‘Soothing rose or tangy lemon? If all goes according to plan, people in the western Indian city of Ahmadabad should find themselves confronted by those two scents by the end of the year when they are stopped by police.
The city’s police department is working with a team of designers to provide 8,000 officers with new uniforms that will be made with specially scented, lightweight fabric designed to keep the police officers sweet smelling and sweat free.
“We think that by end of the year, you will notice a new fresh look when you are intercepted by one of our men,” said J. Mahapatra, the city’s police commissioner.’
‘Mars’s southern polar ice cap contains enough water to cover the entire planet approximately 36 feet (11 meters) deep if melted, according to a new radar study.
It’s the most precise calculation yet for the thickness of the red planet’s ice, according to the international team of researchers responsible for the discovery.
Using an ice-penetrating radar to map the south pole’s underlying terrain, the scientists calculated that the ice is up to 2.2 miles (3,500 meters) thick in places, said the study’s leader, Jeffrey Plaut of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California.
The radar, from the Mars Express orbiter, also revealed the surprising purity of the ice, Plaut added.’
‘Every guy has been in a position where he is asked a question and he doesn’t respond completely honestly. What if guys stopped lying and started saying what they were really thinking?’
(8.5meg Windows media)
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‘Malaysian police detained an eight-member gang of small-sized robbers dubbed the “midget gang,” who allegedly confessed to committing 14 break-ins over the past three months, a news report said Thursday.
All the gang members, aged between 14 and 23 years, were diminutive, The Star newspaper said without saying whether they were dwarfs or just small.
Some of them who were less than 5 feet tall would be picked to squeeze through small openings into the houses they robbed in central Malaysia, The Star said.
Gang members confessed to their crimes when they were detained, according to the report.’
‘A hamster was rescued from inside a pipe by being sucked up on the end of a vacuum cleaner.
Henry the hamster managed to get trapped in a pipe – that measured 10cm wide and 4ft deep – in the kitchen of a house in Tamworth, Staffordshire.
His owner, from Crossfell, Stonydelph, asked for the assistance of two street wardens after the RSPCA couldn’t help and other rescue attempts failed.
The wardens tried a number of ways to reach Henry, including tying a number of hamster ladders together and Curly Wurly bars tied to a piece of string.
As a last resort they attached a crevice tool to the vacuum cleaner and sucked Henry out. ‘
‘There’s a new sheriff in town and his name is John Doe. And he may be in the cubicle next to you.
Under a newly amended rule from the Internal Revenue Service, ordinary citizens can help the tax man cometh, or at least collect. The new Whistleblower Office is the IRS’s attempt to give incentives for you to rat out the tax cheats you know.
That’s right. If your employer, co-worker, landlord, neighbor or father-in-law is raking in fistfuls of cash and bypassing Uncle Sam, you can anonymously report the abuse to the IRS and snag a windfall from their dishonesty.
As long as the total amount of tax fraud comes out to at least $2 million (including penalties, interest, and whatever else the government ultimately collects based on your report), you can get a 15 to 30 percent cut.’
‘The clouded leopard of Borneo — discovered to be an entirely new species — is the latest in a growing list of animals and plants unique to the Southeast Asian country’s rainforest and underscores the need to preserve the area, conservationists said Thursday.
Genetic tests by researchers at the U.S. National Cancer Institute revealed that the clouded leopard of Borneo and Sumatra islands is a unique cat species and not the same one found in mainland Southeast Asia as long believed, said a statement by WWF, the global conservation organization.’
(12meg Windows media)
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This is a large picture of a whale.
‘The best approach to CPR for a bystander who wants to save the life of a victim of sudden cardiac arrest is to pump the chest and skip the mouth-to-mouth, a Japanese study suggests. [..]
Ken Nagao of Surugadai Nihon University Hospital in Tokyo and colleagues compared how well more than 4,000 adults fared after receiving traditional CPR, the chest-compressions only approach, or no CPR at all until paramedics arrived.
Patients who received only chest compressions had less brain damage than those who got compressions and breaths, the team reported in Saturday’s issue of the medical journal The Lancet. Not surprisingly, patients who had no CPR had the poorest outcomes.’
‘Public health advocates are turning to a new medium to combat statutory rape among Hispanics in Virginia: A comic book warning that sex between teenage girls and older men risks pregnancy or arrest.
The effort grew out of a 2004 rape-prevention campaign that emblazoned the question “Isn’t she a little young?” on everything from billboards to napkins.
To adapt that message for Hispanics, officials created a fotonovela, a type of Latino comic book featuring themes of love and betrayal.
“Getting males to challenge their peers about having sex with teens is hard in any culture,” said Robert Franklin, an outreach coordinator with the state health department. He said a one-size-fits-all approach wouldn’t work. “I can’t just translate ‘Isn’t she a little young?’ into Spanish.”‘
You need to watch the slow-mo to fully appreciate his pain. 🙂
(5.7meg Windows media)
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‘So Wolf began snooping around and found that two chains, Costco and Sam’s Club, sold generics at prices far, far below the other chains. Even once you factor in the cost of buying a membership at Costco and Sam’s Club, the price differences were astounding. Here are the prices he found at Houston stores for 90 tablets of generic Prozac:
Walgreens: $117
Eckerd: $115
CVS: $115
Sam’s Club: $15
Costco: $12
Those aren’t typos. Walgreens charges $117 for a bottle of the same pills for which Costco charges $12.’
‘Ricky Lackey has six children on the way.
Don’t call them sextuplets – they’re each with different women.
When Hamilton County Common Pleas Judge Melba Marsh asked Lackey during sentencing Friday on a charge of attempted theft how many children he had, the 25-year-old said, “None, but I have six on the way.”
A stunned Marsh tried to clarify. “Are you marrying a woman with six children?” she asked.
“No, I be concubining,” he said. [..]
Marsh said she wasn’t sure how to respond, so she let the issue drop since it wasn’t relevant to the proceedings.’
Build a paper plane and see how far you can throw it.
I can’t throw it very far.
(1.1meg Shockwave)
‘You run into a shop and tell everyone to hit the floor. For every muppet that hits the deck, you get a point. Simple.’
(7.1meg Windows media)
see it here »
‘Marine veteran Jonathan Schulze survived the war in Iraq but almost two years after he came home, it ended up killing him, reports The Early Show co-anchor Harry Smith. [..]
“She asked, ‘Why do you want to be seen?’ and I was standing behind him and he was sitting in a chair, his shoulders were slumped and Jim was standing in the doorway and he said, ‘I feel suicidal,’ ” Marianne Schulze said.
His parents say the VA told Jonathan they couldn’t admit him that day and asked if he would call back the next day. He did but was told he was number 26 on a waiting-list and the VA didn’t have enough beds for him. Four days later he hung himself.’
‘A fossil unearthed in northeastern China has middle ear anatomy somewhere between more primitive and modern mammals, confirming for the first time transitional steps in the evolution of the important structure.
Scientists suspected the malleus or hammer, incus or anvil, and stapes or stirrup, split off from a location at the hinge of the lower jaw to become separate structures.
The new find, 125 million-year-old Yanoconodon allini, has middle ear bones that are partly separated from the jaw, but remain connected by a bridge of ossified cartilage. [..]
As Dr. Luo put it: “We have now a clear case documenting why a very elaborate and very delicate and very sophisticated ear structure came about and how it came about.”‘
‘A girl, aged three, was almost killed when an elderly man crashed his car into her Adelaide home and three other houses.
The driver, aged in his mid-70s, drove straight into a house on the corner of Nikoloff Crt and Shelley Ave at Fulham Gardens about 5.30pm yesterday.
His Daewoo Leganza hit the garage door with such force it pushed the property owner’s vehicle through another wall and into their loungeroom.
The driver then reversed and crashed into another house, severely damaging the front wall, garage, and another car.
Shocked residents ran out to survey the damage and were horrified to see the man still driving. They said he swerved along Baka Ave before jumping the kerb and smashing into the front porch of another residence on Lindsay St.’
‘The Lorentz Gun can direct a 15,000 Ampere plasma channel through the air along a straight trajectory, at grounded targets up to 35 ft downrange. The gun consists of 30 high pressure pneumatic dart stations, each capable of launching a tapered aluminum sabot that trails a thin ‘seed wire’ 0.008 inches in diameter. Cannon tilt and pan is pneumatic, and a sighting laser is located inside the cannon head. When a launched sabot contacts the target, the Marx-configured capacitor bank automatically fires and erects the bank to 110,000 volts, igniting a plasma channel along the vaporized seed wire. The plasma channel quickly intensifies, magnetically confined in the air by the Lorentz forces of its own current. Damage to the target can vary widely. Most spectators experience some degree of sinus discomfort after several firings, due to the high brissance of the plasma explosion. The capacitor bank is currently disassembled, and newer capacitors are being added to increase the bank energy to 250 kilojoules, and the range to 50 feet.’
‘A massive, mysterious whirlpool of cold water has developed off the coast of Sydney, forcing the sea surface to fall almost 1m and ocean currents to change course.
Dubbed a sea “monster” by CSIRO oceanographers, the huge body of water stretches almost 200km across and plunges 1000m towards the ocean floor. Its centre sits just 100km off the coast of Sydney and could stay there for months.
Scientists are baffled by the powerful cold-water eddy, which is invisible to the human eye but can be tracked through satellite images.
At its centre the sea level has dropped by 70cm, while the water 400m below the surface is 6C colder than normal at that depth.’
‘A 17-year-old girl who spent weeks looking for her missing dog unwrapped a box left on her doorstep and found the pet’s severed head inside, authorities said.
Homicide investigators were looking into the case because of the “implied” terroristic threat, St. Paul Police Sgt. Jim Gray said. The Humane Society of the United States said Wednesday it was offering a reward of up to $2,500 for information leading to an arrest and conviction.
“This was extraordinarily heinous,” said Dale Bartlett, the Humane Society’s deputy manager for animal cruelty issues. “I deal with hundreds and hundreds of cruelty cases each year. When I read about this case, it took my breath away. It’s horrible.”‘
You start 280m up, traven for 2km and reach a top speed of 160km/hr.
see it here »
These people run a server in China and will tell you what web sites are being blocked by the Chinese firewall.
China can see me. Hooray. 🙂 Bite the wax tadpole!
‘Even casual YouTube users have no doubt come across video clips that the company has taken down for one reason or another, but a new service gives viewers at least a chance to see the offending content. Delutube, as its name implies, can serve up some video clips even after YouTube has purged them. [..]
Delutube allows visitors to enter the video ID (pulled from the end of the YouTube URL) of a deleted clip, then attempts to retrieve the clip from YouTube’s system. Clips are not apparently deleted from YouTube’s database at the moment they are taken down (or they at least persist in YouTube’s cache before being cleared), allowing Delutube a chance of retrieving them. The site also allows for the easy downloading of clips.’
‘Prosecutors have demanded a judge impose a harsh two-year prison sentence for the editor-in-chief of the Indonesian version of Playboy. Erwin Arnada was charged in June with distributing indecent pictures and profiting from their sale.
More than 100 Muslim protesters attending the hearing thought the prosecution’s demands were too lax. The raucous group chanted “Hang him, hang him” in the courtroom.
In April, the launch of Playboy’s first Indonesian edition, which contained no nude photos, sparked widespread public debate over morality and decency in the largely Muslim nation.’
This turkey doesn’t like policemen.
(6.5meg Windows media)
see it here »
This is a fun little time killing game. 🙂
(1.7meg Shockwave)
‘A 6-year-old boy stayed in an apartment with the body of his father for two days after the man died on their sofa, obeying instructions to never leave without permission, firefighters said.
The boy, whose name was not released, didn’t want to leave even after firefighters arrived, fearing punishment if he left, fire department Maj. Noble Lee said.
“He wasn’t as distraught as one might think,” Lee said. “I don’t think he understands the gravity of the past few days. He wasn’t as upset at the situation as he was about being outside the residence without permission.”‘
