Israel's wealthiest woman claims to see the future.

From a skeptical Washington Post:

[...] But the biggest jolt comes from the woman in the executive chair: Arison -- billionaire ($2.7 by Forbes's most recent estimate), perhaps the richest woman in the Middle East, a major force in Israeli philanthropy -- claims that she can see the future.

This is much bigger than a parlor trick. In her new book published this summer in Israel, the 51-year-old Miami native says she felt the Indonesian tsunami sweeping over the land two months before it happened and sensed Hurricane Katrina pummeling New Orleans. In an interview, Arison says she also "saw the writing on the wall" before the global economic crash. Reading about Arison's extrasensory perception makes you ache for a heads-up, maybe a blog entry or a tweet or a phone call to Brownie or Greenspan or somebody who might have helped.

Arison explains that she has finally dropped the fear that has held her back from doing more about what she has perceived. Armed with the insight gained through work with Florida-based psychiatrist Brian Weiss, a proponent of regression therapy and the exploration of (take your pick) deep memories or past lives, she says she is ready to go public with her visions and bring together her spiritual and business goals.

Coolio gives performance at deli for free food.

Big deal, I'd sing to a crowd for a seven-layer burrito and a can of Bud. From Exclaim News, and thanks to Dan F.:

Oh how the mighty have fallen. Take, for example, rapper Coolio, who once sat perched upon the top of the world with hits like “Gangsta’s Paradise” and “Fantastic Voyage” but is now enjoying the life of a C-list celeb. Earlier this year, he was arrested for possession of crack cocaine and a crack pipe, and if that wasn’t bad enough, it’s been revealed that Coolio recently performed at a deli, who paid him partially in chicken.

According to a report from TimesCall [via The Daily Swarm], Coolio recently performed at a restaurant called the Deli Zone in Longmont, CO.

As Deli Zone owner Jeremy King explains, his hope was that the rapper would help turn his restaurant into a reputable venue. “My hope is that Coolio is going to give us some recognition,” said Jeremy King. “I’m hoping to get a cool reputation as a cool place to come see music.”

What made it even better for the restaurant, however, was Coolio’s meagre demands. Allegedly, Coolio only asked for “$3,000, a bucket of chicken and a bottle of Patrón (he likes the Silver variety).” Maybe he does weddings too!

Cellphones cause brain tumors, says new report.

Telecom is the new tobacco. Article here, and download the report here (PDF).

A new report, "Cellphones and Brain Tumors: 15 Reasons for Concern, Science, Spin and the Truth Behind Interphone," was released today by a collaborative of international EMF activists. Groups affiliated with the report include Powerwatch and the Radiation Research Trust in the U.K., and in the U.S., EMR Policy Institute, ElectromagenticHealth.org and The Peoples Initiative Foundation.

The exposé discusses research on cellphones and brain tumors and concludes:

- There is a risk of brain tumors from cellphone use;
- Telecom funded studies underestimate the risk of brain tumors, and;
- Children have larger risks than adults for brain tumors.

This report, sent to government leaders and media today, details eleven design flaws of the 13-country, Telecom-funded Interphone study. The Interphone study, begun in 1999, was intended to determine the risks of brain tumors, but its full publication has been held up for years. Components of this study published to date reveal what the authors call a 'systemic-skew', greatly underestimating brain tumor risk.

The design flaws include categorizing subjects who used portable phones (which emit the same microwave radiation as cellphones,) as 'unexposed'; exclusion of many types of brain tumors; exclusion of people who had died, or were too ill to be interviewed, as a consequence of their brain tumor; and exclusion of children and young adults, who are more vulnerable.

Disney to buy Marvel.

This is of course awful, except for a possible Iron Man vs. Wall-E match-up. From CNN:

The Walt Disney Co. announced Monday that it has agreed to purchase comic book and action hero company Marvel Entertainment for about $4 billion.

The deal pairs a comic book publisher that just recently began to produce its own movies with one of the largest international media companies in the world.

"This is perfect from a strategic perspective," Disney Chief Executive Robert Iger told CNNMoney.com. "This treasure trove of over 5,000 characters offers Disney the ability to do what we do best."

On a conference call with investors, Iger said the deal will allow Disney to sell Marvel's vast array of characters and properties across different media platforms and in many more markets. For instance, Iger said that Disney's Pixar animation unit was excited about the opportunities that a Marvel acquisition could yield.

"Spider-Man will appear in 'A Bug's Life' sequel," joked Barclays Capital analyst Anthony DiClemente.

The deal would give Disney some content that appeals more to boys, a market it has been looking to develop, Iger said. Disney XD, a television station and video game unit, already had a deal with Marvel to use some of the comic book company's action heroes in its content.

"Disney is the perfect home for Marvel's fantastic library of characters given its proven ability to expand content creation and licensing businesses," said Marvel Chief Executive Ike Perlmutter. "This is an unparalleled opportunity for Marvel to build upon its vibrant brand and character properties by accessing Disney's tremendous global organization and infrastructure around the world."

Club goer beats self up, blames bouncer.

From NY Post:

A Queens man claimed a bouncer bloodied him when he got tossed from a strip club -- but a surveillance camera there told a different tale.

Khuram Murtaza, 34, called cops after he was tossed out of the Rouge Gentleman's Club, on 58th Street near 55th Avenue, shortly before 1 a.m. Tuesday.

When cops arrived at the Maspeth club, his face was bloody and bruised and he claimed the bouncer had beaten him, sources said.

The bouncer, however, claimed he didn't hit the man and provided proof from the club's surveillance video, the sources said.

Cops viewed the video and it clearly showed Murtaza smashing his face against a car, cutting his own nose, according to court papers.

Murtaza was charged with falsely reporting an incident, said a spokeswoman for Queens DA Richard Brown.

If blood is red, why are veins blue?

I always wondered this, even before I became a sexy vampire. From Live Science:

Blood is red when it has oxygen in it. Without oxygen, it turns blue. So here's what happens:

The heart pumps blood to your lungs to pick up oxygen. The oxygen-rich blood is then pumped out to your body through your arteries. It's red at this point.

From your arteries, the blood flows through tiny blood vessels called capillaries, where it gives up its oxygen to the body's tissues. Your lips have a lot of these capillaries, which is why they're red.

Your blood, now exhausted of its oxygen and turning blue, then returns to your heart through your veins.

Iraq horrifically torturing, killing gay people.

Awful. From Gay City News:

In a 67-page report released on August 17, Human Rights Watch (HRW) — the most prestigious international human rights watchdog organization — has detailed an intensive “sexual cleansing” campaign of murder, torture, kidnapping, beatings, and blackmail carried out against those perceived to be gay in Iraq.

The report, entitled “They Want Us Exterminated: Murder, Torture, Sexual Orientation and Gender in Iraq,” is based on interviews recently conducted by an HRW team in Iraq with more than 50 men who identified as gay, as well as with doctors, journalists, United Nations aid officials, and others.

It says doctors and morgue attendants routinely see horrifically mutilated bodies of gay men. HRW said doctors have confirmed an earlier Gay City News report of men being killed by having their anuses glued shut before being force-fed laxatives, causing painful and slow death.

Since March 2006, Gay City News has reported, in a series of articles, on the anti-gay murder campaign by fundamentalist death squads targeting Iraqi LGBT people. The HRW report confirms the deaths of hundreds of Iraqi sexual and gender dissidents in the wake of the security chaos created by the U.S. invasion and occupation of Iraq, but it is largely focused on the changing face of the sexual cleansing campaign, which has intensified greatly since the beginning of this year.

Typical of the heartrending testimonies gathered by HRW is that from one man, identified as Hamid, 35, who developed a speech impediment and went into hiding after the murder of his lover of ten years. Speaking through tears to HRW just three weeks after his partner’s murder, Hamid said: “They came to take my partner at his parents’ home. Four armed men barged into the house, masked and wearing black. They asked for him by name; they insulted him and took him in front of his parents. All that, I heard about later from his family. He was found in the neighborhood the day after. They had thrown his corpse in the garbage. His genitals were cut off and a piece of his throat was ripped out.”

Hamid continued, “Since then, I’ve been unable to speak properly. I feel as if my life is pointless now. I don’t have friends other than those you see; for years it has just been my boyfriend and myself in that little bubble, by ourselves. I have no family now — I cannot go back to them. I have a death warrant on me. I feel the best thing to do is just to kill myself. In Iraq, murderers and thieves are respected more than gay people.”

Mexico City bans plastic bags.

From last week, but forgot to post it. What's interesting is how more progressive and proactive places like India and China are than the US in this area. From CNN:

Mexico City's thousands of stores went green Wednesday, as amended ordinances on solid waste now outlaw businesses from giving out thin plastic bags that are not biodegradable.

The law affects all stores, production facilities and service providers within the Federal District, which encompasses the city limits. Nearly 9 million people live inside the district and another 10 million reside in surrounding communities that make up greater Mexico City.

Mexico City becomes the second large metropolitan area in the Western Hemisphere to outlaw the bags. San Francisco in March 2007 enacted an ordinance that gave supermarkets six months and large chain pharmacies about a year to phase out the bags. Los Angeles is set to impose a ban if the state of California does not enact a statewide 25-cent fee per bag by July.

About 90 percent of the bags used in the United States are not recycled.

Bans and other restrictions on plastic bags are in place in several countries.

China has adopted a strict limit, reducing litter and eliminating the use of 40 billion bags, the World Watch Institute said, citing government estimates. Although compliance has been spotty, violation of the law carries a possible fine of 10,000 yuan ($1,463), World Watch said.

In Tanzania, selling the bags carries a maximum six-month jail sentence and a fine of 1.5 million shilling ($1,137).

Mumbai, India, outlawed the bags in 2000 and cities in Australia, Italy, South Africa and Taiwan have imposed bans or surcharges. Ireland reported cutting use of the bags by 90 percent after imposing a fee on each one.

Robot cats purrrrfect for killing us all.

From Yahoo! News circa last week:

Robot cats and other man-made companions could help Britain's elderly, according to a report by the Royal Academy of Engineering. The report recommends that autonomous devices could provide a variety of different services to older people, ranging from basic companionship to medical monitoring. Devices with the appropriate sensors could act as fire detectors, or flash lights when doorbells or phones ring.

"This is not constrained by the technological possibility of it so much as by the desire to do it -- and that is bound up with all sorts of social factors," said Professor Will Stewart of Southampton University, who contributed to the report, speaking to Reuters.

"It is not a complete replacement for your kid calling you once a week. What you want is continuous attention and that is very difficult," said Stewart.

Maybe older Brits could start with the Dream Cat Venus, an autonomous robotic feline that is already available for about $110 in Japan.

I'm also interested in how the right device could extend the companionship offered by an organic pet. Consider Huggable, a robotic teddy bear developed by MIT that seems to fit the bill specified by the Royal Academy of Engineering. It has full-body sensors for electric field, temperature and force, inertial measurement unit, cameras embedded in the eyes and microphones in the ears.

If you think that this is a rather science-fictional scenario, you're right. In Philip K. Dick's 1968 novel Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? robotic pets are routinely used by most people.

Nixon gave Ted Kennedy bodyguards -- to spy on his personal life.

From the Guardian via Truthout:

Washington - Richard Nixon considered Ted Kennedy such a threat that he tried to catch him cheating on his wife, even ordering aides to plant secret service bodyguards to spy on the senator's behaviour.

"Do you have anybody in the secret service that you can get to?" the US president asked his aide John Ehrlichman in a stark series of Oval Office conversations about Kennedy before the 1972 election. "Yeah, yeah," Ehrlichman replied.

"Plant one," Nixon said. "Plant two guys on him. This could be very useful."

Nixon made clear that the secret service protection afforded Kennedy before the 1972 election would be rescinded after. Then, said the president, "if he gets shot, it's too damn bad". His aides disdainfully referred to Kennedy supporters as "super-swinger jet-set types".

Tape recordings from the Nixon White House betray a preoccupation with the Kennedy mystique and how that might be used against the Republican president by the last surviving brother, who died on Tuesday aged 77. Nixon wanted a sharp and private eye kept on Kennedy's movements after the Chappaquiddick scandal, hoping to catch him with a woman other than his wife, Joan.

Nixon's men had investigators tail Kennedy on a Hawaii vacation and when he was at his Martha's Vineyard haunts.

Mortified, they told Nixon that Joan Kennedy wanted to wear "hot pants" to a White House function until her husband talked her out of it. But Ted's behaviour? In the aftermath of his scandal he was careful not to step out of line, the tapes suggest.

Thai woman jailed for 18 for "royal slur."

From Raw Story:

A Thai court Friday convicted and sentenced a female “Red Shirt” protester to 18 years in prison for insulting the country’s revered monarchy during anti-government rallies, an official said.

Daranee Charncherngsilapakul, 46, a hardcore supporter of Thailand’s ousted former prime minister Thaksin Shinawatra, was found guilty of making speeches that were insulting to the Thai royal family.

The judge at Bangkok’s main criminal court said her speeches at Sanam Luang park in the capital during three pro-Thaksin rallies in June and July last year were against the law of lese majeste, the court official told AFP.

“The court convicted the defendant on three counts and sentenced her for six years on each count,” she said.

“Although the defendant testified that she did not intend to insult the monarchy or make the public believe her, she could not escape her wrongdoing,” the verdict said.

Lese majeste — insulting the monarchy — is a serious charge in Thailand. Anyone can file a complaint, and police are duty-bound to investigate it in a country where the king is treated with almost religious adulation.

Ultra rare tiger dismembered at zoo, sold on black market.

Leave it to JenK for the really sad, disturbing global news. (Thanks!) Sad item!

In a shocking case that has zoologists baffled, an ultra rare Sumatran tiger was killed and dismembered at a zoo in Indonesia. There are only 400 of the critically endangered tigers left in the wild--but that's not even the most appalling part of the story.

Well, it might be, but this is pretty despicable, too: just over 5 years ago, the Zoological Society of London had used this particular tiger to help train Indonesian veterinarians and zoologists. And one of those very veterinarians may be responsible for killing it, skinning it, dismembering it, and putting it up for sale on the black market.

US military deaths in Iraq War at 4,335.

Just a reminder that we still have young people dying everyday in an unnecessary war. From ABC News:

As of Thursday, Aug. 27, 2009, at least 4,335 members of the U.S. military had died in the Iraq war since it began in March 2003, according to an Associated Press count.

The figure includes nine military civilians killed in action. At least 3,466 military personnel died as a result of hostile action, according to the military's numbers.

[...] The British military has reported 179 deaths; Italy, 33; Ukraine, 18; Poland, 21; Bulgaria, 13; Spain, 11; Denmark, seven; El Salvador, five; Slovakia, four; Latvia and Georgia, three each; Estonia, Netherlands, Thailand and Romania, two each; and Australia, Hungary, Kazakhstan and South Korea, one death each.

Is the next GOP obsession zombie attacks?

From Raw Story:

MSNBC’s Keith Olbermann took a leap into fantasy politics on Tuesday, suggesting that the current Republican obsession with health care reform creating “death panels” could easily lead into an all-out panic over zombies.

[...] At the same time, conservative radio talk-show host Rush Limbaugh has begun describing supporters of health care reform as zombies. “They are having to send out multiple e-mails, war rooms, websites to instruct their brain-dead zombies on how to go out and show support for this abomination!” Limbaugh wrote recently. “It’s the Night of the Living Dead, in the daytime! Obama zombies marching around with little instructions and pamphlets and manuals.”

“The evidence is all around us,” Olbermann concluded, “and it’s hungry for our brains.” He then turned to former Saturday Night Live writer Max Brooks, known as “the Studs Terkel of zombie journalism.”

“Could we see the GOP using the zombie defense against Democrats?” Olbermann asked.

“If they did it would be counterproductive,” Brooks replied, “because Republicans would like a zombie outbreak.”

“During a zombie outbreak society would collapse,” Brooks explained. “The government would implode. We would all have to retreat to our homes surrounded by our guns. Sounds pretty right-wing to me.”

“This is in lockstep with the Republican strategy,” continued Brooks. “Right now, zombies are hot, they’re hip, they’re now — especially among young people. So what do Republicans do when something is hot and hip and now among young people? They attack it.”

Olbermann, however, got in the last word, suggesting yet another reason why Republicans might look favorably on a zombie attack. “If the zombies are looking for brains, they’ll only eat the Democrats.”

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.