether, or MTBE, in its fuel products during the 1980s and ’90s. The chemical served as an unleaded gasoline additive to boost the octane number and, if found in water supplies, has been found to cause cancer and other diseases when it comes in contact with human skin, according to the lawsuit.

Large traces of the additive were found in the groundwater that was located under Jamaica and prevented the city from using it to provide water to New Yorkers, according to the suit.

“From at least the early 1980s, defendants and other gasoline refiners collectively knew ... about the dangers and risks that the products posed to groundwater and soil, but did not at any time warn the public, local gasoline stations or any government entity,” the city said in the suit.

The city is seeking more than $300 million in damages from ExxonMobil in the jury trial. Peter John Sacripanti, the attorney representing the oil company, could not be reached for comment.

More here.

Metal coating created that repairs itself.

From Technology Review:

Airplanes, cars, and ships that don't corrode are the promise of self-healing paint coatings and polymer materials. Now researchers at the Fraunhofer Institute for Manufacturing Engineering and Automation and the University of Duisburg-Essen in Germany have come up with a metal coating that may be able to repair itself after sustaining damage.

The self-healing metal can be electroplated, which opens up applications in construction, car manufacturing, and other industries that use or manufacture steel machines. (Nuts, bolts, and screws made of steel, which is susceptible to corrosion, are already electroplated with rustproof metals such as zinc and chromium.)

The new coating is around 15 micrometers thick and contains polymer capsules a few hundred nanometers in diameter. When the plating is scratched, the capsules should burst and release their contents - which could be a polymer capable of sealing the crack, or corrosion-inhibiting liquids.

Robot vs. the Aztec Mummy.

Let's just hope they battle each other and don't team up against us humans. Thanks Larissa!

New Afghan law allows husbands to starve wives to death for refusing sex.

Form Daily Mail:

An Afghan bill permitting a husband to starve his wife if she refuses to have sex has become law.

The original bill caused international outrage earlier this year, forcing Afghan President Hamid Karzai to withdraw it.

But critics say the amended version of the law, brought into effect on July 27, remains highly repressive.

They accuse Mr Karzai of selling out Afghan women for the sake of conservative Shia support ahead of this week's presidential election.

The law governs family life for Afghanistan's Shia minority, which makes up about 15 per cent of the population of about 30million.

It allows a husband to withhold food from his wife if she refuses his sexual demands.

In the original version, Shia women were ordered to have sex with their husbands every four days at a minimum.

It also removed the need for consent to sex within marriage, effectively condoning rape.

Brown fat makes you thin.

From New Scientist:

In the war on our waistlines, fat is the enemy. It is fat, or adipose tissue, that gives us our beer bellies and our love handles, our man boobs and our muffin tops. And when plastic surgeons sculpt people into slenderness, it is fat tissue they suck up and throw out with the clinical waste.

It seems odd, then, that a type of fat tissue could also be the key to weight control. Not ordinary white adipose tissue, but a special kind called brown fat.

In some mammals, brown fat turns the energy obtained from food into heat, burning up calories without the animal expending any effort. It used to be thought that adult humans had no brown fat, but a raft of new evidence indicates that this is wrong, and it is in fact present and functional in at least some individuals. Differences in the amount of brown fat each person has may help to explain why some of us are slim while others are overweight, and why many of us pile on the pounds as we age.

Researchers are experimenting with various ways to increase the amount or activity of our brown fat, either pharmaceutically or even surgically, by extracting ordinary white fat through liposuction, transforming it into brown fat and re-implanting it. A mere 50 grams of brown fat - well within the range of what some of us already have - could dissipate around 500 calories a day. "I exercise on an elliptical trainer and it's pretty hard for me to burn up 500 calories," says Ronald Kahn, head of obesity research at Harvard Medical School's Joslin Diabetes Center. "If I could do it without working and do it every day, it would be pretty great."

Brown fat's role in heat generation, also known as thermogenesis, has been extensively studied by animal physiologists. It turns out that brown fat cells have unusual mitochondria, the tiny structures found in almost all cells that release energy from food. In the vast majority of cells this energy is either stored or used to power cellular processes. The mitochondria in brown fat, however, contain a protein called thermogenin (or uncoupling protein 1), which causes energy to dissipate as heat. "This is a tissue whose sole purpose is burning energy," says Francesco Celi, a researcher at the US National Institutes of Health.

Mathematical model describes survival rate for zombie attack.

Damn, even math is on the side of the zombies. From Wired:

It is possible to successfully fend off a zombie attack, according to Canadian mathematicians. The key is to “hit hard and hit often.”

Oh yes, somebody actually did a study on mathematics of a hypothetical zombie attack, and published it in a book on infectious disease. So, while we still don’t know what to do if a deadly asteroid takes aim at Earth, an unlikely but technically possible situation, we now know what to do in case of a zombie attack.

“An outbreak of zombies is likely to be disastrous, unless extremely aggressive tactics are employed against the undead,” the authors wrote. “It is imperative that zombies are dealt with quickly, or else we are all in a great deal of trouble.”

[...] The model focuses on modern zombies, which are “very different from the voodoo and the folklore zombies.” It takes into account the possibility of quarantine (could lead to eradication, but unlikely to happen) and treatment (some humans survive, but they still must coexist with zombies), but shows that there is only one strategy likely to succeed: “impulsive eradication.”

“Only sufficiently frequent attacks, with increasing force, will result in eradication, assuming the available resources can be mustered in time,” they concluded.

And if we don’t act fast enough?

“If the timescale of the outbreak increases, then the result is the doomsday scenario: an outbreak of zombies will result in the collapse of civilization, with every human infected, or dead,” they wrote. “This is because human births and deaths will provide the undead with a limitless supply of new bodies to infect, resurrect and convert.”

Girl selling lemonade ticketed $50.

Is it just me, or does the Post seem to have something against the NYC Parks Dept? Item!

Three sourpuss Parks Department agents put the squeeze on a 10-year-old girl in Riverside Park yesterday, slapping the tyke with a $50 ticket for hawking lemonade without a permit.

Clementine Lee, who lives just blocks from the Upper West Side park, had dreamed of opening a lemonade stand since last year and took advantage of yesterday's beautiful weather to set up shop.

"It was such a hot day I figured people would want a cold drink," the aspiring juvenile juice mogul told The Post.

It has a happy ending...

[...] But yesterday, after The Post contacted the department, Parks Commissioner Adrian Benepe announced that the ticket would be nixed.

"The agent used extremely poor judgment" and didn't properly enforce the rule, Benepe said.

The bumbling Parks enforcement patrol officer will be re-trained on rules and regulations and will be reassigned, he added.

"We're going to make lemonade out of lemons . . . I look forward to buying lemonade from her if I pass by," said the commissioner.

Milwaukee mayor beaten with metal pipe.

From CNN:

Milwaukee Mayor Tom Barrett was in stable condition Sunday at a local hospital after he was attacked by a man with a metal pipe at the Wisconsin State Fair on Saturday night, police said.

The attack occurred at 10:45 p.m. at the state fair in West Allis, Wisconsin, as Barrett was leaving the event with his family.

According to Milwaukee Police, Barrett heard a woman crying for help.

When he began calling 911, the man who had been attacking the woman charged at the mayor and began battering him with a metal pipe, according to a statement released by the Milwaukee Police Department.

The suspect then fled the scene.

Scientists: Facebook incites jealousy.

Well, that's certainly the last time I super ninja pirate poke someone of the opposite sex! From Live Science:

Spending time on social networking sites can lead to jealousy toward romantic partners, a new study indicates.

The results are based on a survey of more than 300 college students, and reveal a vicious cycle that plays out in the digital ecosystem called Facebook and ends in a frenzy of jealousy feeding jealousy.

Facebook, which announced its 200 millionth member this year, lets users set up profile pages on which "friends" post comments, photos and other banter, for the most part.

Here's how Amy Muise of the University of Guelph in Ontario and her colleagues think the ugly green-eyed monster rears its head:

Student spends time on Facebook. He or she monitors the profile page of a significant other, finding ambiguous information about their partner that they otherwise may not have access to. This new information stirs up jealous feelings in said student, who then scours for more Facebook information that further fuels the fire.

This escalating cycle can become addictive, according to the new research published in the August issue of the journal CyberPsychology & Behavior.

Wait, there's a journal called CyberPsychology & Behavior?

Bollywood star mistaken for terrorist in Newark.

From the NY Daily News:

Bollywood superstar Shah Rukh Khan, who plays a Muslim mistaken for a terrorist in his latest film, says he was racially profiled at Newark Airport and detained for two hours on Friday.

The 43-year-old "Tom Cruise of India" - cited last year by Newsweek as one of the world's 50 most influential men - was released only after Indian diplomats intervened.

"I was really being hassled, perhaps because of my name being Khan," the international box office sensation charged Saturday in a text message to reporters. "These guys wouldn't let me through."

Khan, who has appeared in more than 70 films, said he was waiting for his luggage Friday when his name popped up on a computer alert list. Security then pulled him aside.

"Absolutely uncalled for, I think," Khan said. "I felt angry and humiliated."

Khan said he endured two hours of interrogation before he was allowed to call the Indian embassy in Washington. An official there vouched for the star, who was then released.

"I was really taken aback," Khan told an Indian television station. "I did not want to say anything just in case they took everything wrong, because I am a little worried about Americans because they do have this issue when your name is Muslim."

Officials at U.S. Customs and Border Protection did not answer multiple inquiries Saturday about the case.

The actor insisted he had all the proper paperwork when he was brought to a detention room at the New Jersey airport. But, he said, Khan "is a Muslim name, and I think the name is common on their checklist."

New Dehli-based U.S. Ambassador Timothy Roemer said officials were trying to "ascertain the facts of the case."

"Shah Rukh Khan, the actor and global icon, is a very welcome guest in the United States," Roemer said Saturday. "Many Americans love his films."

But there were no Bollywood buffs in Newark as Khan came through the airport on his way to Chicago for a celebration of India's independence day.

"I told them I am a movie star," Khan said - although the line fell on deaf ears.

He recently signed a deal with Fox Star Studios to finance and distribute his new movie, "My Name is Khan" - the story of a Muslim man mistaken for a terrorist in post-9/11 America.

Trend Spotting: The male paunch.

I've had my paunch for years, before it was cool. From the NY Times:

This summer the unvarying male uniform in the precincts of Brooklyn cool has been a pair of shorts cut at knickers length, a V-neck Hanes T-shirt, a pair of generic slip-on sneakers and a straw fedora. Add a leather cuff bracelet if the coolster is gay.

In truth this get-up was pretty much the unvarying male uniform last summer also, but this year an unexpected element has been added to the look, and that is a burgeoning potbelly one might term the Ralph Kramden.

Too pronounced to be blamed on the slouchy cut of a T-shirt, too modest in size to be termed a proper beer gut, developed too young to come under the heading of a paunch, the Ralph Kramden is everywhere to be seen lately, or at least it is in the vicinity of the Brooklyn Flea in Fort Greene, the McCarren Park Greenmarket and pretty much any place one is apt to encounter fans of Grizzly Bear.

What the trucker cap and wallet chain were to hipsters of a moment ago, the Kramden is to what my colleague Mike Albo refers to as the “coolios” of now. Leading with a belly is a male privilege of long standing, of course, a symbol of prosperity in most cultures and of freedom from anxieties about body image that have plagued women since Eve.

ZombieWatch: Boy who died 18 times celebrates first birthday.

I'm alarmed by the number of zombie babies in the news lately... From News.com.au:

[...] After extreme complications at birth, his British parents Leigh Dumighan and David Newcombe, were told he would have an appalling life ahead of him if Warwick survived.

They were also told that if Warwick pulled through he would still be severely disabled, not be able to see, hear, move around, or even know who they were.

The Coventry couple were forced to make the hardest decision of their lives, choosing to take him out of his incubator, withdraw his treatment and allow him to die with dignity in their arms.

They stayed with him in a private hospital room for eight days, giving him the cuddles they had been unable to and waiting for him to pass away.

But Warwick fought to survive and, despite him stopping breathing 18 times, today celebrated the first birthday his parents thought they would never see.

Eating fast food will turn you stupid.

From Daily Mail:

Eating too much fast food will make you thicker in more ways than one, according to a study.

As well as expanding the waistline, a high-fat diet of curries, kebabs, burgers and chips can make you less intelligent.

The research was performed by scientists at Oxford University on rats.

A high-fat diet over less than ten days damaged the rodents’ short-term memory and made them less mentally alert, as well as significantly decreasing their ability to exercise.

The group of biological experts say their results – dubbed a ‘high-fat hangover’ – show an important link between what people eat, how they think, and how our bodies perform.

JetBlue offers $599 pass for unlimited flights.

This would be awesome if they flew anywhere good. From CNN:

JetBlue Airways will offer an "all-you-can-jet" pass for $599 in which passengers can book an unlimited number of flights within a one-month span, the airline said Wednesday.

Pass holders can fly to any of JetBlue's (JBLU) 56 destinations between Sept. 8 and Oct. 8, with no seat limitations or blackout dates, the company said in a release.

Airline equities analyst Bob McAdoo, of Avondale Partners, said he "has never seen a promotion like this before."

In fact, Air Canada had a similar promotion in 2007, where it offered an unlimited flight pass starting at $1,657 per month.

Still, with JetBlue flights already slashed as low as $100, customers might have to fly 6 or 7 times in a month before they break even.

67 US soldiers in Iraq have swine flu.

From Army Times:

The number of American troops in Iraq diagnosed with swine flu has climbed to 67, making U.S. soldiers the largest group in the country to come down with the potentially deadly virus, Iraqi health officials said Wednesday.

The figures were released by the Iraqi health ministry as it detailed steps being taken to control the spread of the virus, which last week claimed its first fatality in the southern holy city of Najaf. A 21-year-old Iraqi woman, who had visited the city’s Shiite shrines, later died of the disease.

The health ministry has also confirmed that 23 Iraqis and six other foreigners have been diagnosed with the virus. Their nationalities were not disclosed.

All the U.S. troops had either been treated or were undergoing treatment, said Dr. Amer al-Khuzai, the deputy health minister. There have been no fatalities among American forces, he said.

The fabric of space-time is rough, grainy.

From New Scientist:

On the night of 30 June 2005, the sky high above La Palma in Spain's Canary Islands crackled with streaks of blue light too faint for humans to see. Atop the Roque de los Muchachos, the highest point of the island, though, a powerful magic eye was waiting and watching.

MAGIC - the Major Atmospheric Gamma-ray Imaging Cherenkov Telescope - scans the sky each night for high-energy photons from the distant cosmos. Most nights, nothing remarkable comes. But every now and again, a brief flash of energetic light bears witness to the violent convulsions of a faraway galaxy.

What MAGIC saw on that balmy June night came like a bolt from the blue. That is because something truly astounding may have been encoded in that fleeting Atlantic glow: evidence that the fabric of space-time is not silky smooth as Einstein and many others have presumed, but rough, turbulent and fundamentally grainy stuff.

It is an audacious claim that, if verified, would put us squarely on the road to a quantum theory of gravity and on towards the long-elusive "theory of everything".

Ship disappears after sailing through English Channel.

Ghost ship! From HuffPo:

First the ship reported it had been attacked in waters off Sweden. Then it sailed with no apparent problems through one of the world's busiest shipping lanes. And then it disappeared. The Arctic Sea, a Maltese-flagged cargo ship, was supposed to make port in Algeria with its cargo of timber on Aug. 4. More than a week later, there's no sign of the ship or its Russian crew.

Piracy has exploded off the coast of lawless Somalia – but could this be an almost unheard of case of sea banditry in European waters?

"If this is a criminal act, it appears to be following a new business model," Marine intelligence expert Graeme Gibbon-Brooks told Sky News on Wednesday.

Russian President Dmitry Medvedev ordered the country's defense minister on Wednesday to take "all necessary measures" to find the missing cargo ship and, if necessary, to free its crew, the Kremlin said. Wives and other relatives of the crew members issued an appeal to the Russian government to carry out a full-scale rescue mission, using all of Russia's special services.

Woman who loved to feed bears eaten by one.

From NY Daily News:

A 74-year-old woman who was known for leaving food outside her home for bears — despite several warnings that it was illegal and dangerous to do so — was killed by one of the animals, an autopsy confirmed.

Donna Munson's body had been partially eaten by a bear or bears when it was found outside her home in Ouray County, in southwestern Colorado, on Friday, but Colorado Division of Wildlife officials couldn't immediately confirm what caused her death.

County Sheriff Dominic Mattivi said Monday that an autopsy, performed in neighboring Montrose County, showed Munson had scratches and maul marks consistent with being attacked by a bear. She had no signs of heart damage, ruling out the possibility that she died of a heart attack before being attacked, Mattivi said.

State wildlife officers had received "numerous" complaints during the past decade that Munson was feeding bears. But she never was ticketed, partly because wooded hills around her property made it hard to gather evidence to prove it, said division spokesman Tyler Baskfield.

Orwell Nation: Britain has 1 surveillance camera for every 14 people.

From Daily Mail:

Britain has one and a half times as many surveillance cameras as communist China, despite having a fraction of its population, shocking figures revealed yesterday.

There are 4.2million closed circuit TV cameras here, one per every 14 people.

But in police state China, which has a population of 1.3billion, there are just 2.75million cameras, the equivalent of one for every 472,000 of its citizens.

Simon Davies from pressure group Privacy International said the astonishing statistic highlighted Britain's 'worrying obsession' with surveillance.

'Britain has established itself as the model state that the Chinese authorities would love to have,' he said.

'As far as surveillance goes, Britain has created the blueprint for the 21st century non-democratic regime.

'It was not intended but it has certainly been the consequence.'

It is estimated that Britain has 20 per cent of cameras globally and that each person in the country is caught on camera an average of 300 times daily.

Chicago judge sentences man to 6 months for YAWNING.

This judge sounds out of control. From Chicago Tribune:

Clifton Williams arrived at the Will County Courthouse in Joliet and sat in the fourth-floor courtroom where his cousin was pleading guilty to a felony drug charge.

As Circuit Judge Daniel Rozak handed down the cousin's sentence -- 2 years' probation -- Williams, 33, stretched and let out a very ill-timed yawn.

Williams' sentence? Six months in jail -- the maximum penalty for criminal contempt without a jury trial. The Richton Park man was locked up July 23 and will serve at least 21 days.

"I was flabbergasted because I didn't realize a judge could do that," said Williams' father, Clifton Williams Sr. "It seems to me like a yawn is an involuntary action."

Chuck Pelkie, a spokesman for the state's attorney's office, said the prosecutor in the courtroom that day told him that "it was not a simple yawn -- it was a loud and boisterous attempt to disrupt the proceedings."

Jason Mayfield, the cousin of Williams who was pleading guilty at the time, said it was "not an outrageous yawn."

A Tribune review of a decade's worth of contempt-of-court charges reveals that Rozak jails people -- typically spectators whose cell phones go off or who scream or shout profanity during sentencing -- at a far higher rate than any other judge in the county. There are now 30 judges in the 12th Judicial Circuit, but since 1999, Rozak has brought more than a third of all the contempt charges, records show.

And while it is not uncommon for judges to jail people for ignoring subpoenas or court orders or appearing in court drunk or under the influence of drugs, Rozak's charges tend to involve behavior that would not otherwise be criminal.

ZombieWatch: Man opens coffin to find baby is ALIVE.

From Ananova:

A grieving Paraguayan man opened his baby son's coffin - and discovered he was still alive.

Jose Alvarenga was told by doctors at a hospital in Asuncion that his son had been pronounced dead shortly after birth.

Hospital orderlies delivered the premature baby's body, which had been placed in a temporary coffin, to Mr Alvarenga's home fours hours later.

Shortly afterwards, the grieving father opened the coffin to bid an emotional farewell to the infant, reports the Daily Telegraph.

"I opened it to look at his remains and found that the baby was breathing," Mr Alvarenga said. "I began to cry."

He rushed back to the hospital with his unnamed son in his arms and nurses placed the infant in an oxygen chamber.

Doctors seemed hopeful that tragedy would not strike again, describing the boy's condition as "stable".

Husband jumps in river to escape wife's nagging.

From Ananova:

A Chinese lorry driver jumped into a fast-flowing river because he couldn't take his wife's nagging anymore.

Zhou and his wife were on a ferry on the Yangtze River when it all became too much for him, reports the Chongqing Evening Post.

Members of the ship's crew saw the man suddenly run out of his cabin with his hands covering his ears, and shouting: "I can't stand it any longer."

They initially thought he was suffering from an ear injury and went to help him but found he was unhurt.

"While we were still puzzling over the this, his wife ran up and continued nagging him," said one crewmate.

"The husband covered his ears again and said: 'I need a break' before jumping over the side into the rushing river.

"We immediately found lamps to light up the water but found nobody. The possibility of survival can be zero."

However, later that night, police found the man who had managed to swim more than a mile across across the broad river.

"I felt I was dying, but even that's better than my wife's nagging," he reportedly told the police.

Coozer-Bits.

Eats: 267-pound matzoh ball breaks world record.

D'oh: $20,000 in taxpayer money spent prosecuting man who stole a 25-cent banana (and he's found not guilty).

TV: Why neocons love Jon Stewart.

Eats: Sugar price reaches 28-year high.

Duh: Worst criminals in Russia are actually the police.

Lame: Millionaire hockey player arrested after row over 20 cents.

World: Taliban now winning the war in Afghanistan.

Scientists untangle causes of bee colony collapse disorder.

A little old, but just saw it. Thanks Jen!

A microscopic pathogen and pesticides embedded in old honeycombs are two major contributors to the bee disease known as colony collapse disorder, which has wiped out thousands of beehives throughout the United States and Europe over the past three years, new research at Washington State University has confirmed.

Working on the project funded in part by regional beekeepers and WSU's Agricultural Research Center, entomology professor Steve Sheppard and his team have narrowed the list of potential causes for colony collapse disorder.

"One of the first things we looked at was the pesticide levels in the wax of older honeycombs," Sheppard said. Using combs contributed by U.S. Department of Agriculture, Sheppard found "fairly high levels of pesticide residue."

Bees raised in those hives "had significantly reduced longevity," he said.

One easy solution is for beekeepers to change honeycombs more often. In Europe, for example, apiarists change combs every three years.

"In the U.S., we haven't emphasized this practice and there's no real consensus about how often beekeepers should make the change," said Sheppard. "Now we know that it needs to be more often."

More here.

Dogs as smart as 2-year-olds.

From LiveScience:

The canine IQ test results are in: Even the average dog has the mental abilities of a 2-year-old child.

The finding is based on a language development test, revealing average dogs can learn 165 words (similar to a 2-year-old child), including signals and gestures, and dogs in the top 20 percent in intelligence can learn 250 words.

And the smartest?

Border collies, poodles, and German shepherds, in that order, says Stanley Coren, a canine expert and professor emeritus at the University of British Columbia. Those breeds have been created recently compared with other dog breeds and may be smarter in part because we've trained and bred them to be so, Coren said. The dogs at the top of the pack are on par with a 2.5-year-old.

While dogs ranked with the 2-year-olds in language, they would trump a 3- or 4-year-old in basic arithmetic, Coren found. In terms of social smarts, our drooling furballs fare even better.

"The social life of dogs is much more complex, much more like human teenagers at that stage, interested in who is moving up in the pack and who is sleeping with who and that sort of thing," Coren told LiveScience.

Vegetarian outrage as supermarket sells old meat for energy.

This is pretty nasty. From Daily Mail:

Tesco is sending 5,000 tons of leftover meat a year to be burned to generate electricity for homes, it emerged yesterday.

The supermarket disposes of enough meat that has passed its sell-by date to power 600 homes for a year through the National Grid.

Other major supermarkets plan to follow suit. But animal rights campaigners yesterday said many homeowners would be 'horrified' to learn that their electricity was generated by the 'macabre' recycling scheme.

Tesco has hailed the scheme as part of a 'green' drive which had enabled it to stop sending any of the waste it produces to environmentally damaging landfill sites.

But the campaigners said the environmental benefits were far outweighed by the greenhouse gases produced by all the extra animals unnecessarily reared for slaughter in the first place.

Blackwater boss accused of murder and weapons smuggling in crusade against Muslims.

Maybe this is why our government shouldn't employ mercenaries, let alone one run by a fundamentalist whackjob. From Daily Mail:

The boss of security company Blackwater, which is being investigated for shooting deaths in Iraq, has been accused of a series of crimes including murder and weapons smuggling.

Accusations in sworn affidavits lodged at a Virginia court state founder Erik Prince either murdered or had killed former employees co-operating with federal investigators.

The company, which was recently renamed XE, was the most prominent of an army of private security companies employed by the Pentagon and State Department to protect military convoys and guard U.S. diplomats in Iraq.

The claims against Mr Prince are being made by two former employees including a former Marine.

In the court papers, lodged on Monday night, the employees have sworn themselves anonymously as John Doe No 1 and John Doe No 2, saying they feared for their lives if their identities were revealed.

In one of the statements, John Doe 2, who worked for Blackwater for four years, alleged that Mr Prince 'views himself as a Christian crusader tasked with eliminating Muslims and the Islamic faith from the globe,' The Times newspaper reported.

He further claimed that Mr Prince's companies 'encouraged and rewarded the destruction of Iraqi life'.

He added: 'He sought every opportunity to deploy men to Iraq in order to earn more money from the United States government.'

Japanese pop star arrested for stealing pachinko balls.

Marble madness! From Breitbart:

A 26-year-old man who was once a would-be pop star has been arrested along with three co-workers on suspicion of stealing pachinko balls from a pachinko parlor where they work in Kasukabe, Saitama Prefecture, police said Wednesday.

The four, including Kazuki Matsumoto who belonged to entertainment agency Johnny & Associates that has famous pop music groups like SMAP under its wings, are suspected of removing equipment that counts the number of balls from pachinko machines and stealing around 3,300 pachinko balls on the night of Dec. 25 last year.

[...] The police said the four, who have admitted to the charges, divided the proceeds worth about 8,000 yen after cashing the balls. The four were quoted as saying by the police that they did it "on a routine basis."

Creationism theme park to be seized.

Oh no! How will children learn now that dinosaurs were created by Satan a few hundred years ago?? From PNJ.com:

A federal judge has cleared the way for the government's seizure of a creationism theme park in Pensacola owned by a couple convicted of tax fraud.

A ruling by U.S. District Judge Casey Rodgers states that the nine properties that make up Dinosaur Adventure Land as well as two bank accounts associated with the park will be used to satisfy $430,400 owed to the federal government.

Kent Hovind, who founded the park and a ministry, Creation Science Evangelism, is serving 10 years in federal prison for failing to pay the Internal Revenue Service more than $470,000 in employee taxes.

He was found guilty in November 2006 on 58 counts, including failure to pay employee taxes and making threats against investigators.

The conviction culminated 17 years of Hovind sparring with the IRS. Saying he was employed by God and his ministers were not subject to payroll taxes, he claimed no income or property.

Crocodile walks down airplane aisle.

From Gadling (thanks Jen!):

What would you do if you saw an crocodile walking down an airplane aisle? Perhaps you'd rub your eyes, shake your head to clear any cobwebs, clean your glasses-- if you wore them and ask, "Is that a crocodile?"

Wouldn't a crocodile be about the last thing you'd expect to see walking down an airplane aisle? Particularly if it were pushing the drink cart? Just kidding about the drink cart, but there was a crocodile.

The crocodile created an uproar on an EgyptAir flight last Friday when it was seen peppering its trip down the aisle with forays underneath the seats. The flight, on its way to Cairo from Abu Dhabi, was not the most relaxing ride for the thirty passengers who did what they could to avoid the reptilian stowaway.

I say stowaway because no one claimed responsibility for the crocodile's presence on board. Maybe the crocodile was looking for a free ride to the Giza Zoo. That's where it ended up once the crew caught it and the plane landed.

Mister Softee vendor beats up Haagen Dazs vendor.

Midtown Lunch has got the scoop!

Just because so much has been written about street vendors verbally threatening other street vendors doesn’t mean that people should get the impression that it never gets physical. In fact earlier today two ice cream vendors got into a fist fight over the corner of 6th Ave and 50th Street. The cops were already on scene when I walked up, and an ambulance showed up shortly thereafter (although it looked like only one vendor was hurt, and it was just a black eye.) I’m not sure exactly what happened because both the Police sergeant and the vendors pretty much refused to talk to me- but it looked like the vendors were given the opportunity to press charges and both get arrested, or make up with each other and just receive tickets. It looked to me like they both chose citations (natch), and the ice cream truck left pretty soon thereafter.

As contentious as you normally hear the relationship is between cops and vendors, this interaction looked pretty civil. I guess the cops mind less when the vendors are beating up each other.

Obama delivers birthday cupcakes, sings happy birthday to Helen Thomas.

From Raw Story:

On his own 48th birthday, US President Barack Obama Tuesday turned the spotlight on a reporter also celebrating her special day, who pitched up at the White House in the year he was born.

Obama sang “Happy Birthday” and presented Helen Thomas, the doyenne of the White House press corps, with cupcakes and a single candle to celebrate her 89th birthday, before planting a kiss on her cheek.

The outspoken Thomas, who has covered every president since John F. Kennedy, spoke quietly to Obama, who ignored reporters’ shouted questions about his own birthday and ex-president Bill Clinton’s mercy mission to North Korea.

“Helen wished for world peace, (and) no prejudice, but she and I also had a common birthday wish,” Obama said.

“She said she wishes for a healthcare reform bill,” Obama said, referring to his signature domestic reform legislation, working its tortuous way through Congress.

Bill Clinton did it!!!

North Korea freed the US journalists!!! Yay Bill! Breaking at CNN:

North Korean President Kim Jong Il has pardoned and ordered the release of two U.S. journalists, state-run news agency KCNA said Wednesday.

The announcement came after former U.S. President Bill Clinton met with top North Korean officials in Pyongyang to appeal for the release of Laura Ling and Euna Lee, who had been arrested while reporting from the border between North Korea and China.

"Clinton expressed words of sincere apology to Kim Jong Il for the hostile acts committed by the two American journalists against the DPRK after illegally intruding into it," the news agency reported. "Clinton courteously conveyed to Kim Jong Il an earnest request of the U.S. government to leniently pardon them and send them back home from a humanitarian point of view.

"The meetings had candid and in-depth discussions on the pending issues between the DPRK and the U.S. in a sincere atmosphere and reached a consensus of views on seeking a negotiated settlement of them."

The report said Clinton then conveyed a message from President Obama "expressing profound thanks for this and reflecting views on ways of improving the relations between the two countries."

It added, "The measure taken to release the American journalists is a manifestation of the DPRK's humanitarian and peace-loving policy.

"The DPRK visit of Clinton and his party will contribute to deepening the understanding between the DPRK and the U.S. and building the bilateral confidence."

DPRK is the Democratic People's Republic of Korea, the nation's official name.

The two American journalists had been held in the reclusive communist nation since their arrest in March.

Earlier in the day, White House Secretary Robert Gibbs said Clinton was on a "solely private mission to secure the release of two Americans."

Ling and Lee are reporters for California-based Current TV -- a media venture launched by Clinton's former vice president, Al Gore.

The two were sentenced in June to 12 years in prison on charges of entering the country illegally to conduct a smear campaign. Since the United States has no diplomatic relations with North Korea, efforts to resolve the issue had been handled through Sweden, which represents U.S. interests in North Korea.

Revolting "Dr. Who-like" tentacle monster washes up in Wales.

Some of the pics truly creeped me out. From Daily Mail:

A mysterious 'alien like' creature horrified holidaymakers after it washed up on a beach on the Gower Peninsula in Wales.

The writhing mass of tentacles, which measured 3ft from end to end, was described by a zoology expert today as 'like something out of Doctor Who'.

Hundreds of people flocked to Oxwich Beach near Swansea to catch a glimpse of the monster.

But fears of a UFO invasion were put to rest as scientists revealed it was a seething mass of goose barnacles that was swept up from the depths of the ocean by bad weather.The barnacles - long writhing stalks or pendulates, tipped with shells - are normally found deep below the waves, but were washed up clinging to a log.

Professor Paul Brain, of Swansea University, said: 'One child screamed out that it resembled something from Dr Who and I would have to agree with her - it made very bizarre viewing.

'In fact they were probably the biggest specimens of free-floating goose barnacles I've seen.

'The log is about two metres long and as thick as a telegraph pole so I wouldn't be surprised if there were a couple of thousand barnacles on there.'

Holidaymaker Rebecca Porter said the log was like 'a large living sea monster'.

She said: 'The stalk on which the puffin-shaped head sat on was soft and rubbery and moved like a snake.

'They appeared to be attached to a piece of driftwood but it could hardly be seen as it was densely covered with these huge tentacles that opened and closed, thrusting out fronds like uncurling ferns.'

Punch a Monopoly player, go directly to jail, do not pass Go.

From Lowering the Bar:

Police in Fraser, Michigan, reported that a 54-year-old man assaulted a female friend with whom he was playing Monopoly on Saturday night. Police appeared to believe that the woman's offense, refusing to sell the man Park Place and Boardwalk, did not justify being punched in the face.

The angry Monopoly player, who probably had also gotten stuck using the thimble, was arrested and charged with misdemeanor assault and battery.

This is the most serious board-game-related assault of which I'm aware since the 2007 incident involving a fatal dispute over a game of Yahtzee.

Cambodia cancels Miss Landmine beauty pageant.

From BBC:

A beauty pageant for landmine victims has been cancelled by the Cambodian government, which branded it an insult to disabled people.

Authorities said the contest, due to launch on Friday, would damage "the dignity and honour" of participants.

Twenty women were to have competed for the title of Miss Landmine and the prize of a high-tech prosthetic limb.

Norwegian organiser Morten Traavik expressed disappointment, but said the contest would go ahead on the internet.

He said the result would be announced on 31 December. The website shows photos of the contestants, with missing limbs, wearing crowns and dresses. They are aged from 18 to 48.

Between four and six million landmines are thought to have been laid in Cambodia during its three decades of civil war.

ZombieWatch: Decapitated boy returns to car racing.

Hmm, maybe you shouldn't let a 12-year-old race cars. From Ananova:

A teenager who was 'decapitated' in a junior car race crash has amazed doctors by returning to the track.

Chris Stewart, 14, looked odds-on to die after his skull and neck were separated, reports The Sun.

Only six people in the world are known to have survived the injury - and Chris is the first to make a full recovery.

He underwent a seven-hour op to reattach his skull to his spine using titanium plates and screws.

Mum Debbie, 43, said: "We didn't know if he'd even survive, walk or talk. So it's unbelievable he's back driving again."

Chris was 12 when his car hit a barrier, trapping him, as he led the race in September 2006.

Paramedics steadied his head, a one millimetre movement either way could have killed him, and took him to Southampton General Hospital.

Doctors told Debbie and fiancé Paul Cornell, 50, that Chris had only a seven per cent chance of survival and the op was his only hope.

Nine months later he was walking - after learning to speak and eat. And doctors cleared him to drive earlier this year.

Debbie has outlawed car racing, but allows go-karting as it's "more controlled". Chris is now a regular at a track near his home in Fareham, Hampshire.

Coozer-Bits.

Aww: Swan takes babies under wing for trip across pond.

D'oh: Catholic bank owned shares in birth control pill companies.

Yipes: Scorned women superglue cheating husband's member.

ZombieWatch: Amusement park workers sent to Zombie Boot Camp (with video).

Duh: Video gamers hooked for life.

Dorky: 5 snacks that are shaped like the universe.

Unauthorized Subway franchise moonlighted as strip club.

Talk about ordering the footlong! From NY Post:

A notorious sleaze merchant could be on the hook for nearly $100,000 after opening an unauthorized Subway sandwich shop that doubled as an after-dark strip club.

A federal magistrate has recommended slamming Anthony "Cousin Vinny" Agnello with triple damages for serving up deli delights by day and nudes at night, according to a report filed Tuesday.

Magistrate Frank Maas said Agnello -- who gained infamy after supplying the stripper for a wild high-school party in 2001 -- should pay the fast-food giant's corporate parent $90,000, plus another $7,900 for its legal fees.

Doctor's Associates Inc., which operates Subway, estimated Agnello took in about $23,000 in profits from the eatery last year.

Agnello -- who last year told The Post he started slinging sandwiches because "the money in stripping isn't as profitable as it used to be" -- did not return calls.

34 hospitalized because of a coworker's strong perfume.

From the Houston Chronicle:

FORT WORTH, Texas — At first, fire officials suspected that carbon monoxide or some other poisonous fumes might have sickened almost 150 people at a Fort Worth bank call center.

What they learned was they were fallen by perfume.

MedStar ambulance spokeswoman Lara Kohl says 34 people were taken to hospitals, 12 by ambulance, after reporting dizziness and shortness of breath at the Bank of America call center. She says another 110 were treated at the scene and released.

Fort Worth fire Lt. Kent Worley says hazardous material specialists checked for carbon monoxide or other hazardous fumes, but found nothing.

A worker told a fire investigator that two co-workers became ill after someone sprayed on perfume. When a supervisor announced on the office intercom that those feeling ill should leave, dozens did — including some from other floors.

Fried ants now in lemon or barbecue flavor.

From Colombia Reports:

East Colombia's delicacy, hormigas culonas, almost literally translated as big ass ants, made a gastronomic evolutionary leap after two businessmen decided to market them not just regularly friend, but with lemon and spicy barbecue flavor.

The ants are traditionally eaten in the Santander department, bordering Venezuela. The insects are huge, hence the 'big ass ants' nickname and usually are eaten deep fried.

Two locals came up with the idea to spice the ants and put them in a little colorful box, so they can be eaten as snacks and not only fresh from the frying pan.

The inventors of the flavored insects are now working on cheese-flavored and chocolate-flavored ants and hope to be allowed to export the new delicacy so other parts of the world can enjoy the Santander department's culinary novelty.

Jobless graduate sues college for $70K tuition.

From Breitbart:

A New York City woman who says she can't find a job is suing the college where she earned a bachelor's degree.

Trina Thompson filed a lawsuit last week against Monroe College in Bronx Supreme Court, The New York Post reports. The 27-year-old is seeking the $70,000 she spent on tuition. Thompson says she's been unable to find gainful employment since she received her information technology degree in April.

She says the Bronx school's Office of Career Advancement hasn't provided her with the leads and career advice it promises.

Monroe College spokesman Gary Axelbank says Thompson's lawsuit is completely without merit.

The college insists it helps its graduates find jobs.

Journalist hunts for acid-spitting Mongolian death worm.

From News.com.au:

Armed with explosives, two men are heading to Mongolia's desert to find the fabled acid-spitting and lightning-throwing Mongolian death worm.

The worm- allegedly found in the country's Gobi Desert- has never been documented but locals strongly believe it exists.

The worm- about 1.5m long- apparently jumps out of the sand and kills people by spitting concentrated acid or shooting lightning from its rectum over long distances.

New Zealand resident and journalist David Farrier will spend two weeks trying to verify the worm's existence.

He and cameraman Christie Douglas will make a documentary about their adventure.