Thursday, August 4, 2016
6 Parenting Tips from Around the World That Only Sound Crazy to Americans
Diaper-free babies and nipple-offering dads are just a few.
Celebs Are Hitting Up Sweat Lodges for Better Skin—but Does It Work?
Are there really any benefits to dripping buckets?
Slave Leia Sailor Moon
You can see more cosplay photos of Knockie at her Instagram page, including pictures of her with a Jedi Sailor Moon cosplayer.
Meanwhile, at a high school reunion…
After meeting several of her friends and former school mates, they are sitting at a table where he is yawning and overly bored.
The band cranks up and people are beginning to dance. There’s a guy on the dance floor living it large, break dancing, moon walking, back flips, buying drinks for people… the works!
Wife turns to her husband and says, “See that guy? 25 years ago he proposed to me & I turned him down.”
Husband says: “Looks like he’s still celebrating!!!
Just Thinking About Marriage Can Make People Less Likely to Commit Crimes
So don’t feel bad about dreaming about your wedding day.
Man hospitalized after waiting 10 days in airport for online girlfriend who never arrived
A Dutch man flew to China to meet a woman he met online and refused to
leave the airport after she did not turn up for 10 days, before ending
up in hospital suffering from exhaustion.
Alexander Pieter Cirk, 41, recently flew from the Netherlands to Hunan
province in the hope of meeting his online girlfriend, a Chinese woman
known only as Ms Zhang.
But he ended up spending 10 days waiting at Changsha airport, after she
failed to show up.
Mr Cirk said that he met Ms Zhang, 26, in an app two months ago and
romance blossomed.
He decided to fly to visit her, but when he got to Hunan found no-one had come to meet him.
He refused to leave the airport for the next 10 days, and was eventually taken to hospital suffering from physical exhaustion.
Ms Zhang later said that she had thought it had all been a joke.
"We had advanced our romantic relationship but later he seemed a little callous towards me," Ms Zhang said. 
"One day he sent me a photo of air tickets abruptly and I thought it was
a joke. He didn't contact me later."
Ms Zhang also added that by the time Mr Cirk arrived at the airport, she
was away having plastic surgery in another province and had turned off
her phone.
Ms Zhang said that she would like to meet Mr Cirk when he is feeling
better and is still interested in maintaining their relationship, but
it's understood that he flew back to the Netherlands on Monday.
Is Earthly Life Premature from a Cosmic Perspective?
“If you ask, ‘When is life most likely to emerge?’ you might naively
say, ‘Now,'” says lead author Avi Loeb of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center
for Astrophysics. “But we find that the chance of life grows much
higher in the distant future.”
Life as we know it first became possible about 30 million years after
the Big Bang, when the first stars seeded the cosmos with the necessary
elements like carbon and oxygen. Life will end 10 trillion years from
now when the last stars fade away and die. Loeb and his colleagues
considered the relative likelihood of life between those two boundaries.The dominant factor proved to be the lifetimes of stars. The higher a star’s mass, the shorter its lifetime. Stars larger than about three times the sun’s mass will expire before life has a chance to evolve.
Conversely, the smallest stars weigh less than 10 percent as much as the Sun. They will glow for 10 trillion years, giving life ample time to emerge on any planets they host. As a result, the probability of life grows over time. In fact, chances of life are 1000 times higher in the distant future than now.
“So then you may ask, why aren’t we living in the future next to a low-mass star?” says Loeb.
“One possibility is we’re premature. Another possibility is that the environment around a low-mass star is hazardous to life.”
Although low-mass, red dwarf stars live for a long time, they also pose unique threats. In their youth they emit strong flares and ultraviolet radiation that could strip the atmosphere from any rocky world in the habitable zone.
To determine which possibility is correct — our premature existence or the hazard of low-mass stars — Loeb recommends studying nearby red dwarf stars and their planets for signs of habitability. Future space missions like the Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite and James Webb Space Telescope should help to answer these questions.
The paper describing this work has been accepted for publication in the Journal of Cosmology and Astroparticle Physics and is available online. Its co-authors are Avi Loeb (Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics) and Rafael Batista and David Sloan (University of Oxford). Loeb simultaneously wrote an extended review on the habitability of the universe as a chapter for a forthcoming book.
Headquartered in Cambridge, Mass., the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for
Astrophysics (CfA) is a joint collaboration between the Smithsonian
Astrophysical Observatory and the Harvard College Observatory. CfA
scientists, organized into six research divisions, study the origin,
evolution and ultimate fate of the universe.
For more information, contact:
Christine Pulliam
Media Relations Manager
Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics
617-495-7463
cpulliam@cfa.harvard.edu
Christine Pulliam
Media Relations Manager
Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics
617-495-7463
cpulliam@cfa.harvard.edu
A new leaf: Scientists turn carbon dioxide back into fuel
Produced by the burning of fossil fuels in power plants and car engines, carbon dioxide continues to accumulate in the atmosphere, warming the planet. But trees and other plants do slowly capture carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, converting it to sugars that store energy.
One of the chief challenges of sequestering carbon dioxide is that it is relatively chemically unreactive. “On its own, it is quite difficult to convert carbon dioxide into something else,” said Argonne chemist Larry Curtiss, an author of the study.
To make carbon dioxide into something that could be a usable fuel, Curtiss and his colleagues needed to find a catalyst – a particular compound that could make carbon dioxide react more readily. When converting carbon dioxide from the atmosphere into a sugar, plants use an organic catalyst called an enzyme; the researchers used a metal compound called tungsten diselenide, which they fashioned into nanosized flakes to maximize the surface area and to expose its reactive edges.
While plants use their catalysts to make sugar, the Argonne researchers used theirs to convert carbon dioxide to carbon monoxide. Although carbon monoxide is also a greenhouse gas, it is much more reactive than carbon dioxide and scientists already have ways of converting carbon monoxide into usable fuel, such as methanol. “Making fuel from carbon monoxide means travelling ‘downhill’ energetically, while trying to create it directly from carbon dioxide means needing to go ‘uphill,'” said Argonne physicist Peter Zapol, another author of the study.
Although the reaction to transform carbon dioxide into carbon monoxide is different from anything found in nature, it requires the same basic inputs as photosynthesis. “In photosynthesis, trees need energy from light, water and carbon dioxide in order to make their fuel; in our experiment, the ingredients are the same, but the product is different,” said Curtiss.
The setup for the reaction is sufficiently similar to nature that the research team was able to construct an “artificial leaf” that could complete the entire three-step reaction pathway. In the first step, incoming photons – packets of light – are converted to pairs of negatively-charged electrons and corresponding positively-charged “holes” that then separate from each other. In the second step, the holes react with water molecules, creating protons and oxygen molecules. Finally, the protons, electrons and carbon dioxide all react together to create carbon monoxide and water.
“We burn so many different kinds of hydrocarbons – like coal, oil or gasoline – that finding an economical way to make chemical fuels more reusable with the help of sunlight might have a big impact,” Zapol said.
Towards this goal, the study also showed that the reaction occurs with minimal lost energy – the reaction is very efficient. “The less efficient a reaction is, the higher the energy cost to recycle carbon dioxide, so having an efficient reaction is crucial,” Zapol said.
According to Curtiss, the tungsten diselenide catalyst is also quite durable, lasting for more than 100 hours – a high bar for catalysts to meet.
The study, “Nanostructured transition metal dichalcogenide electrocatalysts for CO2 reduction in ionic liquid,” is published in today’s issue of Science. Much of the experimental work was performed at the University of Illinois at Chicago, while the computational work was performed at Argonne.
Man ripped up woman's lawn for posting bad reviews about his wife's business
A Florida man faces charges after police say he used his pick-up truck
in a fit of revenge to rip up the front lawn of a person who posted
negative reviews about his wife's animal clinic business.
Joshua Ryan Fields, 35, from Palm Bay, was charged with criminal
mischief after Palm Bay Police were called out last Tuesday to a home to
investigate reports of a person rolling into a yard at night in a black
Ford truck and spinning out large ruts through the grass. Police
estimated the damage to the yard from the late night incident to be at
least $300.
Fields was taken into custody for questioning and later released with a
court date.
The witness told police she was home sleeping when she was awakened by bright light shining through her windows. She then looked outside and saw the pick-up rev up its engine and then spin its rear tires in her grass. The truck’s driver repeated the action several times, rolling in and out of the yard. She told officers that she had recently posted negative reviews on a Palm Bay animal clinic’s website and thought that yard incident might be connected.
Officers located Fields at his home and determined he was the owner of the pick-up truck and the husband of the animal clinic owner. After initially denying the woman’s claim and telling officers to “get … out of my house,” he was arrested. He then told officers that, acting on his own, he sought revenge against the victim because she posted several negative reviews about his wife’s animal clinic. He then admitted that he was wrong.
Reckless endangerment charge for teacher who deflated tire of student's car parked in his space
Police say that school security allowed the student to park in the teacher’s space because the student parking area was unavailable. Kimble was released from custody after posting a $500 cash bond. He is due to appear in Waterbury court on August 10th.
Man arrested after argument with wife over three slices of cheese instead of two on sandwich
A man from Athens-Clarke County, Georgia, was arrested after an argument
over a grilled cheese sandwich escalated into physical violence,
according to police.
According to an Athens-Clarke County Police report, officers were called
to the Candy Circle home of James DePaola, 55, and his wife on July 27,
after he became upset over her using three slices of cheese instead of two when making that sandwich.
The report stated DePaola because “upset and animated,” acting as though he may hit her. Police said when she tried to call 911, he pulled the phone from the wall. The couple’s 12-year-old daughter was eventually able to call for police from a cell phone, according to the report.
DePaola later told police he didn’t want his wife to call 911 for such a "stupid" reason. Two other children, ages 9 and 14, in addition to the girl who called 911, were home at the time of the incident. DePaola was charged with obstruction of a 911 call and criminal trespass/damage to property.
Man arrested for hitting tourist with a shovel after dispute over digging on the beach
An argument about a hole on a beach led to a Florida man striking a
teenage tourist with the victim's shovel.
19-year-old Christian Gies had been hanging out at Treasure Island Beach
where he'd been vacationing with his family from Lexington, Kentucky,
and started digging a big hole in the sand.
Police say that enraged 53-year-old Christopher Carosella from Tampa.
“I just like to dig holes on the beach it was fun,” says Gies. But
Gies’s fun on the beach was interrupted when he says Carosella
confronted him.
“He said it was illegal to dig holes on the beach. I didn't know who he
was and told him if he had a problem he could contact security or
police,” says Gies.
“He was not bothering a soul. I don't understand at all why this guy had a problem with that,” says Christian’s dad, Drew Gies. The verbal argument escalated but did not come to blows, according to Drew. The two men then allegedly parted ways. Around 45 minutes later, Drew said that Christian left his shovel unattended and was planning on returning to his hotel room. In that time, Carosella attempted to get hotel security to intervene in the situation. They refused to help Carosella, according to Drew. Carosella picked up the shovel and confronted Christian a second time. During the second confrontation, Carosella and Christian continued to argue when Carosella allegedly began attacking Christian with the shovel. Christian ran from Carosella, who gave chase.
Bystanders on the beach stepped in and stopped Carosella from chasing
Christian.
“He was swinging at me and was like, ‘When I catch you, I'm going to
kill you kid',” says Christian.
According to the Treasure Island Police Department, Carosella struck the
victim twice, on the abdomen and on the left arm, causing bruising and
abrasions. Christian was assessed by paramedics but refused treatment at
the scene.
His dad returned to the beach to see police and paramedics surrounding
his son. “This guy was just causing trouble and Christian asked him to
stop and leave him alone,” says Drew Gies.
“He was obviously no public official in coming to me shirtless with a
beer in his hand,” says Christian Gies.
Treasure Island does have an ordinance that makes it illegal to dig a
big hole on the beach, if it's not filled in right away, when told to do so by a city official.
Police said that the ordinance is not meant to regulate kids building sand castles, but holes that someone could fall into or be a hazard for emergency vehicles. Christian says he had every intention to fill it in, and offered to do so even after the attack. Investigators say it wasn't Christian who broke the law. Carosella was arrested and transported to Pinellas County Jail. He has since been released on $10,000 bond. He’s facing aggravated battery charges. Carosella later said that Christian threatened to use the hole for his grave. “I said you've got two shovels you're pretty tough, huh? Put the shovels down. He wouldn't, so unfortunately things ensued,” Carosella says. When asked why he hit Gies with a shovel he says, “Because he called me vile names and swung at me first, and my lawyer will handle the rest of it.”
Strapping a Helicopter Camera Rig onto an Elephant
How do they do it? To find out, TechCrunch talked to Huw Cordley, a producer for many of the BBC's nature programs. The task requires a lot of creative problem solving:
“People are always developing new equipment,” Cordey says, half grinning, half sighing, as I imagine him waving at an enormous pile of Peli cases stacked in the corner of his no doubt stacked-to-the-rafters office, “which is perfect for us. If you think about it, wildlife hasn’t really changed what they have been doing since we started filming nature documentaries. Instead, we have to come up with new ways of telling their stories.”Photographed above is one of those solutions. It's an 85-pound gyroscopically stabilized camera rig known as a helicopter rig because that's what it's commonly attached to. This time, though, Cordley and his team attached it to an elephant.
Wednesday, August 3, 2016
The Daily Drift
Welcome to Today's Edition of
Carolina Naturally
Carolina Naturally
Carolina Naturally is read in 210 countries around the world daily.
Cool melons ... !
You want the unvarnished truth?
Don't forget to visit: The Truth Be Told
Some of our readers today have been in:
The Americas
Argentina - Bolivia - Brazil - Canada - Chile - Colombia
Dominican Republic - Ecuador - Honduras - Mexico - Nicaragua
Peru - Puerto Rico - Trinidad and Tobago - United States
Uruguay - Venezuela
Europe
Bosnia and Herzegovina - Bulgaria - Czech Republic
England - Estonia - France - Germany - Greece - Hungary
Ireland - Italy - Latvia - Netherlands - Norway - Poland
Portugal - Romania - Russia - San Marino - Scotland
Slovakia - Slovenia - Spain - Sweden - Switzerland - Ukraine - Wales
Asia
Brunei - China - India - Indonesia - Iran - Japan - Korea - Malaysia - Mauritius
Nepal - Oman - Pakistan - Sri Lanka - United Arab Emirates - Vietnam
Africa
South Africa - Tunisia - Zambia
The Pacific
Australia - Philippines
Some of our readers today have been in:
The Americas
Argentina - Bolivia - Brazil - Canada - Chile - Colombia
Dominican Republic - Ecuador - Honduras - Mexico - Nicaragua
Peru - Puerto Rico - Trinidad and Tobago - United States
Uruguay - Venezuela
Europe
Bosnia and Herzegovina - Bulgaria - Czech Republic
England - Estonia - France - Germany - Greece - Hungary
Ireland - Italy - Latvia - Netherlands - Norway - Poland
Portugal - Romania - Russia - San Marino - Scotland
Slovakia - Slovenia - Spain - Sweden - Switzerland - Ukraine - Wales
Asia
Brunei - China - India - Indonesia - Iran - Japan - Korea - Malaysia - Mauritius
Nepal - Oman - Pakistan - Sri Lanka - United Arab Emirates - Vietnam
Africa
South Africa - Tunisia - Zambia
The Pacific
Australia - Philippines
Today in History
| 1347 | Six burghers of the surrounded French city of Calais surrender to Edward III of England in hopes of relieving the siege. | |
| 1492 | Christopher Columbus leaves Spain on his voyage to the new world. | |
| 1546 | French printer Etienne Dolet, accused of heresy, blasphemy and sedition, is hanged and burned at the stake for printing reformist literature. | |
| 1553 | Mary Tudor, the new Queen of England, enters London. | |
| 1610 | Henry Hudson of England discovers a great bay on the east coast of Canada and names it for himself. | |
| 1692 | French forces under Marshal Luxembourg defeat the English at the Battle of Steenkerque in the Netherlands. | |
| 1805 | Muhammad Ali becomes the new ruler of Egypt. | |
| 1807 | The trial of Aaron Burr begins. He is accused of plotting the secession of New England. | |
| 1864 | Federal gunboats attack but do not capture Fort Gains, at the mouth of Mobile Bay, Alabama. | |
| 1882 | Congress passes the Immigration Act, banning Chinese immigration for ten years. | |
| 1908 | Allan Allensworth files the site plan for the first African-American town, Allensworth, California. | |
| 1911 | Airplanes are used for the first time in a military capacity when Italian planes reconnoiter Turkish lines near Tripoli. | |
| 1914 | Germany declares war on France. | |
| 1916 | Sir Roger Casement is hanged for treason in England. | |
| 1945 | Chinese troops under American General Joseph Stilwell take the town of Myitkyina from the Japanese. | |
| 1958 | The first nuclear submarine USS Nautilus passes under the North Pole. | |
| 1967 | President Lyndon B. Johnson announces plans to send 45,000 more troops to Vietnam. | |
| 1972 | Former Beatle Paul McCartney announces formation of his new group, Wings. | |
| 1975 | Louisiana Superdome dedicated. | |
| 1977 | Radio Shack unveils TRS-80 personal computer, which with Apple and Commodore would form the “1977 Trinity.” Its price and Radio Shack’s established retail outlets made it a bestseller for several years. | |
| 1990 | US commits naval forces to Persian Gulf region in wake of Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait. | |
| 2004 | Statue of Liberty’s pedestal reopens to visitors after being closed following the 9/11 terrorist attacks. |
Flyboarder became human fire extinguisher to save burning boat
A man turned his flyboard into a fire extinguisher by hovering over a burning boat on a Minnesota lake on Saturday.
At around 3pm on Cross Lake, Paul Gavic saw a boat on fire from his nearby dock and called for his son, Jesse Gavic.
Jesse strapped into his flyboard, attached to a personal watercraft
driven by brother Caleb Gavic, and headed for the burning boat. After
reaching the boat, it only took about two minutes for Jesse to extinguish the fire using the water propelled from his board.
The people on the boat jumped out and were picked up by a pontoon. No
one was injured.
A skyboard is essentially a pair of boots connected by hose to a jet ski
or other personal watercraft. The propulsion from the boots can lift
someone 50 to 55 feet in the air.
They had approached the boat’s owners before taking action. “We went over and said, ‘Hey, is that your boat?’ and they said yeah and we said, ‘Do you mind if we put it out?'” Paul Gavic said. The fire department arrived shortly after Jesse put the fire out.
You can watch the video here. There's an additional news video here.
Road Tripping Across America As A Muslim Man
So imagine what it must be like to be a Muslim man of Arabic descent here in America these days...scary, right?
Well, as always America is full of surprises, and even though the media makes us think Vice journalist Abdullah Saeed would be shot on sight in certain states his trip was actually quite pleasant.
Bizarre, but pleasant. (NSFW due to language)
After watching a few episodes it seems to me like it's a more realistic look at today's America than the news media portrays, with less fear and more brotherhood.
Ex-wingnut official goes bonkers after court cites his ‘Daily Show’ remarks to kill NC voter ID law
"Well the wingnuts again show their
stupidity," Don Yelton fumed. "Frankly Nathan I would keep my mouth shut
unless you DON NOT BELIEVE IN FREEDOM OF SPEACH (SIC) which it seems
that you don't. "
Moron McCrory fumes after North Carolina’s attorney general refuses to defend state’s racist voter ID law
Embattled North Carolina Moron McCrory (R), who is already dealing with blow-back over his state’s
anti-transgender bathroom law, lashed out at his state’s attorney
general.
Neo-Nazis plan picnic to make Pennsylvania county a white supremacist hotbed again
The National Socialist Movement of
Pennsylvania is planning an event next week in Potter County, which had
been the home of the Aryan World Congress more than a decade ago.
Armed men wearing body armor at Walmart told police they were preparing for Doomsday
Police also found marijuana in the car. All three subjects voluntarily went down to police headquarters for questioning that night, said Lt. Richard Willoby of the Lexington Police Department. They were given a citation for the marijuana but were not charged with any other violations, and were later released.
Willoby said police took photographs of the car and the weapons in order to complete a report to the Cabinet for Health and Family Services because of the baby in the car. “There appeared to be nothing criminal,” Willoby said. “They’re in the mindset of preparing for the end of the world, accumulating weapons and things like that, but the weapons appear to be legally owned.”
Man who broke into home found naked and drinking Pina Colada mix
Investigators say a man broke into a historic home in Port Arthur,
Texas, took off all of his clothes and was naked and drinking Pina
Colada mix.
A Jefferson County grand jury indicted James Duke Vanwright, 50, on a charge of burglary of a habitation.
According to investigators, at about 11pm on July 12, a security officer found the suspect inside White Haven, a home owned by Lamar State College-Port Arthur. They say he'd broken in and was naked. Prosecutors say Vanwright admitted taking a bottle filled with Pina Colada mix from the refrigerator and drinking it.
Investigators say Vanwright told officers his family had left him the home. Prosecutors say because of prior convictions for sexual assault of a child and attempted arson, Vanwright could face up to life in prison on enhanced punishment for the Second Degree Felony of burglary of a habitation.
Police hunt men who broke into apartment and stole a rabbit in its cage
Police are searching for two men wanted for breaking into an apartment
in Crotona Park, New York, and stealing several items, including a
rabbit in its cage.
The two men went into the apartment through an unlocked front door at around 6pm on Monday, July 27. The men took a rabbit in a cage, a metal bracelet and a passport.
Street surveillance video caught them walking away with the rabbit in the cage. Neighbors say they are baffled.
"I am pretty sure that there were more valuable things in the apartment," Licelot Arias said.
One man is described as being 5-feet 11-inches tall with braided long hair. The second man was wearing a light blue T-shirt and shorts, white sneakers and a blue baseball hat.
Man asked to leave McDonald's after walking in with a deceased badger under his arm
A man walked into a McDonald's restaurant in Falköping, 120 kilometers
north-east of Gothenburg, Sweden, with a dead badger under his arm at
10pm on Saturday.
“The staff reacted quickly and asked him to leave,” McDonald's press spokesperson Marianne Ahlgren said.
Police were called after the man then began hitting cars parked outside with the animal.
“We were waiting for the food when we saw him swinging a dead badger,” a witness named only as Henrik said. He said the man then threw the badger at his car.
“It landed on the roof of the car and there are scraps of meat and scratches there now.” Police arrived on the scene shortly thereafter and made the man leave. It is not known what happened to the dead badger.
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