Mr Menees, a coach driver for gospel and rock musicians, managed the feat on Feb 11 at his Carbondale recording studio. He hit 0.393 hertz - a very low F-sharp. The previous record was 0.797 hertz.
But Mr Menees says he could have done better and will probably make another attempt if his new record is bested anytime soon.
Roth and his colleagues wondered how it is that some people can enter a state of frozen suspended animation and then recover from it safely, whereas in general such a change of body temperature is deadly.
The scientists now think they may be on the track of an answer, having learned how to perform the same trick reliably with other lifeforms; in this case yeasts and nematode worms.
Yeasts and worms, like humans, will normally simply die if they are chilled down past a certain point. But Roth and his colleagues have found that if the little creatures are starved of oxygen before turning on the cold, they will go into suspended animation from which they recover on warming and go on to live normal yeasty or wormy lives.
For the past few years, I have been creating a series of "Re-things." These whimsical sculptures represent pixilated animals and objects of nature. I find images of my subjects online and then create three-dimensional sculptural representations of these two-dimensional images. I build my "Re-things" pixel by pixel to understand how each pixel plays a crucial role in the identity of an object. Through the process of pixilation, color is distilled, some bits of information are lost, and the form is abstracted. Making the intangible tangible, I view my building process as an experiment in alchemy, using man-made composite and recycled materials to represent natural forms.
The fastest we go is 172,800x, compressing 24 hours of real time into a blazing 1/2 second. The slowest is 1/32x speed, stretching a mere 1/2 second of real time into a whopping 16 seconds. This gives us a fastest to slowest ratio of 5.5 million. If you like averages, the average speed up factor of the band dancing is 270x. In total we shot 18 hours of the band dancing and 192 hours of LA skyline timelapse – over a million frames of video – and compressed it all down to 4 minutes and 30 seconds! Oh and don’t forget, it’s one continuous camera shot.
At $69,500—roughly the price of a Porsche Cayenne S hybrid SUV—there's the Vividus king-size mattress set from Hästens Sängar AB, of Sweden. Hästens says it takes 160 hours to assemble this mattress entirely by hand, which has a Swedish-pine frame with thick layers of horsehair, cotton, flax and wool inside. The company says since introducing the mattress in 2006, it has sold 250 of them world-wide.
There's an arms race under way in the world of luxury mattresses that jittery economists and sluggish home sales seem unable to stop. Even at the middle-to-upper-middle tiers, mattress prices are creeping up as companies cater to mainstream demand for luxurious sleep.
"Ellie has cataracts on both eyes and is only aware of shadows," explains Jean Spencer, manager of Rochdale's Royal Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals, in an interview with the Manchester Evening News. "But Leo, who's an absolutely massive dog, has become her eyes. It's touching to watch them together. She follows him around and snuggles up to him."
Lander goes on to explain how Leo's almost 90 pounds of bulk helps keep his new charge safe. "I take them for walks in the park and Leo guides Ellie around. He is so protective and herds the more boisterous dogs away from her," Julie says.
“I call these things ‘White Guy in a Tie’ events,” a Canadian friend of a friend named Jake told me during the recruitment pitch he gave me in Beijing, where I live. “Basically, you put on a suit, shake some hands, and make some money. We’ll be in ‘quality control,’ but nobody’s gonna be doing any quality control. You in?”
I was.
And so I became a fake businessman in China, an often lucrative gig for underworked expatriates here. One friend, an American who works in film, was paid to represent a Canadian company and give a speech espousing a low-carbon future. Another was flown to Shanghai to act as a seasonal-gifts buyer. Recruiting fake businessmen is one way to create the image—particularly, the image of connection—that Chinese companies crave. My Chinese-language tutor, at first aghast about how much we were getting paid, put it this way: “Having foreigners in nice suits gives the company face.”
In those bleak moments when the lost souls stood atop the cliff, wondering whether to jump, the sound of the wind and the waves was broken by a soft voice. "Why don't you come and have a cup of tea?" the stranger would ask. And when they turned to him, his smile was often their salvation.[...]
In his younger years, he would occasionally climb the fence to hold people back while Moya called the police. He would help rescue crews haul up the bodies of those who couldn't be saved. And he would invite the rescuers back to his house afterward for a comforting drink.
It all nearly cost him his life once. A chilling picture captured decades ago by a local news photographer shows Ritchie struggling with a woman, inches from the edge. The woman is seen trying to launch herself over the side — with Ritchie the only thing between her and the abyss. Had she been successful, he would have gone over, too.
These days, he keeps a safer distance. The council installed security cameras this year and the invention of mobile phones means someone often calls for help before he crosses the street.
But he remains available to lend an ear, though he never tries to counsel, advise or pry. He just gives them a warm smile, asks if they'd like to talk and invites them back to his house for tea. Sometimes, they join him.
The bridge does exactly what the name suggests: It flips traffic around. The key here is separating the two sides of traffic, using a figure-eight shape. One side of the road dips under the other, funneling cars that were traveling on the left to the right (and vice versa), without forcing them to encounter head-on traffic at an intersection.[...]
Say, for instance, you're coming from Zhuhai. As you cross the bridge on the right into Hong Kong, the highway slopes downward to let you pass under the oncoming traffic. As it slopes back up, you reemerge on the left. No cars barreling straight at you. No concrete labyrinth to maneuver through. No sweat (and, ostensibly, no blood).
