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Lost parrot tells veterinarian his address

Wed, 21 May 2008 20:27:03 GMT

clipped by: ratilfar

TOKYO - When Yosuke the parrot flew out of his cage and got lost, he did exactly what he had been taught — recite his name and address to a stranger willing to help.

He kept mum with the cops, but began chatting after a few days with the vet.

"I'm Mr. Yosuke Nakamura," the bird told the veterinarian, according to Uemura. The parrot also provided his full home address, down to the street number, and even entertained the hospital staff by singing songs.

The Nakamura family told police they had been teaching the bird its name and address for about two years.

But Yosuke apparently wasn't keen on opening up to police officials.

"I tried to be friendly and talked to him, but he completely ignored me," Uemura said.

'Witches' burnt to death in Kenya

Wed, 21 May 2008 18:01:31 GMT

clipped by: invictus

Clip Source: news.bbc.co.uk

Eleven elderly people accused of being witches have been burned to death by a mob in the west of Kenya, police say.

A security operation has been launched to hunt down villagers suspected of killing them in Kisii District.

The BBC's Muliro Telewa in the region says the gang had a list of the victims and picked them out individually.

The area has witnessed similar attacks in the past when people suspected of engaging in witchcraft have been killed or ostracised.

But our reporter says that this is a surprisingly large number of people to be attacked at the same time.

Tags: africa, kenya, witch hunt, terror, lynch, bigotry

My Name is Not "Those People"

Tue, 20 May 2008 23:11:34 GMT

clipped by: dmegivern
clipper's remarks: A wonderful poem by Julia Dinsmore

Clip Source: depts.loras.edu

My Name Is Not "Those People"

By Julia Dinsmore

My name is not "Problem and Case to Be Managed."
I am a capable human being and citizen, not a client.
The social service system can never replace the compassion
and concern of loving Grandparents, Aunts, Uncles, Fathers,
Cousins, Community - all the bonded people who need to be

but are not present to bring children forward to their potential.

My name is not "Lazy, Dependent Welfare Mother."

If the unwaged work of parenting, homemaking and community building was factored into the Gross National Product, my work would have untold value. And I wonder why my middle-class sisters whose husbands support them to raise their children are glorified - and they don't get called lazy and dependent.

My name is not "Ignorant, Dumb or Uneducated."
I live with an income of $621 with $169 in food stamps.

Rent is $585. that leaves $36 a month to live on. I am such a genius at surviving that I could balance the state budget in an hour.

Tags: social services

The memory hacker - creating brain implants

Tue, 20 May 2008 12:48:07 GMT

clipped by: Silkweaver

Clip Source: www.popsci.com

Ted Berger has spent the past decade engineering a brain implant that can re-create thoughts. The chip could remedy everything from Alzheimer´s to absent-mindedness-and reduce memory loss to nothing more than a computer glitch

Berger´s research team-an all-star roster of neuroscientists, mathematicians, computer engineers and bioengineers from around the country-has so far managed to reproduce only a minute amount of brain activity.

Their chip models fewer than 12,000 neurons, compared with the 100 billion or so present in a human brain.

Yet researchers within the field say that even this small number represents a stunning achievement in the field of neuro-engineering.

It´s straight mechanic-talk from the man who has created a prototype of the world´s first memory implant, basically a hardware version of the brain cells in your hippocampus that are crucial to the formation of memory.

Tags: neuroscience, brain computer interface, memory

Older Brain May Be Wiser

Wed, 21 May 2008 09:54:42 GMT

clipped by: debbyski
clipper's remarks: “For the young people, it’s as if the distraction never happened,” said an author of the review, Lynn Hasher, a professor of psychology at the University of Toronto and a senior scientist at the Rotman Research Institute. “But for older adults, because they’ve retained all this extra data, they’re now suddenly the better problem solvers. They can transfer the information they’ve soaked up from one situation to another.”

Clip Source: www.nytimes.com

When older people can no longer remember names at a cocktail party, they tend to think that their brainpower is declining. But a growing number of studies suggest that this assumption is often wrong.

Instead, the research finds, the aging brain is simply taking in more data and trying to sift through a clutter of information, often to its long-term benefit.

Some brains do deteriorate with age. Alzheimer’s disease, for example, strikes 13 percent of Americans 65 and older. But for most aging adults, the authors say, much of what occurs is a gradually widening focus of attention that makes it more difficult to latch onto just one fact, like a name or a telephone number. Although that can be frustrating, it is often useful.

“It may be that distractibility is not, in fact, a bad thing,” said Shelley H. Carson, a psychology researcher at Harvard whose work was cited in the book. “It may increase the amount of information available to the conscious mind.”

Tags: thank, god

Reuters Year 2007 in Pictures

Wed, 21 May 2008 17:47:26 GMT

clipped by: Lubaska

Clip Source: www.news.com.au

USA ... the tiny feet of Amilia Sonja Taylor, the world's most premature living baby, after her birth at Baptist Children's Hospital in Miami, Florida / Reuters photo

Clip Source: www.news.com.au

Austria ... women dressed as clowns in front of a work by British artist Damien Hirst titled "Iodomethane - 13C" at the Kunsthaus in Bregenz, February 17, 2007 / Reuters photo

Clip Source: www.news.com.au

South Africa ... surfers in an attempt to break the Guinness world record for the highest number of riders on a single wave at Muizenberg in Cape Town September 2, 2007 / Reuters photo

Clip Source: www.news.com.au

Japan ... workers butcher a 10-tonne Baird's Beaked Whale at Wada Port in Japan, June 21, 2007 / Reuters photo

Clip Source: www.news.com.au

Poland ... a combination of pictures shows two planes from the Zelazny aerobatics team crashing at the Radom Air Show, September 1, 2007 / Reuters photo

Clip Source: www.news.com.au

Poland ... kayakers in the Rospuda nature reserve near Augustow, July 26, 2007 / Reuters photo

Clip Source: www.news.com.au

China ... paramilitary recruits practice goose-stepping in Nanjing, January 19, 2007 / Reuters photo

Clip Source: www.news.com.au

Tags: reuters, photography, world, 2007

UK planning to monitor and record every phone call, web page, and email sent by citizens

Wed, 21 May 2008 17:53:36 GMT

clipped by: Mohir
clipper's remarks: scary

Clip Source: www.engadget.com

We're not sure if these plans will ever make it to reality, but the Telegraph is reporting that Britain's Home Office is working on database designed to store the details of every phone call, email, and web page accessed by British citizens in the previous year. The idea is to have various telecom providers hand over their records, which will all go into the database and then be accessible by police upon receipt of a court order. Of course, there's no reason why police couldn't simply ask the ISPs for the appropriate data when they get that court order, since records are already required to be kept for a year, but sometimes it's important for a government to build a massive scary database of personal information with endless potential for abuse by embittered low-level bureaucrats, you know? The plan is still in draft stages, so hopefully it dies on the table -- and if not, well, the NSA welcomes you with open arms, British expats.

Tags: 1984, internet, uk

24 Amazing Pictures of Money

Tue, 20 May 2008 22:27:02 GMT

clipped by: Charolastra

Clip Source: www.delraycc.com

Money makes the world go around. It also makes for some truly amazing pictures. Photo credits are given by number at the bottom of the page.

1. World's Largest Gold Bar

2. $10,000 Dollar Bill

3. $100,000 Dollar Note

4. What 50 Million Pennies Look Like

5. Security Glass Advertisement

6. Dress Made With $100,000 Dollars

7. Portraits Made of Pennies

8. Vault Of Gold

9. What $1 Million Pennies Look Like

10. Pyramid Of Pennies

11. Largest Bank Vault Door In the World

12. 100 Million Pennies

13. Drug Money

14. A Wall Of Gold

15. Origami Money

16. Largest Gold Nugget Ever Found

17. World's Largest Gold Coin

18. Don't Flush the Money Down the Toilet

19. First Cash Register

20. Walls of Money

21. Stack of Silver Certificates

22. Another Vault of Gold

23. Money Tree

24. Ceiling of Money

Tags: money, creative, amazing, pictures

First dinosaur tracks found in Arabian Peninsula

Wed, 21 May 2008 14:11:48 GMT

clipped by: invictus

Clip Source: news.yahoo.com

Scientists have discovered the tracks of a herd of 11 long-necked sauropods walking along a coastal mudflat in what is now the Republic of Yemen, the first discovery of dinosaur footprints on the Arabian peninsula.

Sauropods, the largest land animals in earth's history, walked on four stout legs and ate plants.

"The nice thing is we finally filled in a bit of a blank spot in the dinosaur map," said Anne Schulp, a palaeontologist at the University of Maastricht in the Netherlands, who worked on the study.

The creatures roamed the Earth from about 228 million years ago to 65 million years ago, the middle of the age of dinosaurs.

Paleontologists have so far unearthed only a few dinosaur fossils from the Arabian peninsula and possible fragments of a long-necked dinosaur from Yemen.

Tags: palaeontology, dinosaurs, yemen, arabia, science

The world's first BILLION dollar home

Wed, 21 May 2008 09:14:37 GMT

clipped by: Antara
clipper's remarks: Hmmm, I dunno.......

Clip Source: www.forbes.com

Exterior

Antilla, the partially completed home of Mumbai-based petrochemicals giant Reliance Industries head Mukesh Ambani, will stand 27 stories high and is expected to cost $2 billion. Ambani, the fifth richest man in the world, his wife and three children currently live in a 22-story Mumbai tower the family has spent years remodeling and refashioning to meet its needs.

Clip Source: www.forbes.com

Lobby

Clip Source: www.forbes.com

Bathroom

Clip Source: www.forbes.com

World's Most Expensive Home

India's richest man is building a billion dollar high-rise in Mumbai.

Clip Source: www.forbes.com

Health Level

Clip Source: www.forbes.com

World's Most Expensive Home

India's richest man is building a billion dollar high-rise in Mumbai.

Tags: india, worlds most expensive home, forbes

The Neurological Roots of Sexual Pleasure

Tue, 20 May 2008 13:26:00 GMT

clipped by: skwirlinator

Clip Source: www.sciam.com

The Orgasmic Mind: The Neurological Roots of Sexual Pleasure

Key Concepts

Principles of Pleasure

PAGE 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | Next»

Achieving orgasm, brain imaging studies show, involves more than heightened arousal. It requires a release of inhibitions engineered by shutdown of the brain’s center of vigilance in both sexes and a widespread neural power failure in females.

Sexual desire and orgasm are subject to various influences on the brain and nervous system, which controls the sex glands and genitals.

20 Things You Didn't Know About... Relativity

Tue, 20 May 2008 19:49:07 GMT

clipped by: Mohir
clipper's remarks: the rest of the 20 in the website

Clip Source: discovermagazine.com

1 Who invented relativity? Bzzzt—wrong. Galileo hit on the idea in 1639, when he showed that a falling object behaves the same way on a moving ship as it does in a motionless building.

2 And Einstein didn’t call it relativity. The word never appears in his original 1905 paper, “On the Electrodynamics of Moving Bodies,” and he hated the term, preferring “invariance theory” (because the laws of physics look the same to all observers—nothing “relative” about it).

3 Space-time continuum? Nope, that’s not Einstein either. The idea of time as the fourth dimension came from Hermann Minkowski, one of Einstein’s professors, who once called him a “lazy dog.”

4 But Einstein did reformulate Galileo’s relativity to deal with the bizarre things that happen at near-light speed, where time slows down and space gets compressed. That counts for something.

5 Austrian physicist Friedrich Hasenöhrl published the basic equation E = mc² a year before Einstein did.

Tags: relativity, einstein, physics, trivia

great illusions - by sandro del prete

Tue, 20 May 2008 22:32:03 GMT

clipped by: boozich

Clip Source: muzich.blogspot.com

Rare albino tadpoles

Tue, 20 May 2008 07:06:44 GMT

clipped by: michellezm
clipper's remarks: "What's unusual about this is that the batches of white tadpoles suggest that a number of adults that carry genes for albinism possibly exist in the area, not just one."

"Usually though albino amphibians fail to live to a breeding age - their white colour makes them a blindingly conspicuous beacon for the various animals that depend on frogs for food." she added.

Clip Source: www.dailymail.co.uk

Experts on amphibians have been caught on the hop by a rare batch of albino tadpoles living in a garden pond.

Tiny pale globules of frog spawn and tadpoles are now under observation at a secret and closely guarded address in Carmarthenshire, west Wales.

Experts from Froglife were called in after at least four separate blobs of albino spawn were found deposited in the pond.

They believe the "highly unusual" discovery could point to a significant frog population carrying the rare recessive gene for albinism.

No adult albino frogs have so far been discovered but their frog spawn and tadpoles have the characteristic pink eyes and off-white skin colour.

"Albino individuals of adult frogs, toads and newts have been reported in the past, though sightings are considered very rare," a spokesman said.

"Cases of multiple albinistic individuals in a breeding population are even rarer."

Hubble Survey Finds Missing Matter

Wed, 21 May 2008 10:07:56 GMT

clipped by: Silkweaver

Clip Source: www.physorg.com

Although the universe contains billions of galaxies, only a small amount of its matter is locked up in these behemoths. Most of the universe's matter that was created during and just after the Big Bang must be found elsewhere.

Now, in an extensive search of the local universe, astronomers say they have definitively found about half of the missing normal matter, called baryons, in the spaces between the galaxies.

This important component of the universe is known as the "intergalactic medium,"

Baryons are protons, neutrons, and other subatomic particles that make up ordinary matter such as hydrogen, helium, and heavier elements. Baryonic matter forms stars, planets, moons, and even the interstellar gas and dust from which new stars are born.

Astronomers caution that the missing baryonic matter is not to be confused with "dark matter," a mysterious and exotic form of matter that is only detected via its gravitational pull.

Tags: astronmomy, astrophysics