Coozer-Bits.

NY Times: Russia gives $1B to Venezuela for military.

LiveScience: Prehistoric giant goose skull found. (AFLAC!)

Newsday: Johnny Depp on board to do another painfully confusing Pirates movie.

Daily News: Jury in fourth day of deliberations in case of man who beat a cat to death. Cmon, people.

Raw Story: Rice admits that Bush administration officials ok'd torture.

MIT: MIT solves 100-year-old fluid mechanics problem.

Woman killed helping injured dog lying in road.

Sad... From the Daily Mail:

Tributes have been paid to a woman killed by a passing car after trying to save an injured dog lying in the road.

Emma Cragen, 21, tried to rescue the helpless dog after the car she was a passenger in ran over it.

Holding back tears, her friend Darren Witty, who drove into the animal, described what happened...

Palin syrah getting boost from Sarah Palin.

Almost as amusing as John McCain sharing his name with a Toasters drummer who looks like Obama. From Breitbart:

Democrats watching the presidential campaign may find it hard to swallow a glass of the syrah Palin.

The organic red wine, pronounced "pay-LEEN sih-rah," comes from a small winery in northern Chile.

According to distributor North Berkeley Imports' Web site, the vintner's name "describes a ball that was used in an ancient game played by the Mapuche, a group of people indigenous to central Chile."

But that hasn't stopped some drinkers from making the political connection to Republican vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin.

"They would just basically say, 'Oh, I don't want to drink that. That's too close,'" said Chris Cavelli, co-owner of the Yield Wine Bar in San Francisco. "It reminds them too much of Sarah Palin."

He said the wine, which his bar sells by the glass, was a good seller there until Palin was nominated for the Republican ticket. Cavelli plans to keep it on the list.

"I think it's pretty funny," he said.

Man crosses English Channel with awesome jet pack.

The BBC reports that the cool Swiss dude with the jet pack successfully crossed the Channel. I gotta get me one of those!!

A Swiss man has become the first person to fly solo across the English Channel using a single jet-propelled wing.

Yves Rossy landed safely after the 22-mile (35.4 km) flight from Calais to Dover, which had been twice postponed this week because of bad weather.

The former military pilot took less than 10 minutes to complete the crossing and parachute to the ground.

The 49-year-old flew on a plane to more than 8,200ft (2,500m), ignited jets on a wing on his back, and jumped out.

Mr Rossy had hoped to reach speeds of 125mph.

It felt "great, really great", said Mr Rossy: "I only have one word, thank you, to all the people who did it with me."

Brazilian man racks up $1.9m in speeding fines.

Daaaamnn. From BBC:

Police in Brazil have finally caught up with a serial speeder who owed $1.9m (£1m) in traffic fines.

Sao Paolo police who pulled over Armando Clemente da Silva were shocked to discover he had clocked up nearly 1,000 violations, local media report.

Mr da Silva had accumulated the fines for speeding and running red lights over a seven-year period.

The driver, 36, said he had not received any penalty tickets because he had been too busy to register his car.

Churches to defy IRS by endorsing candidates.

People think this issue is about religion - it's not. It's about nonprofit tax law. NO nonprofit can endorse a political candidate or intervene in a political campaign without risking its tax-exempt status. The reason is to avoid having public funds, which are supposed to go toward charitable activities and which are tax-deductible for the donors, go toward helping politicians.

Anyway, these people are lame for making it a religion issue.

Office emails are filled with DECEPTION AND LIES!

From LiveScience:

A pair of new studies indicates email in the workplace is more deceptive than old-fashioned writing, and that people feel quite justified in their distortions.

"There is a growing concern in the workplace over email communications, and it comes down to trust," said Liuba Belkin, co-author of the studies and an assistant professor of management at Lehigh University in Pennsylvania. "You're not afforded the luxury of seeing nonverbal and behavioral cues over email. And in an organizational context, that leaves a lot of room for misinterpretation and, as we saw in our study, intentional deception."

Poland to impose chemical castration on sex offenders.

I'm gonna lose liberal points, but I totally agree with this. Though I'd prefer they use surgical castration instead.

Poland is to become the first country in the European Union to force convicted paedophiles to undergo chemical castration.

Judges will get the power to order the procedure under a law being rushed through the country's parliament next month in the wake of an incest case that has horrified the nation.

[...] The legislation will make chemical castration a ' necessary medical procedure' if a sex criminal is thought to pose a risk to others.

It will allow offenders to be held down while drugs that take away their sexual urges are administered.

European civil liberties groups have condemned the move, saying it violates fundamental human rights.

But Polish prime minister Donald Tusk soared in popularity in the opinion polls after he announced the proposal.

He said: 'I don't think you can call such individuals - such creatures - human beings. Therefore, I don't think you can talk about human rights in such a case.'

Bush refused to support Israeli strike on Iran.

From the Jerusalem Post:

The US refused to give Israel a green light for an attack on Iran's nuclear facilities when Jerusalem requested Washington's support for such a move this past spring, The Guardian reported Thursday night.

According to the report, Prime Minister Ehud Olmert raised the issue in a meeting with US President George W. Bush in May, when Bush was visiting Israel for its 60th anniversary celebrations.

Bush, senior European diplomatic officials told the paper, responded that he would not support a strike on Iran, and added that his position was unlikely to change as long as he is in office.

Bush's position was apparently the result of two factors, the sources said: the first was US concern over Iranian retaliation, which would likely include attacks on US targets in Iraq and Afghanistan as well as on trade routes in the Persian Gulf; the second was US fears that Israel could not disable Iran's nuclear facilities in a single strike, while ongoing strikes could bring on a full-scale war.

Trailer: Repo! The Genetic Opera.

This is a sci-fi, graphic novel-based rock opera about a repo man who takes back donated organs and body parts. You know, like The Sound of Music but with live organ transplants.

Trailer here.

I like wacky and I like campy, but I have to admit this looks bad. Like, Jesus Christ Vampire Hunter meets Moulin Rouge bad.

Master switch that "balances the brain" found.

This is huge. It could have major effect on studies into epilepsy, schizophrenia, autism, being a Yankees fan, you name it. From Science Daily:

Neuroscientists at Children's Hospital Boston have identified the first known "master switch" in brain cells to orchestrate the formation and maintenance of inhibitory synapses, essential for proper brain function. The factor, called Npas4, regulates more than 200 genes that act in various ways to calm down over-excited cells, restoring a balance that is thought to go askew in some neurologic disorders.

Synapses, the connections between brain cells, can be excitatory or inhibitory in nature. At birth, the rapidly developing brain teems with excitatory synapses, which tend to make nerve cells "fire" and stimulate their neighbors. But if the excitation isn't eventually balanced, it can lead to epilepsy, and diseases like autism and schizophrenia have been associated with an imbalance of excitation and inhibition. The creation of inhibitory connections is also necessary to launch critical periods -- windows of rapid learning during early childhood and adolescence, when the brain is very "plastic" and able to rewire itself.

Npas4 is a transcription factor, a switch that activates or represses other genes. The researchers, led by Michael Greenberg, PhD, director of the Neurobiology Program at Children's, demonstrated that the activity of as many as 270 genes changes when Npas4 activity is blocked in a cell, and that Npas4 activation is associated with an increased number of inhibitory synapses on the cell's surface.

Trend Spotting: Neck tattoos.

NY Times reports that neck tattoos are in! I'm getting a skull on my neck! Woooo!!

In a mysterious and inexorable process that seems to transform all that is low culture into something high, permanent ink markings began creeping toward the traditional no-go zones for all kinds of people, past collar and cuffs, those twin lines of clothed demarcation that even now some tattoo artists are reluctant to cross.

Not entirely surprisingly, facial piercing followed suit.

Suddenly it is not just retro punks and hard-core rappers who look as if they’ve tossed over any intention of ever working a straight job.

Anyway, after the author stops being a dick, he talks about neck tattoos.

Woman fined $222K by RIAA to get new trial.

Ha! Suck it, RIAA!! From Computer World:

A federal judge in Minnesota yesterday ordered a new trial in a copyright infringement case involving a woman who last fall was told by a jury to pay $222,000 to various record companies for illegally copying and distributing 24 songs.

In doing so, U.S. District Judge Michael Davis also rejected a key argument used by the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) in the Minnesota case and numerous others — namely, that the mere act of making music available for download in a shared computer folder constitutes illegal distribution.

Davis' ruling is being seen as a setback for the RIAA's controversial campaign against music piracy, especially since he is now the third federal judge to have flatly rejected the trade group's "making available" argument. What isn't clear, though, is the extent to which his ruling will actually benefit the defendant in this particular case.

Phillie Phanatic causes bomb scare with hot dog.

They do say that most terrorists are phanatics. From the Houston Chronicle:

PHILADELPHIA — After a bomb scare at the Philadelphia Phillies' ballpark, authorities pointed the finger at a fuzzy green suspect — The Phillie Phanatic.

Hours before the Phillies-Atlanta Braves' game on Wednesday night, a film crew shot a commercial of the mascot shooting heavily wrapped hot dogs from a launcher.

But someone inadvertently left three of the duct taped hot dogs outside the ballpark, sparking security fears. Stadium employees were evacuated and the bomb squad was called in.

Only after the packages were blown up did authorities realize they'd just exploded some sausages.

"We saw something that looked suspicious," said Michael Stiles, Phillies senior vice president, administration and operations. "We did the right thing. It turned out to be nothing. We could have gone over and picked it up and thrown it in the trash and been done with it. But if we had been wrong, somebody might have lost an arm."

After the detonation, the game went on as scheduled.

"I'd rather them blow up some hot dogs or some ketchup and mustard and relish than have it be a real bomb," reliever Chad Durbin said. "Better safe than sorry."

17 Air Force officers disciplined for... something.

I read this three times and can't figure out what happened. Did they accidentally send missiles to Taiwan? Or did they not send enough missile parts to Taiwan? Weapon trade is so weird. Article here.

Coozer-Bits.

Yahoo! Canada: Wife steals winning lotto ticket before divorce.

Yahoo! Canada: Go to Greece and wear a skirt, it's your fault for being raped.

Yahoo! Canada: "Canadian-themed" pizza place huge in Berlin. Even though Canada isn't known for their pizza. Even in Canada.

Sports Illustrated: Brazilian soccer player tortured, slain.

NY Post: Okay, non-news items about Palin is getting out of hand...

New Scientist: Smart take on the banking crisis.

Coozer Files: My wife just stepped in cat poop. No link, just hilarity.

NY1: 13-year-old NYC student poisons teacher.

Universe Today: Ancient groundwater flows found on Mars.

Washington Post: Palin interview with Couric filled with gaffes, awkwardness (hey, it's not THAT non-news!).

Ananova: Cannabis smoker fined for tobacco.

News.com.au: It takes 9 years to remove N-word from sports ground.

Daily Mail: Oldest place on Earth discovered in Canada. (No, it's not a Tim Horton's.)

Columbia University: Brain regions responsible for warding off negative emotion identified.

Republican offers $1,000 for black women to tie their tubes.

And he's also offering $ to rich families (read: white) to have MORE kids. Is he thinking up creative ways to combat "generational welfare", as the article suggests, or is he just a sick race warrior? From ABC News.

As Hurricane Gustav loomed off the coast of Louisiana, thousands of impoverished people flocked into shelters, where some of them seemed unprepared to take care of their young children's basic needs, forgetting to bring along diapers or medicine.

That heartbreaking scenario inspired Louisiana Republican State Rep. John LaBruzzo to start thinking about ways to stem generational welfare, in which many welfare recipients have children who also end up dependent on government assistance, according to the representative.

His idea -- giving $1,000 to poor women to undergo reproductive sterilization by Fallopian tube ligation -- is stirring up controversy among some medical professionals, who say that the proposal is offensive and smacks of long-discredited eugenics programs.

LaBruzzo has also suggested other controversial ideas: paying poor men to get vasectomies and giving tax incentives for college-educated wealthy couples to have more children.

Obama airing more negative ads, but McCain is more maliciously untruthful.

Advertising experts on this year's political ads. Interesting stuff.

Seventy-seven percent of Obama's ads the week after the Republican Convention were negative, compared to McCain's 56 percent, according to a recent study by the University of Wisconsin, cited the moderator, USA Today Washington bureau chief Susan Page, at a Pulse of America discussion.

And the attack ads are damaging both candidates in the eyes of the public.

"Both of these campaigns have diminished whatever their message might be," said Republic consultant and strategist Ed Rollins, who was political director for Ronald Reagan in 1984, and this year served as campaign manager for Mike Huckabee.

Reviewing McCain's controversial commercial telling voters that Barack Obama supported sex education for kindergarten kids, the panelists agreed that the ad was a misstep.

"Obama is being pretty negative in some of his ads, but the overall impression is that McCain is playing fast and loose with the truth," said Democratic consultant and strategist Bob Shrum, who worked on the failed presidential bids of Al Gore and John Kerry. "The biggest effect of the McCain advertising right now has been sullying the McCain brand. And as anyone in this room knows, if your ad is hurting your brand, it doesn't matter what else you are getting out of it."

Despite challenges from the press, the McCain campaign has continued to take a sensational approach in its ads, Rollins said. "It has damaged McCain. You can say negative things about your opponents as long as they are truthful, but it's a fine line."

Obama's ads have also been negative, but such efforts -- like the spot depicting McCain as out of step and computer illiterate -- were driven by strategy, said Shrum, while McCain relies on "tactics and misdirection. Whatever has occurred to them at a given moment becomes an instant ad."

Ed McMahon bustin' caps in yo cranium, son.

From CNN:

Ed McMahon has an unexpected new job title: rapper.

The 85-year-old former "Tonight Show" sidekick will star in two viral rap videos for FreeCreditReport.com, a financial Web site owned by credit bureau Experian.

The videos feature McMahon wearing a tracksuit, being chauffeured around Los Angeles in a Cadillac Escalade golf cart and waxing lyrical about his very public financial troubles.

"I knew I could sing the blues, but I didn't know I could rap," McMahon said Wednesday.

The videos will appear online in October.

Nursing home employee drugged patients to death.

This is awful. From the Chicago Tribune:

An employee of a McHenry County nursing home at the center of an investigation into suspicious deaths mixed drug cocktails to make sure that troublesome residents "would not be bothering her during her shift," according to a state report.

The 130-page report of an investigation by the Illinois Department of Public Health says that improper use of drugs such as morphine sulfate contributed to five suspicious deaths in 2006 at the facility in Woodstock, then called the Woodstock Residence.

A supervisor allegedly told a nurse, "I do not care if you play the angel of death, just don't let me know about it," the report says.

"She won't make it through the day," the report says the nurse told a co-worker, referring to a restless patient. "I made sure of that."

Stupid fratboys cause crash with milk vomit.

From Breitbart:

TEMPE, Ariz. (AP) - Police say members of an Arizona State University fraternity vomited milk from a campus bridge and caused a car crash that injured two people.

Tempe police Sgt. Steve Carbajal says the prank caused a woman in one car to stop in the road Monday night. Another car smashed into it from behind.

He says the woman and her 6-year-old daughter suffered only minor injuries.

University police say they are investigating the alleged prank.

Doctors mock you with acronyms.

This is an eye-opening article. To think my family doctor has been jotting down insulting notes about me and my blubber! Hopefully it's just a British thing.

The inventive language created by doctors the world over to insult their patients - or each other - is in danger of becoming extinct.

So says a doctor who has spent four years charting more than 200 colourful examples.

[...] The increasing rate of litigation means that there is a far higher chance that doctors will be asked in court to explain the exact meaning of NFN (Normal for Norfolk), FLK (Funny looking kid) or GROLIES (Guardian Reader Of Low Intelligence in Ethnic Skirt).

Dr Fox recounts the tale of one doctor who had scribbled TTFO - an expletive expression roughly translated as "Told To Go Away" - on a patient's notes.

[...] From LOBNH (Lights On But Nobody Home), CNS-QNS (Central Nervous System - Quantity Not Sufficient), to the delightful term "pumpkin positive", which refers to the implication that a penlight shone into the patient's mouth would encounter a brain so small that the whole head would light up.

Regular visitors to A&E on a Friday or Saturday night are also classified.

DBI refers to "Dirt Bag Index", and multiplies the number of tattoos with the number of missing teeth to give an estimate of the number of days since the patient last bathed.

Snubbed again!!

The MacArthur Foundation just announced their new round of MacArthur Genius Grants, and guess who they forgot? Adam Coozer, that's who! Here's a list of the dopes who are supposedly smarter and better than me.

Man farts on cop, gets charged with assaulting an officer.

Thanks Larissa for the heads up! From WSAZ:

SOUTH CHARLESTON, W.Va. -- As if getting a DUI wasn’t bad enough, a man arrested for driving under the influence got in a lot more trouble at the police station.

Police stopped Jose Cruz on Route 60 in South Charleston Monday night for driving with his headlights off.

Then, he failed sobriety tests and was arrested.

When police were trying to get fingerprints, police say Cruz moved closer to the officer and passed gas on him. The investigating officer remarked in the criminal complaint that the odor was very strong.

Cruz is now charged with battery on a police officer, as well as DUI and obstruction.

Mozilla fixes Firefox 3.0.

I hope these patches work because Firefox 3.0 is the most disappointing thing to hit my computer since Zork II.

From Computer World:

Mozilla Corp. late Tuesday patched 11 vulnerabilities in Firefox 3.0, more than half of them labeled "critical," and fixed 14 flaws in the older Firefox 2.0.

Firefox 3.0.2 quashes six critical bugs, four marked "high" and one pegged as "low" in Mozilla's four-step threat ranking system. Among the most serious were four stability bugs in the browser's graphics rendering, layout and JavaScript engines that can crash the program and might be exploitable with malicious code.

"Some of these crashes showed evidence of memory corruption under certain circumstances and we presume that with enough effort at least some of these could be exploited to run arbitrary code," said Mozilla in the accompanying advisory.

Mozilla also updated the older Firefox to 2.0.0.17, patching all but one of the bugs fixed in 3.0.2, but also addressing several issues specific to the aging browser.

Naked man in Dunkin Donuts pleads guilty.

What an ingenious way to carry around donuts if your hands are full!

From the it's-okay-to-torture-cats NY Post:

A man who took his pants off before going out for doughnuts at a shop just north of New York City has pleaded guilty to public lewdness.

John Greco admits he exposed his genitals in February while placing an order at a Dunkin Donuts drive-through in Yorktown.

What else can $700 billion buy?

While bankrupting American taxpayers to help out greedy jerks on Wall Street may seem like a good idea, it's helpful to think about what $700 billion actually means.

Some tidbits from around the Web for your perspective:

For $100 billion you can get Universal Health Care for all people in the U.S. without health insurance.

For $35 billion you can get universal preschool. Half-days for 3-year-olds and full days for 4-year-olds.

For $10 Billion you can carry out all the security recommendations issued by the 9/11 commission.

For those of you in Boston, $700 billion can also buy 40 Big Digs and 14 million years' worth of tuition, room, and board at Harvard.

Also:

$700 billion is nine times the amount spent on education in 2007.

It is $140 billion more than has been spent on the Iraq war since the invasion.

It can buy free broadband access for every American for the next 200 years.

It can give 23 million Americans a free college education.

Titanic, the highest-grossing film of all time, raked in $1.8 billion.

$700 billion is equal to 17 Bill Gateses.

The Marshall Plan, which bailed out all of Western Europe after World War II, cost $13 billion (about $100 billion in today's dollars).

(Sources: CJR, BuzzMachine, Slate, Consumerist, Boston Globe)

E-mail mocks Wall Street bailout as Nigerian scam.

Saw this on Raw Story. Pretty funny.

Dear American:

I need to ask you to support an urgent secret business relationship with a transfer of funds of great magnitude.

I am Ministry of the Treasury of the Republic of America. My country has had crisis that has caused the need for large transfer of funds of 800 billion dollars US. If you would assist me in this transfer, it would be most profitable to you.

I am working with Mr. Phil Gram, lobbyist for UBS, who will be my replacement as Ministry of the Treasury in January. As a Senator, you may know him as the leader of the American banking deregulation movement in the 1990s. This transactin is 100% safe.

This is a matter of great urgency. We need a blank check. We need the funds as quickly as possible. We cannot directly transfer these funds in the names of our close friends because we are constantly under surveillance. My family lawyer advised me that I should look for a reliable and trustworthy person who will act as a next of kin so the funds can be transferred.

Please reply with all of your bank account, IRA and college fund account numbers and those of your children and grandchildren to wallstreetbailout@treasury.gov so that we may transfer your commission for this transaction. After I receive that information, I will respond with detailed information about safeguards that will be used to protect the funds.

Yours Faithfully Minister of Treasury Paulson

Google Maps now features NYC public transit directions.

I still prefer HopStop, but Google Maps' transit directions includes subway arrival times and service disruption advisories. Neither of which are very accurate in NYC, but still a neat feature.

Knut's "dad" passes away suddenly.

Jesus, it's one heart-wrenching polar bear story after another. From Yahoo! News:

Hundreds of Germans flocked to the Berlin zoo on Tuesday to mourn the sudden death of the popular zookeeper who raised celebrity polar bear Knut.

[...] Doerflein, who shot to fame as Knut's surrogate father after the tiny cub's mother Tosca rejected him at birth, was found dead in his Berlin apartment near the zoo on Monday.

The 44-year old zookeeper with a thick black beard won the admiration of many in Germany and abroad when he stayed with the polar bear around the clock for 150 straight days, handfeeding the cub milk and porridge through the nights.

A modest man who had worked in the Berlin Zoo for about 28 years, Doerflein said he had received love letters and propositions from female fans after he became Knut's "dad."

"I wrote a letter to express my grief," said crying teenager Jennifer Hennig, standing by a collection of cards and flowers near the enclosure where Knut, now a burly grown bear, paced around.

"I didn't know Thomas personally, but he became somewhat of a friend to me. It hurts when you lose a friend," Hennig said.

Polar bears resort to cannibalism as Arctic ice shrinks.

Holy shit, this is sad. God, we humans suck. From CNN:

"The Arctic sea ice melt is a disaster for the polar bears," according to Kassie Siegel, staff attorney for the Center for Biological Diversity. "They are dependent on the Arctic sea ice for all of their essential behaviors, and as the ice melts and global warming transforms the Arctic, polar bears are starving, drowning, even resorting to cannibalism because they don't have access to their usual food sources."

Scientists have noticed increasing reports of starving Arctic polar bears attacking and feeding on one another in recent years. In one documented 2004 incident in northern Alaska, a male bear broke into a female's den and killed her.

In May, the U.S. Department of Interior listed the polar bear as a "threatened" species under the Endangered Species Act. In a news release, U.S. Interior Secretary Dirk Kempthorne stated, "loss of sea ice threatens and will likely continue to threaten polar bear habitat. This loss of habitat puts polar bears at risk of becoming endangered in the foreseeable future, the standard established by the ESA for designating a threatened species."

What is the future for Arctic sea ice? Some scientists believe that in just five years, the Arctic may be ice-free during the summer.

"The Arctic is kind of the early warning system of the climate," Meier said. "It is the canary in the coal mine, and the canary is definitely in trouble."

Original trekkie beamed up.

Thanks Rhea for the tip! From the NY Times:

For the “Star Trek” faithful, it was a historic event. Gene Roddenberry, the creator of the series, showed up. So did the science fiction writer Isaac Asimov, not to mention fans dressed as Klingons, Tribbles and Bele from the planet Ceron. NASA delivered a scaled-down lunar module and a spacesuit.

It was January 1972, and the first Star Trek convention was under way in a rented ballroom at the Statler Hilton in Manhattan. The organizers had expected a crowd of about 500. In the end, more than 3,000 fans turned up, so many that by the final day of the event registrars were issuing ID cards made from torn scraps of wrapping paper. For fans of the series, the convention marked the moment when a diaspora became a nation.

And it made a subculture celebrity of Joan Winston, who played a leading role in creating the event and went on to achieve a second-order fame as one of world’s most avid “Star Trek” fans. She died of Alzheimer’s disease on Sept. 11 at age 77, her cousin Steven Rosenfeld said. She lived in Manhattan.

15 train robbers killed by poison gas.

Train robbers can be pretty cool. These guys weren't.

GUWAHATI, India (Reuters) - At least 15 Indian train robbers looking to steal diesel from a freight carriage died Saturday after inhaling poison gas stored in another tank they accidentally broke open, police said.

A police patrol party said they found 30 other people lying unconscious on both sides of a forested train track in India's Assam state.

"We found many empty drums which they must have brought with them to fill with oil," a local police officer said by phone.

The train was earlier stopped by dozens of armed people who police believe were members of a gang which frequently steals crude oil from trains and pipelines carrying oil to refineries in the oil-rich state.

Robot Uprising Watch: Robot wheelchair finds its own way.

And have these smarty pants MIT researchers thought about when the robot wheelchair stops wanting to follow orders and starts wanting to zoom around on its own volition?? Good job, MIT. Way to put our most vulnerable in harm's way.

MIT researchers are developing a new kind of autonomous wheelchair that can learn all about the locations in a given building, and then take its occupant to a given place in response to a verbal command.

Just by saying "take me to the cafeteria" or "go to my room," the wheelchair user would be able to avoid the need for controlling every twist and turn of the route and could simply sit back and relax as the chair moves from one place to another based on a map stored in its memory.

"It's a system that can learn and adapt to the user," says Nicholas Roy, assistant professor of aeronautics and astronautics and co-developer of the wheelchair. "People have different preferences and different ways of referring" to places and objects, he says, and the aim is to have each wheelchair personalized for its user and the user's environment.

Unlike other attempts to program wheelchairs or other mobile devices, which rely on an intensive process of manually capturing a detailed map of a building, the MIT system can learn about its environment in much the same way as a person would: By being taken around once on a guided tour, with important places identified along the way. For example, as the wheelchair is pushed around a nursing home for the first time, the patient or a caregiver would say: "this is my room" or "here we are in the foyer" or "nurse's station."

Britons spend 14 years of life watching TV.

This story is only sad because I've seen British television.

BEIJING, Sept. 20 -- Britons spend 14 years of their life in front of the TV and don't care that much what they are watching, according to a survey released on Friday.

Research for Virgin Media found that 29 percent of Brits spend 20 hours a week watching TV with 71 percent saying they find themselves viewing programs for the sake of it.

The survey also concluded that 13 percent of people could not bear to miss their favorite show.

In total, that means spending 14 years watching TV based on an average lifetime of 78 years.

And if people aren't watching the box then they are talking about it.

According to the research, based on a survey of 2,052 people, 52 percent of those quizzed said the previous night's TV offerings formed the basis of conversation. "We don't realize how much we watch affects us ... so it's rather worrying that 71 percent of us watch stuff for the sake of it," said psychologist Honey Langcaster-James.

Frankly, for a society whose stores close at 5 and bars close at 10, I don't blame them.

ZombieWatch: Formula discovered for longer plant life.

According to the Max Planck Society, molecular biologists have discovered how to make plants grow faster and live longer. Sounds great and all... until we eat the fruit of such plants and becoming the LIVING DEAD!

Plants that grow more slowly stay fresh longer. In their study now published in PLoS Biology, scientists at the Max Planck Institute for Developmental Biology in Tübingen have shown that certain small sections of genes, so-called microRNAs, coordinate growth and aging processes in plants. These microRNAs inhibit certain regulators, known as TCP transcription factors. These transcription factors in turn influence the production of jasmonic acid, a plant hormone. The higher the number of microRNAs present, the lower the number of transcription factors that are active, and the smaller the amount of jasmonic acid, which is produced by the plant. The plant therefore ages more slowly, as this hormone is important for the plant’s aging processes. The researchers have succeeded for the first time in describing the antagonistic regulation of growth and aging in plants. Since the quantity of microRNAs in the plants can be controlled by genetic methods, it may be possible in future to cultivate plants that live longer and grow faster.

Coozer Prophesy: Melting permafrost to kill us all with methane.

Melting permafrost is releasing millions of tons of methane that's 20 times more damaging than carbon dioxide. From The Independent:

The first evidence that millions of tons of a greenhouse gas 20 times more potent than carbon dioxide is being released into the atmosphere from beneath the Arctic seabed has been discovered by scientists.

The Independent has been passed details of preliminary findings suggesting that massive deposits of sub-sea methane are bubbling to the surface as the Arctic region becomes warmer and its ice retreats.

Underground stores of methane are important because scientists believe their sudden release has in the past been responsible for rapid increases in global temperatures, dramatic changes to the climate, and even the mass extinction of species. Scientists aboard a research ship that has sailed the entire length of Russia's northern coast have discovered intense concentrations of methane – sometimes at up to 100 times background levels – over several areas covering thousands of square miles of the Siberian continental shelf.

Coozer-Bits.

Science Round-Up!

LiveScience: Chimps prefer cooked food.

NASA: Scientists detect "cosmic dark flow" in universe. I'm thinking it's Wall Street greed.

EurekAlert: Half a bar of dark chocolate a week lowers heart attack risk.

New Scientist: Oceans are getting louder and, as a result, more acidic.

New Scientist: Melamine "widespread" in China's food chain.

Science Daily: Culture shapes young people's drinking habits.

US abortion rate at 30-year low.

Coincidentally, my sex life is in a 30-year low. Hmm...

From US News:

Abortions in the United States fell 33 percent between 1974 and 2004, but sizeable differences among racial and economic groups continue to exist as to who gets an abortion, a new report says.

While the number of abortions among teens has also dropped dramatically, down 50 percent, abortion rates are still high among older women with children and poor women, according to the report from the Guttmacher Institute.

"There's been a shift in the population of women obtaining abortions relative to 30 years ago," said Rachel Jones, a senior research associate at the institute. "They are older, they are more likely to be unmarried, more likely to be mothers, and they are more likely to be women of color."

Man in Phantom of the Opera mask goes on stabbing spree.

This is precisely why I hate musical theater. From the Daily Mail:

A knife attacker wearing a 'Phantom of the Opera' mask stabbed a woman to death and injured another before slitting his own throat, it has been revealed.

The two victims were working at a language school when the assailant stormed in yesterday evening.

A 23-year-old Asian woman died after being knifed in the chest and neck. Her partially clothed body was found at the scene by police who arrived moments after the attack. The second woman was taken to hospital but was later discharged.

The attacker, aged 29, is believed to have turned the knife on himself in an attempted suicide bid. Police said today his condition was stable and officers were waiting to interview him.

Gooey cheese leads to scuffle, arrest.

I like that his name is Lust. Only men named Lust would fight so brutally for liquid cheese. From the Chicago Sun-Times:

Charging an extra $3 to pour cheese topping into a bag of Fritos recently led to a scuffle at a Tinley Park gas station.

At about 6:16 a.m. Friday, Darryl Lust Jr., 25, 15145 S. Honore Ave., Harvey, was waiting in line at Speedway, 7201 W. 183rd St., to buy a can of ice tea and bag of Fritos oozing with cheese.

When the manager told him he'd have to pay a few more bucks for the topping, Lust wouldn't say whether he was willing to foot the extra cash, according to a police report. The manager then threw Lust's creation in the garbage.

That's when Lust knocked over the can of ice tea toward the manager, who came around the counter toward Lust to calm him down, police said.

The manager told police Lust pushed him to the ground and got on top of him. Another man at Speedway subdued Lust by using the wrestling move called a half Nelson until police arrived.

Man steals dead animals, stuffs them in high school lockers.

Prankster or serial killer in the making? From Breitbart:

DUBLIN, Calif. (AP) - Police have arrested a 20-year-old man on suspicion of stealing dead animals from a veterinary hospital morgue and stuffing them into empty lockers at a Bay Area high school.

Police say the man admitted that he took the bodies of two cats and a 25-pound dog from an unlocked freezer behind the VetCare Hospital in Dublin. He said he then put the dead animals in lockers at Dublin High School before classes started Aug. 25.

The man told police he thought it was a practical joke.

The man was arrested at his Pleasanton home Friday afternoon arrested on suspicion of grand theft, tampering with school property and improper disposal of animals.

ZombieWatch: Scientists discover method to revive preserved cells.

This is how it begins. Czech scientists try to clone animals that are going extinct and we end up raising the dead. How could we have been so stupid?! Czech this out:

Czech scientists have discovered in cooperation with their Italian colleagues the new method of cell preservation that allows to revive the cells whenever it is necessary, the daily Mlada fronta Dnes said on Friday.

The researchers from Prague and Sardinia are the first in the world to have managed to discover the frost drying method of cells which can be revived later. They have used the method in the cloning of sheep embryos, the daily said.

The discovery enables to establish a databank of dried cells of endangered animal species that could serve for their cloning in the future, the paper said, adding that the discovery can help save endangered animals and even the recently extinct species of animals.

Good bacteria or bad genes? Two breakthroughs in Type 1 diabetes.

Two recent, promising studies. In one, scientists have found that "good" bacteria prevents juvenile diabetes in mice. Article:

In a dramatic illustration of the potential for microbes to prevent disease, researchers at Yale University and the University of Chicago showed that mice exposed to common stomach bacteria were protected against the development of Type I diabetes.

The findings, reported in the journal Nature, support the so-called "hygiene hypothesis" – the theory that a lack of exposure to parasites, bacteria and viruses in the developed world may lead to increased risk of diseases like allergies, asthma, and other disorders of the immune system. The results also suggest that exposure to some forms of bacteria might actually help prevent onset of Type I diabetes, an autoimmune disease in which the patient's immune system launches an attack on cells in the pancreas that produce insulin.

In a completely different study, scientists have made a breakthrough on the genetic side:

New research from Stanford University scientists suggests that type 1 diabetes, an autoimmune disease that develops in children and young adults, may not be due to bad genes but rather to good genes behaving badly.

Because type 1 diabetes typically runs in families, scientists have looked for inborn genetic errors or gene variants passed on from generation to generation. Although this search has failed to find a single type 1 diabetes gene, many candidate type 1 diabetes susceptibility genes have been identified. These susceptibility genes, located in a region known as the major histocompatibility complex (MHC), help the body distinguish its own cells and tissues from those that are foreign.

[...] According to Dr. Fathman, the results suggest that type 1 diabetes may not result from genetic mutations but from differences in how normal genes and gene variants are turned on and off during disease progression. In addition to identifying altered genes that may indicate potential avenues for therapeutic or preventive treatments, the authors also found patterns of coordinated gene expression that may prove useful as biomarkers of disease onset or progression.

Chinese prez pressures Bush to bail out economy.

I'd love to have been a fly on the wall during this conversation. Awwkwwaaard.

BEIJING, Sept. 22 (Xinhua) -- Chinese President Hu Jintao and his U.S. counterpart George W. Bush discussed bilateral relations and the financial upheavals in the United States in a phone conversation on Monday morning Beijing time.

Bush congratulated Hu on China's successful hosting of the Beijing Olympic and Paralympic Games and thanked China for its hospitality toward him when he was in Beijing to attend the Olympics. Hu appreciated the U.S. government and people's support for the Games.

Bush briefed Hu on the latest development of the U.S. financial market, saying his government was well aware of the scope of the problem, and had taken and would continue to take necessary measures to stabilize the domestic and world financial markets.

Hu hoped the measures would soon take effect and lead to a gradual recovery of the financial market, which he said not only serves the interests of the United States, but also those of China, and benefits the stability of the world financial market and the sound development of the world economy.

Road rage woman burned to death after setting own car on fire.

Kind of ironic that she was driving a Vauxhall Nova. From Mail Online:

A road rage woman driver was burned to death after ramming another vehicle and setting her own car on fire by furiously revving her engine until sparks flew from the wheels, it emerged today.

Serena Sutton-Smith, 54, had deliberately driven into the back of Paula Small's stationary car and then refused to get out of her Vauxhall Nova as she sat with her foot down on the accelerator.

One of her front tyres disintegrated and then the wheel dug into the tarmac, causing sparks which ignited the brake fluid in her engine and set the vehicle alight.

Wedding Crashers: Wedding party smashes into wall by church.

From the Mail Online:

It was a wedding to remember... for all the wrong reasons.

The driver of the white limousine, carrying the bridegroom Brian Ashton, his mother and the best man, lost control of the car just yards from the church after the brakes failed and ploughed into a van and a brick wall.

The crash caused the groom's mother to have a heart attack and left Mr Ashton, 47, in agony with back and leg injuries.

That anti-pot ad was right!

Check out this article. Not to be flip about someone's personal tragedy, but this sounds exactly like that dopey tv ad that tried to scare us away from marijuana.

The shotgun death of a 16-year-old South Side boy appears to have been accidental, the product of foolish play, authorities said this morning. A 16-year-old companion has been charged with involuntary manslaughter.

About 2:30 a.m. Sunday, 16-year-old Arthur Tyler and two companions were playing with a shotgun in the 6300 block of South Seeley Avenue in the West Englewood neighborhood when it discharged, striking Tyler in the neck, police said.

[...] According to the boy who was charged and his friend, the three were smoking marijuana prior to the shooting, police said. It's unclear where they got the gun.

Goldilocks burglar: Man breaks in, eats cheese, falls asleep.

Craziest part of the story? Dude looks like Frank Zappa!

BILLINGS, Mont. - A man is charged with burglary after someone broke into a home here, ate cheese from the refrigerator, made a mess in a bathroom and fell asleep on a child's bed.

[...] The woman said she found a strange man sleeping in her son's bed. She woke her husband and left to call police from a neighbor's house. The husband confronted the man with an unloaded shotgun and held him until police arrived.

Our sun may have been a galactic hitchhiker.

From LiveScience:

Astronomers have long believed that most stars are homebodies which stick close to their birthplaces. But a new simulation supports the suggestion that our sun might have once hitchhiked through the galaxy.

Where our sun or another star ends up migrating seems to depend on its position in a spinning spiral galaxy. Stars tagging along behind a massive spiral arm can get a gravitational speed boost that sends them into a bigger orbit around the galactic center. The stars leading in front of a spiral arm may end up getting slowed by the arm's gravitational pull and fall back into a smaller orbit.

Superpower no more.

I liked this satirical but blunt op-ed in the LA Times. Here's the first half:

Dear United States, Welcome to the Third World!

It's not every day that a superpower makes a bid to transform itself into a Third World nation, and we here at the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund want to be among the first to welcome you to the community of states in desperate need of international economic assistance. As you spiral into a catastrophic financial meltdown, we are delighted to respond to your Treasury Department's request that we undertake a joint stability assessment of your financial sector. In these turbulent times, we can provide services ranging from subsidized loans to expert advisors willing to perform an emergency overhaul of your entire government.

As you know, some outside intervention in your economy is overdue. Last week -- even before Wall Street's latest collapse -- 13 former finance ministers convened at the University of Virginia and agreed that you must fix your "broken financial system." Australia's Peter Costello noted that lately you've been "exporting instability" in world markets, and Yashwant Sinha, former finance minister of India, concluded, "The time has come. The U.S. should accept some monitoring by the IMF."

We hope you won't feel embarrassed as we assess the stability of your economy and suggest needed changes. Remember, many other countries have been in your shoes. We've bailed out the economies of Argentina, Brazil, Indonesia and South Korea. But whether our work is in Sudan, Bangladesh or now the United States, our experts are committed to intervening in national economies with care and sensitivity.

We thus want to acknowledge the progress you have made in your evolution from economic superpower to economic basket case. Normally, such a process might take 100 years or more. With your oscillation between free-market extremism and nationalization of private companies, however, you have successfully achieved, in a few short years, many of the key hallmarks of Third World economies.

Your policies of irresponsible government deregulation in critical sectors allowed you to rapidly develop an energy crisis, a housing crisis, a credit crisis and a financial market crisis, all at once, and accompanied (and partly caused) by impressive levels of corruption and speculation. Meanwhile, those of your political leaders charged with oversight were either napping or in bed with corporate lobbyists.

Nonprofit sector suffering because of Wall Street meltdown.

Things were already bad with individuals' donations being down. Now the sector that relies on corporate philanthropy is going to collapse. From the Boston Globe:

Wall Street was the epicenter of the brutal financial earthquake last week following Lehman's filing for bankruptcy protection, Bank of America Corp.'s move to acquire Merrill, and the government's bailout of AIG and takeover of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. But shockwaves are being felt far outside the corporate world to nonprofits that have grown accustomed to major support from commercial banks and investment firms. While smaller charities are struggling with immediate funding issues, those with endowments are certain to take a big hit with their investment portfolios. In Massachusetts, the financial services industry serves as the largest and most significant giver, according to the Boston Foundation, and the fallout could not have come at a worse time.

Even before last week, many of the nation's largest companies expected their donations to remain flat or decrease. The Chronicle of Philanthropy reported last month that of the 77 businesses that offered predictions for how much they would donate in 2008, 50 said their giving would remain the same as last year, including local stalwarts Staples, CVS, and Raytheon.

Busted: New Microsoft ads made with Macs.

From Computer World:

Several digital images that Microsoft Corp. has posted on its Web site to trumpet its new "I'm a PC" advertising campaign were actually created on Macs, according to the files' originating-software stamp.

Four of the images that Microsoft made available on its PressPass site today display the designation "Adobe Photoshop C3 Macintosh" when their file properties are examined. The images appear to be frames from the television ads that Microsoft will launch later today.

My milkshake brings all the boys to the yard... and kills them.

The Consumerist brings to our attention the lethal Heath Shake from Baskin Robbins. It has 2,300 calories, 108 grams of fat, and over 3 times your recommended daily intake of saturated fat. It also has an ingredients list that reads like a blueprint for a diabetes time bomb. Frightening.

Pennies dropped from skyscrapers won't kill you.

Strangely, I'm disappointed by this news. Some myths should never be busted. From ABC News:

Many visitors outside of the famous skyscraper we spoke to had heard all about killer pennies. "Anybody who gets hit by that penny is about to die, 'cause that's a long way for a penny to fall," said one young man. "It could actually go through someone's skull," said another.

[...] We thought so too, so we asked University of Virginia physics professor Louis Bloomfield about it. "They're thinking of a world without air ... but air resistance is a big deal for little things. It slows down leaves, it slows down raindrops and it slows down pennies," he said.

"The penny is heavier [than a raindrop] but it flutters as it comes down. It's very unstable in the air."

Bloomfield has heard about the myth so often he tackles it in his latest book, "How Everything Works."

"Pennies, they're not aerodynamically stable ... they catch a lot of wind ... basically they're safe," he said.

Smells affect dreams.

This may explain why my wife has terrible dreams the nights I eat dairy. From New Scientist:

Stuck's team waited until their subjects had entered the REM phase of sleep, the stage at which most dreams occur, and then exposed them to a high dose of smelly air for 10 seconds before waking them up one minute later. The volunteers were then quizzed about the content of their dreams and asked how it made them feel.

All subjects reported a positive dream experience when stimulated by the rose smell, and most experienced the opposite when exposed to the rotten eggs. Stuck says the smells influence the "emotional colouration" of the dream.

The team are now looking to recruit people who suffer from nightmares to see if exposure to smells can help make their dreams more pleasant.

Trend Spotting: Train-surfing hits Australia.

Kids today love the train-surfing! Fresh air, quick transportation, and a myriad ways to die: the impact of falling, being run over and crushed, electrocution by the rails, you name it! From Australia's Sunday Mail:

The most dramatic scene is when a youth waits for disembarking passengers to leave the platform before jumping on to the back of a train just as it departs the station.

He crouches down and holds on to a thin piece of metal on the back of the train before turning and raising his finger to the cameraman.

The train then speeds out of the station with the youth clinging on for his life.

[...] Fatalities in recent times have been linked to train-surfing – a teen on the North Coast line last year fell from the outside of a moving train, and a 20-year-old was found atop a Victorian train, possibly electrocuted.

The DVD, is by a group called the "AEROHOLiCS" and they boast a sequel will be posted online soon. "We'll be back," they say.

Coozer Prophesy: Superbugs caused by antibiotics will kill us all.

This article blames human consumption of antibiotics for the alarming increase in resistance and mutations of deadly bacteria. But let's also not forget all the antibiotics that are pumped into our food supply, which then finds its way into our sewers, water, and environment.

World Faces Global Pandemic of Antibiotic Resistance, Experts Warn

A concerted global response is needed to address rising rates of bacterial resistance caused by the use and abuse of antibiotics or "we will return to the pre-antibiotic era", write Professor Otto Cars and colleagues in an editorial.

All antibiotic use "uses up" some of the effectiveness of that antibiotic, diminishing the ability to use it in the future, write the authors, and antibiotics can no longer be considered as a renewable source.

They point out that existing antibiotics are losing their effect at an alarming pace, while the development of new antibiotics is declining. More than a dozen new classes of antibiotics were developed between 1930 and 1970, but only two new classes have been developed since then.

According to the European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control, the most important disease threat in Europe is from micro-organisms that have become resistant to antibiotics. As far back as 2000, the World Health Organisation was calling for a massive effort to address the problem of antimicrobial resistance to prevent the "health catastrophe of tomorrow".

Bush admin backed UN general despite human rights abuses.

This article is really worth reading. It made my head spin.

The Bush administration's support for the appointment of a Rwandan general to a top U.N. peacekeeping job in Sudan last year came despite a warning from the State Department human rights bureau that there was "credible evidence" linking the officer to human rights abuses in Rwanda in the 1990s, according to internal U.S. government documents.

The U.S. decision to back Maj. Gen. Emmanuel Karake Karenzi as the deputy force commander of the joint U.N.-African Union mission in the Darfur region of Sudan may have violated a provision of a 1997 U.S. law known as the Leahy Amendment, according to two State Department bureaus that opposed Karenzi's appointment. The law requires the State Department to vet the human rights records of foreign military units receiving U.S. assistance.

Karenzi's nomination last year opened a deep rift within the administration between officials who argued that a tainted record on human rights should disqualify him and those who feared offending the Rwandan government, which has threatened to pull its forces from peacekeeping operations in Darfur.

But the U.S. assistant secretary of state for African affairs, Jendayi E. Frazer, short-circuited the debate, assuring African Union officials in a Sept. 7, 2007, meeting that a U.S. inquiry had found no evidence of Karenzi's role in atrocities and proposing that he receive the job, according to a U.S. cable describing the meeting. Four days later, the United Nations approved Karenzi for the post.

In February, a Spanish judge charged Karenzi and 39 other Rwandan officials with the mass killings of Rwandan civilians and of several Spanish and Canadian missionaries and relief workers. Nevertheless, the United States, Britain and Rwanda have urged U.N. Secretary General Ban Ki-moon to renew Karenzi's contract when it expires next month, according to U.S. and U.N. officials.

North American fish in danger of extinction.

From New Scientist:

NORTH America's freshwater fish are in trouble - and we should have seen it coming.

A report commissioned by the American Fisheries Society has warned that the number of North American freshwater species in danger of extinction in at least part of their range has nearly doubled since 1989. As well as this, 33 per cent of fish have seen their conservation status grow more dire, while only 6 per cent have seen an improvement.

Interestingly, this isn't because of overfishing (though that's a major problem with the saltwater fish populations):

Habitat loss due to humanity's growing thirst for water is the root cause of the problem, says Noel Burkhead from the US Geological Survey in Gainesville, Florida, and one of the report's lead authors.

Coozer-Bits.

Live Science: Scientists predict the next president.

New Scientist: Explosion from edge of the universe detected.

NY Times: Cheney ordered to preserve records.

Health News Digest: Is even milk NOT from China poisonous to humans?

WikiNews: Bill O'Reilly rants against hackers. Hackers retaliate by hacking into his webpage and releasing info of his subscribers.

FemPac: Feminist Majority backs Obama.

Boston Globe: Ancient Jewish capital discovered.

BBC: We've been granted two more months to live.

BBC: George Michael arrested in a bathroom again.

BBC: More on McCain thinking that Spain is in Latin America.

ABC News: Evangelist ministry raided in child porn case.

Science Daily: Buckyballs continue to be weird.

Science Daily: Hundreds of new species discovered on Australian reef.