`File this under “what’s old is new again.” A German company is introducing sails it says may help propel ships across the sea cheaper and faster than modern engines.
SkySails’ system consists of an enormous towing kite and navigation software that can map the best route between two points for maximum wind efficiency. In development for more than four years, the system costs from roughly $380,000 to $3.2 million, depending on the size of the ship it’s pulling. SkySails claims it will save one third of fuel costs.’
`US War Dept produced comic strip included in the first edition of the “POCKET GUIDE TO CHINA”, a 75-page booklet distributed to US soldiers (Army and Navy) during their stay in China during World War II.’
`Four-wheel-drive owners, already seen as a road menace, are more dangerous than we thought, a study of more than 40,000 vehicles has found.
A person behind the wheel of one is far more likely to be wielding a mobile phone while driving, and less likely to wear a seatbelt, researchers say. They have concluded that four-wheel-drive owners take more risks because they feel safer.
But that distorted logic is a threat to the safety of everyone on the road, says Lesley Walker, a research associate with Imperial College London’s primary care and social medicine department.’
`For an aeronautical engineer it was the perfect day and a perfect end to a quest that has consumed his life for more than 30 years.
Yesterday Dr. James DeLaurier, an aeronautical engineer and professor emeritus at the University of Toronto’s Institute for Aerospace Studies, fulfilled a lifelong dream, seeing his manned mechanical flapping-wing airplane, or ornithopter, fly — a dream first imagined by Leonardo da Vinci.’
`A Dutch design student bored with conventional advertisements has set up a fake online agency offering advertising space for beer, cars and TV stations on prostitutes’ thighs and cleavage.
On his website www.instoresnow.nl, Raoul Balai also proposed painting brand names on zoo animals and floating huge billboards off popular beaches to get vacationers’ attention.
“I was getting sick and tired of advertising everywhere,” Balai told reporters. “But I don’t want to preach, and I thought satire would work better.”‘
`Hundreds of people have flocked to a hospital in the Indian city of Calcutta to see a man holding a sizeable chunk of his head in his hands.
Doctors say a section of electrician Sambhu Roy’s skull fell off on Sunday, months after he suffered severe burns.
He has now become the centre of public attention as the man who literally “holds his head in his hands”.’
`An 89-year-old New Zealand woman on a mobility scooter fled the scene after twice running down and injuring a pedestrian, the victim alleged.
June Bridgman pleaded guilty in a South Island court this week to carelessly operating a vehicle causing injury, but denied it was a hit and run, The Dominion Post reported.
Bridgman plans to continue using the scooter. [..]
Ellison told the newspaper she lay in agony with broken bones on a street in the town of Picton after being hit twice as Bridgman fled “like a bat out of hell”.’
`A policeman stabbed his son through the heart while demonstrating a tribal killing, an inquest heard today.
Conor Johnson, 11, of Littlehampton, West Sussex, died from a single thrust of the knife by his father, Pc Ian Johnson.
[..] “He was describing some sort of tribal killing that occurred to someone. He was holding a knife to him. He said his son didn’t like it and his son slipped forward on to the knife.”‘
`Royal Dutch Shell, the world’s top marketer of biofuels, considers using food crops to make biofuels “morally inappropriate” as long as there are people in the world who are starving, an executive said on Thursday.
Eric G Holthusen, Fuels Technology Manager Asia/Pacific, said the company’s research unit, Shell Global Solutions, has developed alternative fuels from renewable resources that use wood chips and plant waste rather than food crops that are typically used to make the fuels.
Holthusen said his company’s participation in marketing biofuels extracted from food was driven by economics or legislation.’
`A Romulus man whose wife mysteriously lost an arm early Sunday has been arrested and is expected to be arraigned today on several charges, including drunken driving causing serious injury, police said Wednesday.
Stephen Humphrey, 39, was being held in the Monroe County Jail. His wife, 34-year-old Brenda Humphrey, arrived at St. Joseph Mercy Hospital in Superior Township missing her right arm.
Police searched for the limb and for a possible crime scene for days, but found neither.’
`A computer scientist at UCLA has transformed one power-hungry component of a silicon laser into a generator of energy — which could help engineers trying to incorporate faster optical elements into commercial processors.
“Not only are we not dumping energy in, we’re actually recovering it,” says Bahram Jalali, a professor of electrical engineering at UCLA’s Henry Samueli School of Engineering and Applied Science “It sounds too good to be true, but it is true.”‘
`The man who won “Survivor: Thailand” four years ago is charged with battery and cruelty to animals.
Officials say Brian Heidik shot a puppy with an arrow. [..]
An Atlanta TV station (WSB-TV) reports Heidik told the judge he thought the dog was a coyote that has been harassing his pets.
But a prosecutor says Heidik’s wife called authorities at about 3:00 Wednesday morning to say he’d shot a puppy “and planned to shoot another one.” ‘
`A man grabbed two cordless power saws off a subway station workbench and went on a rampage Thursday, swinging the saws at riders and slicing open a man’s chest before running away, police said.
The 64-year-old victim, whose name was not released, was hospitalized in critical but stable condition. Police were searching for the suspect, described by witnesses as a thin man in his 30s, who had earrings in both ears and was possibly carrying a teddy bear.’
`A Slovakian man has been charged with attempted murder after a pensioner was savaged by a cackling “cannibal” during a raid on his home. [..]
A police source said it was like a scene from the horror film The Silence of the Lambs, in which cannibal killer Hannibal Lecter wears a gruesome mask.
The source added: “There was blood on the walls and this guy was just laughing like a maniac.” [..]
“The old chap lived a peaceful life with his wife, then someone jumped through his window and bit off his thumb. It doesn’t bear thinking about.”’
`Someone seems to have gone out of their way to cause people genuine harm by placing six footballs on the capital’s streets and a sign asking people to kick them. The catch? The balls were filled with concrete.
“Can u kick it?” was written on a poster near the innocuous looking footballs. So, probably without thinking too long about it, two young guys, aged 21 and 23, took up the challenge and gave the balls a good kick. Unfortunately the leather balls had been filled with concrete and weighed around 10kg each. The men sustained foot injuries so severe that they had to go to hospital.’
`The Spanish news agency EFE apologized to Republican gubernatorial candidate Don Goldwater, saying a story distributed by the agency on June 21 mischaracterized Goldwater as wanting to use “concentration camps” as part of efforts to combat illegal immigration. [..]
EFE Executive Vice President Emillio Sanchez said in a June 25 letter released Tuesday by Goldwater’s campaign that the EFE stringer who wrote the June 21 article should not have reported that Goldwater supports using “concentration camps.”
“We understand the very serious connotations those words have for the people of the Arizona. Upon further reflection, our investigation has determined that your plan to house illegal prisoners in a tent city is consistent with accepted practices for nonviolent American prisoners in your area,” Sanchez said in the letter.’
followup to GOP Candidate’s Call for Labor Camp Rebuked.
`A giant ice cube or a gift from God?
Weather experts cannot explain what caused a microwave oven-sized block of ice to fall from the sky and shatter on the pavement outside an upmarket Douglasdale complex at 9.58am on Friday.
But the security guards who witnessed the icy object plummet to its pulpy end believe that it might have been a blessing from above.
“It came from God… because the (security guard) strike is over,” one of the men told the Saturday Star.’
`Doctors have their first proof that a man who was barely conscious for nearly 20 years regained speech and movement because his brain spontaneously rewired itself by growing tiny new nerve connections to replace the ones sheared apart in a car crash.
Terry Wallis, 42, is thought to be the only person in the United States to recover so dramatically so long after a severe brain injury. He still needs help eating and cannot walk, but his speech continues to improve and he can count to 25 without interruption.’
`Scott Wilson won’t eat his newest flavor of ice cream.
He warns customers at his ice cream shop away from it. And he’s not even sure whether he’ll make another batch when he runs out.
It’s called Cold Sweat.
Along with milk, sugar and the other usual ingredients, the ice cream is made with three kinds of peppers and two kinds of hot sauce. It’s so spicy that just touching it makes your fingers feel hot.’
`The velvet ropes were down Friday as Priscilla and Lisa Marie Presley gave a private “family” tour of Graceland to President and Mrs. Bush and Japanese Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi. [..]
Elvis’s daughter said she “inherited from my dad” his interest in Japan – she even went to Kyoto to get married earlier this year. “I’ve been several times,” she said, and was rewarded with a hearty embrace from Koizumi as he sang the opening lines to Elvis’s “I Want You, I Need You, I Love You”: “Hold me close, hold me tight.”
The prime minister told People of the trip, “It was thrilling. It was exciting. This was a dream come true. When I think of the United States, it’s Elvis.”‘
‘Forget politics, oligarchs and Chechnya. What Russians really want to ask their leader is when he lost his virginity, when he will legalise marijuana and when a giant fictional octopus sleeping at the bottom of the ocean will awaken.
These are at least some of the most popular questions being put by Russian website surfers to President Vladimir Putin on the Yandex website in preparation for a July 6 interactive Internet question-and-answer session. [..]
Ranked most popular on Yandex on Monday with 8 080 votes was a question on what possessed Putin to kiss a young boy on the stomach during a walkabout in a Kremlin courtyard last Wednesday. [..]
More than 3 000 surfers voted on a question from Viktor, 29, on what Putin thought about the re-awakening of the Cthulhu, a fictional octopus-like creature invented by 20th century horror writer HP Lovecraft.’
Edit: Now with stomach kissing video.
(1meg Flash video)
see it here »
`People in Britain view the United States as a vulgar, crime-ridden society obsessed with money and led by an incompetent president whose Iraq policy is failing, according to a newspaper poll. [..]
With much of the worst criticism aimed at the US adminstration, the poll showed that 70 percent of Britons like Americans a lot or a little.
US President George W. Bush fared significantly worse, with just one percent rating him a “great leader” against 77 percent who deemed him a “pretty poor” or “terrible” leader.
More than two-thirds who offered an opinion said America is essentially an imperial power seeking world domination. And 81 per cent of those who took a view said President George W Bush hypocritically championed democracy as a cover for the pursuit of American self-interests.’
`Microsoft has dropped Big Brother-style plans to track down pirated copies of Windows XP, dumping elements of its Windows Genuine Advantage Notification after they ignited a firestorm of controversy.
The stealth application, introduced with auto updates in Australia in April as part of a pilot scheme, “phoned home” every time the computer was booted to confirm that the operating system was genuine.
If the software was pirated it triggered a series of irritating warnings. Now Microsoft has reacted to user anger by switching off the boot-up check.’
`It happens to more machines that it should. I decided to see what the problem might be. I searched google, forums, and newsgroups for an answer. The biggest culprit is a problem unloading the current users profile. [..]
This is why Microsoft released the User Profile Hive Cleanup Service’
What happens when you slap a sleeping elephant seal?
(570kB Windows media)
see it here »
`The day Michael Jackson was acquitted of child molestation charges, his teenage accuser, a cancer survivor, thought life couldn’t get any worse.
“Why didn’t they believe me? I told the truth. Why didn’t they believe me?” the anguished boy cried when prosecutors broke the news to him by telephone.
But in the year since the verdict June 13, 2005, the 16-year-old’s existence has sunk to an even lonelier hell. His mom has turned her back on him, blaming him for the courtroom loss, for the alleged abuse by the pop idol, even for welfare fraud charges filed against her, the Daily News has learned.’
`The world’s first teraflop computer has been decommissioned by the U.S. government despite still being among the world’s 500 fastest supercomputers.
Although young in age, the historic supercomputer — based at the Sandia National Laboratories in Albuquerque, N.M., and known as ASCI Red — is very old by supercomputer standards. ‘
`A Maplewood police officer was charged with several felonies for allegedly falsely imprisoning a man and threatening to beat him, only to let him go when the man called 911 on his cell phone from the back of a squad car.
Washington County Attorney Doug Johnson said Friday that his office had charged Officer Jason Patrick Marino, 31, with kidnapping, terroristic threats, misconduct and several other counts stemming from the incident on April 28, 2006.’
A US Senator explains why he voted against a net neutrality bill:
`There’s one company now you can sign up and you can get a movie delivered to your house daily by delivery service. Okay. And currently it comes to your house, it gets put in the mail box when you get home and you change your order but you pay for that, right.
But this service isn’t going to go through the interent and what you do is you just go to a place on the internet and you order your movie and guess what you can order ten of them delivered to you and the delivery charge is free.
Ten of them streaming across that internet and what happens to your own personal internet?
I just the other day got, an internet was sent by my staff at 10 o’clock in the morning on Friday and I just got it yesterday. Why?
Because it got tangled up with all these things going on the internet commercially.’
`Genetically modified tomatoes containing edible vaccine are to be used to challenge two of the world’s most lethal viruses.
The aim is to create affordable vaccines for HIV and the hepatitis B virus (HBV) that could be easily grown and processed in the countries where they are most needed. So far, none of the 90 or so potential vaccines against HIV have proved successful and, though a vaccine already exists for HBV, it is too expensive to be used by poorer countries.’
