Are elephants afraid of mice?

Mythbusters

Are elephants afraid of mice?
We finally get the answer to that question ... or do, we?!

Nudity, talc and twitching pigs?

It must be Glasgow's National Review of Live Art.

Read all about it here.

Now, who said we Scots are a dour bunch!?

Model banned from boxing due to breast implants

A former model who wanted to become the first woman boxer to represent Britain at the Olympics has been barred from the ring - because she has breast implants.

Sarah Blewden from Poole, Dorset, who runs a hair salon, said that the decision was 'ridiculous' Photo: BNPS

Sarah Blewden, 25, took up the sport two years ago to keep fit and hoped to enter competitive bouts after discovering she had a natural talent.

But the Amateur Boxing Association of England (ABAE) turned down her application on the grounds that the breast enlargement she underwent in 2003 put her at greater health risk.

"International rules forbid anyone with breast implants continuing to box because of risk of damage to the breast tissue," said Tony Attwood, chairman of the ABAE.

Read the rest here.

*****

I dunno, if she wants to box, then let her. Depending on which type of implants she has it might be more harmfull to her opponents if they land a solid hit on a hard implant and shatter their fingers!

And I Quote

We are all here for a spell; get all the good laughs you can.

~ Will Rogers

Weasel Stop

Foghorn Leghorn from 1956

A meeting of Polar and Political minds

Policymakers met polar explorers at the Troll Research Station on the boundless ice of Antarctica Monday as a U.S.-Norwegian scientific expedition came in from the cold to report on the continent's ice sheets, a potential source for a catastrophic "big melt" from global warming.

"Our preliminary finding is that there's a slight warming trend in East Antarctica," American glaciologist Ted Scambos told the group of visiting environment ministers.

Read the rest here.

Real Time

Bill Maher's opening monologue from the first show of the new season.

Reality Check: Crunching the numbers

Found this over at BartCop:

See what happens when you list the facts?

In typical repugican fashion ...

Repugs Fighting For Money From Stimulus They Opposed

From the Huffington Post:

House Republicans, as a group, may take great pride in the goose egg they offered Obama's stimulus package.

But now the unanimous opposition is struggling to bring that money home.

Republicans will be working hard to make sure the money they opposed ends up benefiting their home districts, highlighting the political tightrope they walk in this economic crisis.

The DCCC is watching House Republicans -- and reading local media -- closely and will highlight any happy talk about a stimulus Republicans voted against.

Read the rest here.

Norwegian Wood

The Beatles
(rare home movies)

Suburban gold-selling parties

The LA Times' Tiffany Hsu reports on people who host Tupperware-style parties where cash strapped people bring their gold jewelry to a house and sell it to an assayer who rakes in a 35% take on the house.

The party Geivet attended at the Aliso Viejo home of Mary-Margaret Fincher is a twist on the old suburban Tupperware party. Here, however, it's the guests who do the selling.

Erin Stevenson, who organized the party through her group My Gold Party CA, appraised the jewelry with assistant Richard Bartoletti as guests debated whether to wear heels or flats during pregnancy.

To test the gold, Stevenson shaved off small flecks with a whirring Dremel tool, blanketing the dark wood of the dining table with a luminous sheen. Later, while Bartoletti peered through a magnifier attached to his eyeglasses, looking for karat stamps on the jewelry, Stevenson weeded out gold impostors with magnets and a special acidic gel.

Fincher, 34, said the parties were popular in her hometown of Atlanta. As the host she gets 10% of what is paid out -- which this night was $4,000. One woman walked away with a $1,836.88 check.

Stevenson pays about 65% of the market value, which works out to $5.56 for a gram of 8-karat gold, rising to $15.47 a gram for 22k. She then sells the gold to a refiner for a price just under the market trading price.

Gold fever sweeps suburbia

He says one thing and then does another ...

South Carolina Governor Mark Sanford has agreed to increase unemployment benefits in the state by $25 a week using part of the federal stimulus package.

Employment Security Commission Executive Director Ted Halley said Monday the Republican governor agreed to an extension of the benefits Friday. Halley says details of adding the cash to unemployment checks are being worked out.

Sanford spokesman Joel Sawyer confirmed the governor approved the increase.

Sanford has railed against bailouts but has never said he would refuse taking federal money. He says the stimulus will only drive the country deeper into debt.

But South Carolina has one of the nation's highest unemployment rates. Jobless claims have bankrupted the state's fund for unemployment benefits.

Dinosaur's Digestion Reveals Changing Climate

Proof that climate change is real and has happened before ...

Leonardo, a duck-billed vegetarian hadrosaur, evolved in a time of stress to planet Earth. Paleontologist Robert Bakker takes you on a journey through the guts of Leonardo, an exceptionally well-preserved dinosaur fossil.

Check out this video of Leonardo.

Environmental News

From New Scientist:

Ancient civilizations may have given us a carbon boost

Can we thank past civilizations for the way tropical rainforests are soaking up our carbon pollution? A new analysis of tree growth and death in 79 plots across tropical Africa finds that every hectare is soaking up an average 0.6 tonnes of carbon from the air per year.

The findings of the international study, reported by Simon Lewis of the University of Leeds, UK, mirror past discoveries of the huge carbon-absorbing ability of the Amazon rainforest. Together, they confirm estimates from atmospheric chemists that natural tropical forests absorb about a fifth of our carbon emissions.

The researchers followed the growth of some 250,000 trees over 40 years. After allowing for trees that died, they estimate that African tropical forests are absorbing a total of 340 million tonnes of carbon a year.

This huge "carbon sink" in the tropical rainforests roughly counterbalances releases from mankind's destruction of tropical rainforests by burning, logging and clearing. Though, as IPCC scientist Chris Field of Stanford University warned at the American Association for the Advancement of Science conference in Chicago at the weekend (see our updates from the conference), they could soon be swamped by carbon releases from raging fires in the forests as a result of climate change.

But what caused the sink? Mature forests should be carbon-neutral in theory, releasing as much as they absorb. Helene Muller-Landau of the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute in Panama, suggests the forests could still be regrowing after partial destruction by past civilisations, such as pre-Columbian Amazon cities and ancient African iron-making societies. They are, she says, "far from being pristine wildernesses."

But Lewis thinks the similar results from both forests suggest a global influence - "probably the fertilising effect of the rising levels of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere".

More Science News

In other science news today, we get all spacey on you:

Quark star may hold secret to early universe

Milky Way still reeling from ancient smash

Plasma experiment recreates 'burping' astrophysical jets

High-energy portrait of approaching comet released

First tracked space rock recovered after impact

*****

The Mother Ship is ready ...

Science News

From New Scientist:

Scans of fossils have cracked the mystery of pterosaur power. The biggest animals ever to fly drew their energy from bird-like lungs that they evolved 70 million years before the first birds took to the air.

Leathery-winged pterosaurs evolved 220 million years ago, from the same group of reptiles that gave rise to crocodiles, dinosaurs, and later birds. Yet how pterosaurs powered their flight had been a mystery because their ribcages were thought to be inflexible, making their breathing inefficient.

Leon Claessens of the College of the Holy Cross in Worcester, Massachusetts, realised that view might be mistaken after pterosaur specialist Dave Unwin at the University of Leicester, UK, showed him a fossil Rhamphorhynchus with a beautifully preserved ribcage.

Computed tomography (CT) scans of this specimen – as well as other pterosaur fossils – revealed that the bones had been filled with air sacs that connected to lungs. It is likely that, as in living birds, flexing of the body caused the air sacs to push and pull fresh air through the lungs, allowing them to extract oxygen from the air more efficiently than mammalian lungs.

The air sacs bring an added bonus in that they reduce the weight of the bones. In both birds and pterosaurs, the volume of the air space inside the bones increases with the size of the animal. In the largest pterosaurs, whose wing spans could exceed 10 metres, even the outermost "finger" bones of the wings were hollow.

Intriguingly, the sacs connected with a pneumatic system under the skin, which pterosaurs might have been able to inflate to change the shape of their wings, Claessens says.

*****

Science is fun!

New Zealand's horrid copyright law suspended and may be dead

Street demonstrations, netwide campaigns, unfavorable press attention and sustained lobbying have moved the New Zealand government to temporarily suspend its new copyright law, which would have required ISPs to terminate their customers' net access on the basis of three unsubstantiated accusations of infringement.

It remains to be seen whether the law is truly dead, but this truly is an amazing development:

In a surprise announcement, prime minister John Key says the government will delay the implementation of the controversial Section 92a of the amended copyright law.

John Key delays copyright law

Nuclear duct-tape

When normal duct-tape won't cut it, you need nuclear duct-tape, whose "slate blue color makes it ideal for use in nuclear tape facilities and it is certified for low leachable halogens and sulfur. It also provides sunlight and UV resistance for up to one year without the backing deteriorating or delaminating. This product is especially ideal for applications in the shipbuilding, nuclear power plant and stainless steel industries." 3M Performance Plus 8979N Nuclear Grade 48-Millimeter-by-54.8-Meter Duct Tape, Slate Blue

The Death of Plasma

Jose Fermoso at the New York Times writes that Pioneer's killing-off of Kuro, its next-generation Plasma TV line, rings the technology's death knell.

It was a dramatic fall for a company that just one year ago had CES abuzz with its newest plasma TV, the so-called “Ultimate Black” Kuro. ... The Kuro’s tech was impressive because it reduced light emissions from black areas of the screen to such a degree that at its maximum brightness, the contrast ratio was “almost infinite.” The result was a plasma display with the most vibrant, colorful images yet.

But even at the hype’s peak, problems in the plasma industry were apparent.

If you bet on LCD surpassing Plasma hard and fast, you won.

Pioneer’s Kuro Killing: A Tipping Point in the Plasma Era

A must have ...

I survived the bush administration t-shirt, $16 from Print Liberation.

Normally I do not endorse any product but this is a must have for any intelligent person who survived the dark ages.

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Daily Horoscope

Today's horoscope says:

There is no reason to hurry or run around too quickly.

All right!