Wow - talk about living in an old house. When ornithologist Kurt Burnham of the University of Oxford and colleagues carbon dated the guano and other debris of a gyrfalcon nest in Greenland, he got a very surprising answer:
Carbon dating revealed that one nest in Kangerlussuaq in central-west Greenland is between 2,360 and 2,740 years old, the researchers report in Ibis.
Three other nests in the area are older than 1,000 years, with the youngest nest site first being occupied 520 to 650 years ago.
These ancient nests are still being regularly used by gyrfalcons.
"While I know many falcon species re-use nest sites year after year, I never imagined we would be talking about nests that have been used on and off for over 2,000 years," says Burnham.
By now, I'm sure you've all have heard the fly swat heard 'round the world. Late night talk show hosts had a field day making fun of President Obama's artful swat of a persistent fly that bugged him during an interview.
Enter PETA to the fray: the animal rights group decried Obama's display of unchecked executive power and suggested that next time he used a humane fly catcher instead:
“We support compassion for the even the smallest animals," says Bruce Friedrich, VP for Policy at PETA. “We support giving insects the benefit of the doubt."
Friedrich says PETA supports "brushing flies away rather than killing them" and was disappointed that the President had gone ahead and squashed the pesky fly.
This afternoon PETA sent a Katcha Bug, a device which traps bugs and allows their safe release back into nature to the White House.
Good thing it didn't happen to Cheney - he'd have used his shotgun fo' sho': Link
There's probably never a good time to get arrested, but you have to admit, this is kind of awkward: Marcus T. Bailey, 25, was in the middle of getting his hair done when he stepped out to deal drug ... and got arrested!
The mug shot is priceless:
A 25-year-old Evansville man was arrested Wednesday when he stepped out of a South Side barbershop to conduct an apparent drug deal, police said.
Marcus T. Bailey, 25, was actually being sought on a parole warrant when authorities arrived at 952 Washington Avenue and found him in a car with two other people and about 21 grams of crack cocaine, said Evansville Police Department Spokesman Steve Green. Bailey was apparently having his hair braided inside when he stepped out, Green said.
http://www.courierpress.com/news/2009/jun/18/man-arrested-dealing-cocaine-mid-haircut/?partner=yahoo_headlines - via BuzzFeed
David William of And I Am Not Lying For Real blog was having a nice lunch when a hawk flew into where he was eating and landed on his food:
I was sitting at a window seat next to the open door, and my food had just been brought out. I looked down to see this guy (or gal - I don’t know hawks) just standing in the doorway, looking back and forth. After surveying the place for a few seconds, it flapped its way in and up onto one of the empty tables. [...]
The hawk just sat there for a little while, getting jerk BBQ sauce all over its talons and looking all emo, until it was spooked by the restaurant’s delivery guy walking in, whereupon it shot past all of us into the kitchen. The counter guy, the delivery guy and I heard a few pots clanging as we debated calling animal control versus just trying to shoo it back out the door, when one of the cooks who was back there caught the hawk with his bare hands, and walked it back outside.
I *love* jigsaw puzzles but haven't had the time to put one together since I have kids. Who has the time? (Plus, I'm sure that if I even try now pieces would be eaten forthwith by said kids). So, when Smart-Kit asked me to do a review of their online puzzles, I jumped at the opportunity.
First of all, there are limitations to a Flash-based online jigsaw puzzle: the workspace is limited and the pieces are already rightside up. But the benefits far outweigh the limitations for a casual gamer like me. For one, you'd never lose a piece! Pieces virtually snap together when you get the right ones next to each other - and no rotating necessary (so I guess that rightside up pieces is actually a benefit after all).
You can select how complicated you'd like the puzzle dimensions to be: 4x3, 8x6 (the one above), 12x9 or if you like a challenge, 16x12. See the pic above? It took me about 8 minutes to complete - just the right amount of time for a little fun break at work.
We've covered Smart-Kit before on Neatorama (they also have many more non-jigsaw puzzles - like the SwizzlePop! and the Hidden Object Puzzle: Find the Bear, for instance), so for a quick online fun, give 'em a try!
Summer is nearly here and school's out! Except for hundreds of poor students in Chino, California, who got an unwelcome surprise news that they have to sit for 34 more days of school because of a clerical error. If they didn't, the school district would lose millions in funding.
Ladies and gentlemen, I give you the mindboggling bureaucracy and arcane rules that is the school system:
"We made an error on the minimum days of about five minutes," said Dickson Principal Sue Pederson. "Realistically, that's our accounting mistake as adults. We're unfortunately making the children pay for it by making them give up their summer."
Students at each school exceeded the state's requirement of at least 54,000 minutes of annual classroom time, but the problem arose in the district's minimum days. Schools typically have one shortened day per week, allowing teachers to use the remaining time for planning and parent conferences. Under state law, these days must be at least 180 minutes, and the daily average classroom time over 10 consecutive days must be 240 minutes.
An internal audit in early May discovered that 34 minimum days had been 175 minutes at Dickson and 170 at Rolling Ridge, said district spokeswoman Julie Gobin. That adds up to a shortage of 170 and 340 minutes, respectively, which could be made up in one or two school days. But under state law, these too-short days do not count at all, meaning that all 34 must be made up to avoid a state penalty of more than $7 million.
Seema Mehta of the Los Angeles Times has the report: Link
Born 3-and-a-half months prematurely, Derek Paravicini was so small that his doctor presumed that he was dead. Just as his mother had given up hope, she heard the faintest whimper. To keep him alive, he was put on oxygen but improper equipment left him blind and autistic. At the tender age of 2 years old, Derek discovered the piano, and his life was never the same.
Fast forward 30 years. Derek couldn't tell his left from right and could barely count to ten but his brain is a perfectly programmed musical computer.
Press play or go to Link [YouTube, Part I] to see the amazing things Derek Paravicini, the musical genius, could do.
Heck, people drink designer water at $55 a bottle (yes, I'm looking at you, Bling H2O), so why not sell designer band-aids to rich people that obviously get their papercuts from counting too much money?
Here's an experimental leather band-aids by conceptual artist Scott Amron - now, you can fashionably dress your boo-boos for a mere $15: Link - via Refinery29 Pipeline
The recently revived Herminiimonas glacei - image: The Society for General Microbiology
Forgetting the lessons of Jurrasic Park, scientists have "awaken" a strain of bacteria called Hermeniimonas glacei from a 120,000-year slumber trapped beneath a block of ice. What could go wrong?
The new bacteria species was found nearly 2 miles (3 km) beneath a Greenland glacier, where temperatures can dip well below freezing, pressure soars, and food and oxygen are scarce.
"We don't know what state they were in," said study team member Jean Brenchley of Pennsylvania State University. "They could've been dormant, or they could've been slowly metabolizing, but we don't know for sure."
Dormant would mean the bacteria were in a spore-like state in which there's not a lot of metabolism going on, so the bacteria wouldn't be reproducing much. It's possible the bacteria could have been slowly metabolizing and replicating. [...]
To coax the bacteria back to life, Brenchley, Jennifer Loveland-Curtze and their Penn State colleagues incubated the samples at 36 degrees Fahrenheit (2 degrees Celsius) for seven months, followed by more than four months at 41 degrees F (5 degrees C).
The resulting colonies of the originally purple-brown bacteria, now named Herminiimonas glaciei, are alive and well. "We were able to recover it and get it to grow in our laboratory," Brenchley said. "It was viable."
Jeanna Bryner of LiveScience has the fascinating story: Link
Sinking of the Titanic - LIFE Images We all know the story of the Titanic - but did you know that one man survived the disaster only to be condemned for not dying an honorable death? Here's the story of a lone Japanese onboard of the ill-fated ocean liner whose survival actually became a curse:
THE LONG TRIP HOME RMS Titanic - photo via abratis.de
In 1910 Japan's Transportation Ministry sent an official named Masabumi Hosono to Russia to study that country's railroad system. Hosono finished his assignment in early 1912 and, following a brief stop in London, began the next leg of his trip home by embarking across the Atlantic on the RMS Titanic. Needless to say, that leg of the trip didn't go quite as planned. On April 14, at 11:40 p.m., just four days into its maiden voyage, the Titanic struck an iceberg while traveling near top speed and began taking on water. (Photo: Cheddarbay.com)
RUDE AWAKENING
It's doubtful that anyone on the Titanic, which had been advertised by the White Star Liner as being "practically unsinkable," realized at first that the ship had suffered a mortal blow. There were plenty of people on board who didn't even know the ship had hit anything. Many of those who noticed felt only a slight shudder followed by the sound of the engines coming to a stop. Hosono apparently slept through the entire thing. The first he learned of it was shortly after midnight, 25 or 30 minutes after the collision, when he was awakened by a knock at the door of his second-class cabin and told to put on his life vest. Three times when he tried to make his way to the lifeboats, he was turned away by the ship's officers, who ordered him to return to the lower levels of the ship. They likely assumed that, as a Japanese person, he must have been traveling in third class, or "steerage." On his third attempt, Hosono managed to slip past a guard and make his way to the lifeboats.
IN THE DARK
Was the Titanic sinking, or was it just floating dead on the water, waiting to be assisted by the ocean liner Carpathia or one of the half a dozen other ships who'd received her distress calls and were already steaming to her aid? We know the answer today, of course, but on that fateful night only three men on the Titanic did - Edward J. Smith, the captain; Thomas Andrews, the chief designer; and J. Bruce Ismay, the president of the White Star Line. They knew not only that the Titanic would sink, but also that it would sink well before help arrived. And they kept the information to themselves, fearing a panic that would cause the passengers to stampede the lifeboats, which when filled to capacity could carry only 1,178 of the more than 2,200 people on board. Even the officers ordered to organize the loading of the lifeboats had no idea that the Titanic was going down.
THANKS ... BUT NO THANKS
Withholding this information did help to keep the loading of the lifeboats orderly, but probably at the cost of hundreds of needless deaths. Many passengers and even many crew members, not suspecting the gravity of the situation, preferred to remain on board rather than risk climbing into the lifeboats. If you had booked passengers on a ship that was said to be unsinkable, would you be willing to leave its warm, dry, and seemingly safe environs to climb into a tiny, swinging lifeboat in the middle of the night, and be lowered on pulleys 65 feet straight down into the freezing, iceberg-filled Atlantic? Even the captain's order to load women and children first must have cost some passengers their lives, because it meant that married women were being asked to separate from their husbands, which many refused to do. Besides, what was the rush? As far as the crew members loading the boats knew, the Titanic wasn't sinking. The lifeboats were simply going to ferry passengers to the rescue ships when they arrived, and that was still hours away. There would be plenty of time to load more people into the lifeboats later, if they didn't want to go now.
The crew members filled the boats with as many people as wanted to get in, and then lowered them into the water. In the end, only three of Titanic's 20 lifeboats were filled to capacity when they set down in the Atlantic. Hosono must have sensed what was happening earlier than many of the passengers did, because as he stood next to Lifeboat No. 10 as it was being loaded, he was already steeling himself for the end. "I tried to prepare myself for the last moment with no agitation, making up my mind not to leave anything disgraceful as a Japanese," he explained in a letter to his wife. "But still I found myself looking for and waiting for any possible chance to survive." That chance came moments later, when the officer loading No. 10 could not coax any more women or children into the boat. "Room for two more!" the officer called out. Hosono watched as another man jumped into the boat. "I myself was deep in desolate thought that I would no more be able to see my beloved wife and children, since there was no alternative for me than to share the same destiny as the Titanic," he wrote. "But the example of the first man making a jump led me to take this last chance." Hosono hopped in, and at 1:20 a.m. he and 34 other people were lowered to safety in a boat built to hold 65.
The Titanic, by now sitting very low in the water, had just one hour left to live. Eight of the 20 lifeboats had already launched and only one of them - Hosono's No. 10 - was filled even halfway to capacity. (Lifeboat No. 1 launched with only 12 passengers out of a possible 40). Many of the passengers still aboard the Titanic were just beginning to realize that the "unsinkable" ship might really be sinking. When the Titanic finally slipped beneath the waves at 2:20 a.m., Hosono watched from Lifeboat No. 10. He described the experience in a letter to his wife, which he wrote on board the Carpathia as it brought the survivors to New York. "What had been a tangible, graceful sight was not reduced to a mere void. And how I thought about the inevitable vicissitudes of life!"
AFTERMATH
Of the more than 2,200 passengers and crew aboard the Titanic, just over 700 survived, including 316 of the 425 women and 56 of 109 children. Even if every woman and child had been accommodated in the lifeboats, there still would have been enough room for nearly 700 of the 1,690 men, yet only 338 men survived. Not everyone who perished did so because they declined an opportunity to climb into a lifeboat, not by a long shot. But this must surely have been the cause of many deaths.
In the shock and horror that followed one of the worst peace-time disasters in maritime history, many of these subtle details were lost on newspaper-reading public. As they counted up the 162 dead women and children, many readers wondered how 338 men had managed to find their way into the lifeboats, "displacing" those helpless victims. Hosono received some of the harshest criticism of all. Not from the American newspapers, who expected chivalrous self-sacrifice from well-bred gentlemen of the middle and upper classes, but were dismissive of foreigners and the rabble traveling in the steerage. Few American papers even took an interest in Hosono's story. One that did celebrated the good fortune of the "lucky Japanese boy."
SAVED ... AND CONDEMNED
No, the harshest attack against Hosono came from his own countrymen. For in surviving the Titanic disaster, he had broken two cultural taboos. Not only had Hosono chosen ignominious life over an honorable death, he had done so in public - on a European passenger liner with the eyes of the world upon him. Hosono was denounced as a coward by Japanese newspapers and fired from his job with the Transportation Ministry. The ministry hired him back a few weeks later, but his career never recovered. College professors denounced him as immoral, and he was written up in Japanese textbooks as a man who had disgraced his country. There were even public calls for him to commit hara-kiri - ritual suicide - as means of saving face.
Hosono never did kill himself, but there must have been times when he wished he'd died on the Titanic. He never spoke of the experience again, and forbade any mention of it in his home. After he died in 1939, a broken and forgotten man, his letter to his wife, written on what is believed to be the only surviving piece of Titanic stationery, sat in a drawer until 1997, when the blockbuster film Titanic staged its Tokyo premiere. Then the Japanese public's interest in the doomed liner's lone Japanese passenger was renewed again, this time with much more sympathy.
The article above is reprinted with permission from Uncle John's Unsinkable Bathroom Reader. The Bathroom Readers' Institute has sailed the seas of science, history, pop culture, humor, and more to bring you Uncle John's Unsinkable Bathroom Reader. Our all-new 21st edition is overflowing with over 500 pages of material that is sure to keep you fully absorbed. Since 1988, the Bathroom Reader Institute has published a series of popular books containing irresistible bits of trivia and obscure yet fascinating facts. Check out their website here: Bathroom Reader Institute.
Don't mess with Chiquita the Chihuahua! The tiny 10-lb dog took on a 100-lb wild cougar who wanted to eat its companion for dinner ... and won!
It was 10:30 p.m. and out went Chiquita through the doggie door to investigate as Lindsay opened the blinds. "I rush to the blinds and I flick on the light and I'm trying to see." Pinning poor Rosie to the ground was a 5-foot-long, 100-pound cougar. Rosie was about to become a cougar snack. [...]
As the cougar let out it's best guttural growl and Lindsay grabbed the phone for help, little Chiquita went to work. With all 1'3" flexed for battle, her 10 pound frame let out it's best attack dog imitation. Believe it or not, the cougar let little Rosie go.
Scott Burton of KGW has the story: Link (with video clip) - Thanks Tiffany!
Missing the bus may have been the best thing that ever happened to UK sprinter Jeffrey Lawal-Balogun:
"Then one day I was on my way to college and had to run after the bus. I must have been quite fast because a girl came up to me afterwards and asked if I ran with a club."
It turned out the girl was from Kent Athletic Club and she introduced him to leading sprint coach Clarence Callender, who was immediately impressed. Jeffrey, now 23, of Mottingham, South London, is already carving out a name for himself - and encouraging children to take up athletics at an early age. [...]
He added: "I never thought running after a bus would lead to all this. And the funny thing is, I missed it."
Orthodox jews are restricted from surfing the web in case they run across religiously questionable and sexually explicit materials. But Koogle, a search engine launched by Yossi Altman, may change all that:
Yossi Altman said Koogle, a play on the names of a Jewish noodle pudding and the ubiquitous Google, appears to meet the standards of Orthodox rabbis, who restrict use of the Web to ensure followers avoid viewing sexually explicit material.
The site, at www.koogle.co.il, omits religiously objectionable material, such as most photographs of women which Orthodox rabbis view as immodest, Altman said.
Its links to Israeli news and shopping sites also filter out items most ultra-Orthodox Israelis are forbidden by rabbis to have in their homes, such a television sets.
"This is a kosher alternative for ultra-Orthodox Jews so that they may surf the Internet," Altman said by telephone.
Snakes slither to get around but how exactly do they snake move? Scientists used to think that they move by pushing against objects like rocks but it turns out that something else is going on:
New research confirms that friction is indeed at work but instead at a microscopic scale: The snakes' overlapping belly scales react against uneven areas on the ground, said lead study author David Hu, an assistant professor of mechanical engineering at Georgia Tech
The reptiles don't lie totally flat on the ground as they move, [...] David Hu said. "If you imagine you have a shoestring on the ground in the shape of an s, the curved parts of the s are lifted slightly, and the remaining weight is concentrated on the middle part of the s."
So snakes will lean on the lifted areas with the most force--an adaptation that allows them to travel much faster.
