Definitely one of the weirdest mask ever used to rob a convenience store:
Security cameras at Flash Foods showed the man walking through the door with the milk-crate head gear and armed with a gun.
A short time later, Marty Simpson was taken into custody in connection with the crime. Simpson showed his face at one point during the robbery, according to the report.
Taking a cue from Cupid, male snails fire slimy "love darts" that increase their chances of fathering little snails.
“Snails that hit their partners with a dart are able to father more babies,” explains Ronald Chase of McGill University in Montreal.
The so-called love darts are wielded by a number of molluscs, including the brown garden snail (Cantareus aspersus) where it sits on the right side of its body, adjacent to a mucus-producing gland.
Chase and Blanchard found the mucus appears to cause certain ducts in the females to contract, and they think this could stop the delivery of the enzymes that digest the sperm. But the substance within the mucus that does this remains a mystery.
In what language do the profoundly deaf think? Why, in Sign (or the local equivalent), assuming they were fortunate enough to have learned it in infancy. The hearing can have only a general idea what this is like--the gulf between spoken and visual language is far greater than that between, say, English and Russian.
Research suggests that the brain of a native deaf signer is organized differently from that of a hearing person. Still, sometimes we can get a glimpse.
Sacks writes of a visit to the island of Martha's Vineyard, where hereditary deafness was endemic for more than 250 years and a community of signers, most of whom hear normally, still flourishes. He met a woman in her 90s who would sometimes slip into a reverie, her hands moving constantly. According to her daughter, she was thinking in Sign. "Even in sleep, I was further informed, the old lady might sketch fragmentary signs on the counterpane," Sacks writes. "She was dreaming in Sign."
The small california town of San Juan Bautista (pop. 1549) is wrestling with this question: Should the chicken hit the road?
The small town, with its Mission San Juan Bautista made famous by Alfred Hitchcock's Vertigo, is grappling with wild chickens strutting down its downtown sidewalks and being fed by tourists and locals alike.
Now, the city council is considering a resolution to made feeding the feral chickens illegal:
"It's a policy issue the council is wrestling with," said City Manager Janice McClintock, who stepped into the long-simmering chicken dispute as soon as she started her job just five weeks ago. "Both the pro-chicken and the anti-chicken forces make some good points."
In a town of fewer than 2,000, almost everyone has a well-defined point of view when it comes to the chickens. The pro-chicken forces in this hamlet 45 miles south of San Jose talk up civic identity; the anti-chicken forces mutter darkly about bird flu. The boosters point to delighted tourists; the critics point to speckled sidewalks.
Why do we like particular food? Science may have the answer:
The researchers set up trials to look at how organisms learn and on what basis they choose. They manipulated the preferences of the locusts: the insects met peppermint-flavoured grass when they were hungry and lemon-flavoured grass when they were not so hungry, and later behaved as if peppermint-flavoured grass was preferable. When they reversed the treatments, the locusts reversed their preference.
Professor Alex Kacelnik in Oxford’s Zoology Department, one of the authors of the study alongside Spence Behmer and Lorena Pompilio, said: ‘This is interesting because value depends on the condition of the organism at the time it learns, and thus what the animals learn depends on their condition and not only the properties of the food. We call this learning mechanism “state-dependent valuation”.’
Colin and Rick built this trike for someone who has multiple sclerosis.
Heather really enjoys cycling. She used to ride both for recreation and for commuting to work, but Multiple Sclerosis made it impossible for her to ride her mountain bike. Far too often, when she would stop her bike & put her foot down on the road to balance herself, her leg would give out on her & she would fall over. Besides the risk of injury from the fall itself, the added risk falling in front of & being struck by a motor vehicle made this an especially dangerous situation. Heather need a bike that she didn't have to balance when she stopped. What she needed was a tricycle.
Two towns with the same name, one in the United States and the other in Wales, can be quite different, as Simon's photos show:
After the Welsh Quakers left their homeland towards the end of the 17th century in search of religious and economic freedom, the new settlements founded in the Americas were often named after the settlers' point of origin. It was one familiar link in an otherwise strange new world, fostering a sense of community among the displaced. This practice continued into the 20th century, when Welsh miners crossed the Atlantic to develop the rich Pennsylvania coalfields.
Parallel Wales is the result of two weeks spent in Pennsylvania, Maryland and Delaware in October 2005, visiting locations with Welsh namesakes. Many have, in the time since they were settled, become distinctly un-Welsh. Others have been abandoned altogether, simply becoming areas of wasteland.
Who says you can't train a cat? Quang-Tuan Luong got the photographic proof of this monk from Inle Lake, Myanmar, training a cat to jump through a hoop. See more of QT's cool photos here: Link
Previously on Neatorama: Moscow Cat Theater's Cat Circus.
The universe went through a traumatic growth spurt before it was a billionth of a billionth of a second old, according to the latest data from the Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe (WMAP).
The probe has also given physicists their first clues about what drove that frantic expansion, and revealed that the cosmic "dark age" before the first stars switched on was twice as long as previously thought.
On Thursday, the WMAP team revealed the best map ever drawn of microwaves from the early universe, showing variations in the brightness of radiation from primordial matter. The pattern of these variations fits the predictions of a physical theory called inflation, which suggests that during the first split second of existence the universe expanded incredibly fast.
