If you think Meercats are cute and cuddly mammals, think again - they are baby-killing cannibals.
In an eight-year study published in the journal Biology Letters by Dr Andrew Young and Prof Tim Clutton-Brock, the scientists report a gripping account of "infanticidal power struggle" in meerkat society on the edge of the Kalahari.
Resources are so scarce that the matriarch tries to monopolise sex and reproduction in the group. When she becomes pregnant she evicts subordinate females and kills their young to maintain control. However, when her pups are born, the subordinates will return and even help the dominant female with the babysitting.
But the Cambridge team found that in cases when subordinate females manage to become pregnant, despite the best effort of the dominants, they too resort to infanticide - killing both the pups of their subordinate sisters and the matriarchs - to boost the chances that their own litter will have enough food.
Students at the Royal Oak Intermediate School in Covina, California built this 1/4 scale roller coaster in their gym.
Twenty-four feet tall at its highest point and occupying 10,000 square feet, the fully-functional ride towers over the 135 eighth-graders who are its designers, builders and decorators. Students and four teachers have spent thousands of hours measuring, sawing, constructing, painting and decorating the wooden structure over the last three weeks.
Painted mostly black and decorated with a solar system theme - the planets, the sun, Earth's moon, Orion's Nebula, the asteroid belt and a black hole - the roller coaster includes three lifts and drops, an enormous figure eight and a 360-degree loop. The track is 400 feet long, and students estimate that the car will reach a top speed of 35 mph coming down the final and tallest drop.
Scientists using MARSIS, a radar antenna onboard Europe's Mars Express spacecraft found what looks like a large and previously unknown reservoir of water ice below the surface of Mars.
The antenna was deployed in June 2005 and quickly detected what appeared to be water ice stretching 1.8 kilometres below the surface of the northern polar ice cap. Now, it has found what looks like water ice extending as deep as 3.5 kilometres below the southern polar cap.
Paul Rothemund of Caltech used "scaffolded DNA origami" technique to create the world's smallest smiley face.
Rothemund made DNA strands into structures such as squares, smiley faces, stars, rectangles and hollow triangles, each about 100 nm across. He based each shape on a single strand of DNA roughly 7000 nucleotides long taken from a virus. (A nucleotide is the structural unit that makes up DNA and some other biological molecules.) The so-called "scaffold strand" was folded into the desired shape and held together by short "staple strands" of DNA.
Recently, StreetWars gained a lot of media attention (it was also featured in one of the CSI series):
You can hunt your target down any way you see fit; you can pose as a delivery person and jack them when they open the door, disguise yourself and take them out on the street, etc.
If you are successful in your assassination attempt, the person you killed will give you their envelope and the person they were supposed to kill becomes your new target. This continues until you work yourself through all the players and retrieve the envelope with your (or your team's) picture(s) and name(s). Then you win. Cash…but first live in fear.
Neatorama reader Chris Barr suggested his new project "Buerau of Workplace Interruptions", he said:
The Bureau of Workplace Interruptions is an "intimate bureaucracy" created to challenge our relationship to efficiency and productivity. BWI harnesses interruptive technology such as email, snail mail, and the telephone, as well as in-person visits to create invisible theatre that steals time from the realm of work and capital.
If you think you haven't wasted enough time reading Neatorama, check it out: http://www.interruptions.org/ (Thanks Chris!)
In an incident known as the "Axe Murder Incident" or the "Hatchet Incident", a United Nations Command workforce trimming a tree at the North-South Korean border in August 1976 was attacked and killed by North Korean soldiers.
Lieutenant Pak Chul of the KPA, seeing that he was losing control, took off his wristwatch, wrapped it in his handkerchief and put it in his pocket. Another North Korean rolled up his sleeves. Lieutenant Pak then shouted "MI KUN UL CHU KI GI CHA." Translated, it means, "Kill the U.S. Aggressors."; the UNC security force was attacked by a superior force of 30 KPA guards wielding pick handles, knives, clubs, and axes.
The US Response: Operation Paul Bunyan, where overwhelming force was sent in to cut down the tree.
LL Barkova and SV Pankova of the Department of Archeology of Eastern Europe and Siberia discovered intricate tattoos on Siberian mummies from the 3rd to 5th century BC!
These drawings are of different animals: beasts of prey such as tigers and leopards; ungulates such as horses, wild mountain sheep and roe deer; birds and imaginary creatures such as hoofed animals with birds' heads or winged predators. All of the pictures are done in a special artistic manner which is characteristic of Pazyryk art in the so-called Siberian Scythian animal style. They convey the shapes of separate animals and subjects of predators attacking ungulates, so-called "scenes of mauling."
The Pentagon's defence scientists want to create an army of cyber-insects that can be remotely controlled to check out explosives and send transmissions.
Scientists who spoke to the BBC news website were unconvinced.
Entomology expert Dr George McGavin of the Oxford University Museum of Natural History said the idea appeared "ludicrous".
Darpa's previous experiments to get bees and wasps to detect the smell of explosives foundered when their "instinctive behaviours for feeding and mating... prevented them from performing reliably", it said.
After February's yellow snowfall, Russian island of Sakhalin's now got pink snow:
Experts at the local meteorology centre said sand from neighboring Mongolia was to blame for this unusual natural phenomenon. Before it arrived in Maritime, the cyclone passed Mongolia, where sand storms had been raging in the desert.
