Saturday, May 11, 2013

The Daily Drift

Somebody in California hasn't been listening lately ...

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1573 Henry of Anjou becomes the first elected king of Poland.
1689 French and English navies battle at Bantry Bay.
1690 In the first major engagement of King William's War, British troops from Massachusetts seize Port Royal in Acadia (Nova Scotia and New Brunswick) from the French.
1745 French forces defeat an Anglo-Dutch-Hanoverian army at Fontenoy.
1792 The Columbia River is discovered by Captain Robert Gray.
1812 British prime Minster Spencer Perceval is shot by a bankrupt banker in the lobby of the House of Commons.
1857 Indian mutineers seize Delhi.
1858 Minnesota is admitted as the 32nd U.S. state.
1860 Giuseppe Garibaldi lands at Marsala, Sicily.
1862 Confederates scuttle the CSS Virginia off Norfolk, Virginia.
1864 Confederate General J.E.B. Stuart is mortally wounded at Yellow Tavern.
1960 Israeli soldiers capture Adolf Eichmann in Buenos Aires.
1967 The siege of Khe Sanh ends, the base is still in American hands.

Non Sequitur

http://media.zenfs.com/en_us/News/ucomics.com/nq130511.gif

Family appeal for return of abducted aliens

A couple from South Roanoke, Virginia are seeking the return of two aliens abducted from their front yard. Some humans abducted the aliens, in broad daylight. The crime occurred on April 22 in Robert and Dian Bolling’s front yard, sometime between 11am and 1pm And the Bollings want them back. They’ve combed the neighborhood, stapled wanted posters to telephone poles and taped them to storefront windows. So far, nothing.

The 3-foot-tall bright green molded plastic creatures have been fixtures in the family’s yard for more than a decade, where the Bollings live with their three sons. They bought them at an after-Halloween clearance sale. On the surface it seems just like an ordinary prank. But there’s another dimension to this. To grasp that, you have to get to know the Bollings. They’re no ordinary family. Austen Bolling, 15, and his twin brothers Connor and Alex, who are 13, have Fragile X Syndrome, a genetic abnormality that sets them apart from other children their age.

The inherited condition causes profound learning, speech and language problems. Children with it have short attention spans, a poor ability to make eye contact and great difficulty adjusting to change. It affects roughly one in 2,000 boys and one in 4,000 girls. About one in every 260 women are carriers of the gene. The boys require near around-the-clock care. That’s greatly limited the couple, who both work, in meeting other folks and developing normal friendships. “We have a very different household,” Dian Bolling said. “We have love and laughter.” But in the process of parenting three special needs children, “we’ve lost a lot of friends; lost a lot of family members. It’s just hard to deal with, handling the kids.”

The aliens have proved to be a very effective way for the Bollings to connect to others. Devising new yard adventures for the aliens was a stress-relieving diversion for a stressed-out couple. The couple have also used the figurines to teach their boys communication and socialization skills. The kids realize something is missing from their front yard. They seem to miss them, although they’re unable to articulate it like their parents can. On Friday, the Bollings reported the theft to Roanoke City Police. City Police spokeswoman Aisha Johnson confirmed the report. Police have no record of any previous alien lawn ornament abductions, she added. A policeman later called Bolling back to say he had assigned it to a detective.

Did you know ...

That general motors calls for U.S. to address climate change

That these crows literally build a nest on a crow's nest

That most women would prefer over-the-counter birth control

Quick, call Dr. Who! robot finds mysterious spheres in temple of the feathered serpent

That the pope calls one of the foundations of capitalism slavery

Can an app help prevent sexual assault?

The wingnut obsession with sex hurts their own children

Are you a corporate guinea pig?

A positive NC history worth preserving

By William H. Chafe and Jacquelyn Dowd Hall

This week, we were arrested at the General Assembly. We chose the path of civil disobedience – along with 29 others – as a means of calling attention to the headlong assault on our state’s history by the governor and the state legislature.
We are not radicals. Each of us has been president of the Organization of American Historians, the leading professional organization of all American historians. We cherish the history we have spent our lives studying. Yet now we see a new generation in Raleigh threatening to destroy the very history we have spent our lives celebrating.
During the last half century, North Carolinians helped pave the way for racial justice, educational leadership and fairness for all citizens.
On Feb. 1, 1960, four freshmen from N.C. A&T went to the downtown Woolworth’s in Greensboro and bought toothpaste at one counter and notebooks at another before sitting down at the lunch counter, their receipts in hand, to ask they be served there as well.
“No way,” said the person behind the counter. The four returned to campus.
The next day there were 23, the day after that 66, the day after that 100 and, on Day 5, 1,000 people. Within two months, similar demonstrations had spread to 54 cities in nine states. The direct action phase of the civil rights movement had begun – in Greensboro.
Eleven months later, a new governor took office in Raleigh. At a time when almost no white parents voluntarily sent their children to desegregated schools, Terry Sanford enrolled his children in a school that black children also attended. He created Good Neighbor Councils in communities across the state where people of different backgrounds could learn to work together. Despite the state’s terrible poverty, Sanford helped make North Carolina’s public education system one of the best in the South.
He supported enactment of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, and he created a local model of what would later become Lyndon Johnson’s War on Poverty.
This was a period when governors of both parties, from Jim Holshouser to Jim Hunt, helped build on that tradition, seeking to move in positive directions to attract outside firms that would pay better wages, hire more skilled workers and improve the state’s economy. These leaders, Republicans as well as Democrats, helped make the Research Triangle Park and cities like Charlotte magnets for out-of-town businesses that came to create new jobs in a state noted for being modern and fair – a good place to live, not just a state with cheap labor and low taxes.

That history is one that our current legislature and governor now seek to reverse: by denying 500,000 people health care through Medicaid, even though it would not cost the state a cent for the first two years; by restricting women’s access to reproductive health care; by terminating unemployment payments for more than 160,000 workers laid off through no fault of their own; by endangering the right to vote of tens of thousands of people through curtailing early voting and requiring state-issued picture IDs; by cutting taxes on the rich, and increasing them on the poor; by telling a father in New Bern that if his daughter chooses to vote in Boone, where she attends Appalachian State, instead of traveling five hours back to New Bern to cast her ballot, the father can no longer claim his daughter as a dependent on his tax return.
This political juggernaut runs totally contrary to what North Carolina has stood for during the last half century. It represents class warfare against the middle class and the working-class residents of our state. Justice lies at the core of our civic life. And we are all responsible for sustaining that justice.
As Robert F. Kennedy told students in apartheid South Africa in 1966, “Each time a [person] stands up ... to improve the lot of others, or strike out against injustice, he sends a tiny ripple of hope, and crossing each other from a million different centers of energy and daring, those ripples build a current which can sweep down the mightiest walks of oppression and resistance.”
That is why we stood up, why we got arrested.
Let us hold on to the history we have won.

William Chafe is the Alice Mary Baldwin Professor of History, emeritus, at Duke University and the former dean of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences. Jacquelyn Dowd Hall is the Julia Cherry Spruill Professor of History at UNC-Chapel Hill.

Fiscally Responsible repugicans?

Pffffffft.

by James Schlarmann

If the Sasquatch, Santa Claus, The Tooth Fairy, and a Fiscally Responsible Congressional repugican all walked into a bar, who would order the first drink?
Trick question. None of those people exist.
The myth of the Fiscally Responsible repugican has been debunked so many times now it’s not worth much more than a laugh when the austerity-pushing morons get up to their old tricks. All one has to do is cast their gaze back to the shrub junta to see just how fiscally responsible repugicans truly are. A decade of wars on two credit cards, combined with a staggering lack of understanding what would happen if we didn’t raise taxes to help pay for those wars is pretty much all the proof you need. But if you were looking for the real proof of just how bone-headed and stupid these jackasses are, you can look no further than the bullshit games they play with our country’s debt ceiling.
For some reason, the repugicans in Congress still haven’t latched onto the notion that the Debt Ceiling has absolutely, positively, nothing to do with new or future spending. We all get it, repugicans. You guys hate spending and you want to do everything you can to stop all future spending no matter how helpful it is to the world or its economy. The problem is that when you try to hold the debt ceiling hostage, the only thing you’re doing is showing everybody that half of America’s politicians are totally cool with the world thinking we’re deadbeat dads. What the debt ceiling does is simply allow the government to keep paying debts it has already incurred.
The other sticky wicket the repugicans constantly find themselves in is the fact that the Constitution itself says our country’s national debt is to always be considered valid, and to always be paid. For a group of people who claim to hold the patent on Constitutional scholarship, they sure don’t know about the finer details like, you know, not defaulting on our damn debts. In fact, the very definition of not paying your debts is to be fiscally irresponsible. Yet that’s been the one tool they’ve tried to wield the most when negotiating with the Obama White House and Senate Democrats over the budget. How anyone who considers themselves a party that first and foremost doesn’t dick around with money, can then turn around and threaten to stop paying our debts, is beyond my reason to understand.

NewsCorp shareholders make another bid to democratize the Murdoch family empire

The traditional shareholder revolt at NewsCorp (owner of Fox, Faux News, Sky, Harper Collins, the NY Post, the Wall Street Journal, the Sun) is back for another run, and this time it's gathering steam and may indeed make it. Rupert Murdoch and his family own a minority of the shares in NewsCorp, but their shares are in a special class of voting stock that means that they effectively get to do whatever they want with the majority investors' money. Effectively, Murdoch's initial pitch to investors was, "I'll take your money, but I'm not interested in your advice -- just cough up, shut up, and let me run this thing and I'll pay you some fat dividends."
But it's all gone rather wrong. Murdoch's ideological projects and nepotism have cost the business millions -- between a sweetheart deal that saw the company buying his daughter Elisabeth's startup Shine for £413M of the shareholders' money, and his son James's presiding over a phone-hacking scandal that destroyed News of the World, the bestselling newspaper (sic) in Britain, the investors are getting a bit tired of Murdoch running NewsCorp like his own personal fiefdom. It's one thing to play Colonel Kurtz in the jungle when it's making the shareholders rich, but when you start frittering away titanic assets like the NotW because you need to give your idiot son a job, well, that's another story.
As I said, this isn't the first time the shareholders have taken a swing at Rupert and his spawn, but this is a bigger, more multi-pronged, and better coordinated approach that any to date. Fingers crossed.

Dissident shareholders are pressing once more for the media mogul Rupert Murdoch to step down as chairman of News Corporation.
Shareholders from the US, UK and Canada filed a resolution on Tuesday, calling for News Corp to appoint an independent chairman. A similar resolution attracted strong support at the media company's annual shareholder meeting last year.
The proposal was introduced by Christian Brothers Investment Services (CBIS), which manages $4.6bn for Catholic institutions worldwide. It is backed by the UK's Local Authority Pension Fund Forum, with assets of £115bn ($178.9bn), and British Columbia Investment Management Corporation, one of Canada's largest institutional investors.
In a separate resolution, Nathan Cummings Foundation, an ethical investment group, has called on News Corp to end the dual-class share structure that allows the Murdoch family to control its media empire despite owning a minority of shares.

Rupert Murdoch must step down as News Corporation chair – shareholders

The truth be told

HOWTO search the Web like the NSA

Wired's Kim Zetter rounds up some of the highlights from Untangling the Web: A Guide to Internet Research [PDF], an NSA guide to finding unintentionally published confidential material on the Web produced by the NSA and released in response to a Muckrock Freedom of Information Act request. As Zetter notes, the tactics discussed as described as legal, but are the kind of thing that weev is doing 3.5 years in a Federal pen for:

Want to find spreadsheets full of passwords in Russia? Type “filetype:xls site:ru login.” Even on websites written in non-English languages the terms “login,” “userid,” and “password” are generally written in English, the authors helpfully point out.
Misconfigured web servers “that list the contents of directories not intended to be on the web often offer a rich load of information to Google hackers,” the authors write, then offer a command to exploit these vulnerabilities — intitle: “index of” site:kr password.
“Nothing I am going to describe to you is illegal, nor does it in any way involve accessing unauthorized data,” the authors assert in their book. Instead it “involves using publicly available search engines to access publicly available information that almost certainly was not intended for public distribution.” You know, sort of like the “hacking” for which Andrew “weev” Aurenheimer was recently sentenced to 3.5 years in prison for obtaining publicly accessible information from AT&T’s website.

Use These Secret NSA Google Search Tips to Become Your Own Spy Agency

HOWTO fix security after the Boston bombing

As we think about the postmortem on security procedures following from the Boston Marathon attack and plan on new procedures, Bruce Schneier has some crucial security design advice: don't forget transparency and accountability. Without these two crucial elements, security can't work:

Long ago, we realized that simply trusting people and government agencies to always do the right thing doesn't work, so we need to check up on them. In a democracy, transparency and accountability are how we do that. It's how we ensure that we get both effective and cost-effective government. It's how we prevent those we trust from abusing that trust, and protect ourselves when they do. And it's especially important when security is concerned.
First, we need to ensure that the stuff we're paying money for actually works and has a measurable impact. Law-enforcement organizations regularly invest in technologies that don't make us any safer. The TSA, for example, could devote an entire museum to expensive but ineffective systems: puffer machines, body scanners, FAST behavioral screening, and so on. Local police departments have been wasting lots of post-9/11 money on unnecessary high-tech weaponry and equipment. The occasional high-profile success aside, police surveillance cameras have been shown to be a largely ineffective police tool.
Sometimes honest mistakes led organizations to invest in these technologies. Sometimes there's self-deception and mismanagement -- and far too often lobbyists are involved. Given the enormous amount of security money post-9/11, you inevitably end up with an enormous amount of waste. Transparency and accountability are how we keep all of this in check.
Second, we need to ensure that law enforcement does what we expect it to do and nothing more. Police powers are invariably abused. Mission creep is inevitable, and it results in laws designed to combat one particular type of crime being used for an ever-widening array of crimes. Transparency is the only way we have of knowing when this is going on.

Transparency and Accountability Don't Hurt Security—They're Crucial to It

High School Students Build Robotic Locker Opener for Disabled Student

Muscular dystrophy gives Nick Torrance added challenges at Pickney Community High School in Pickney, Michigan. But opening his locker is no longer one of them, thanks to the mechanical ingenuity of fellow students Micah Stuhldreher and Wyatt Smrcka. Nick can now wave his hand over a sensor on his wheelchair whenever he needs to open or close his locker:

They were told to tear off a locker door and figure out a way to open and close it. They originally installed a relay inside the locker, but it took up too much space, so they switched to a computer.
They originally used a key fob to activate the robotic device, which opened the locker, but they said Torrance wasn’t strong enough to press the button. So they switched to a sensor.
The two students won a $1,500 minigrant from the Society of American Military Engineers so other devices can be made.
Both plan to pursue robotics as a career.

If you want to discourage your teenager from texting while driving, make him or her drive a car with a manual transmission. A driver who has to work the gearshift constantly must stay focused. Seattle's NBC News affiliate describes how one local family uses this approach:

Riley's parents took notice of all those messages about the risks of using a phone while driving - too many sad stories. And while they trust their son, they're not taking any chances.

Riley has a smart phone, but when he gets in the car, it goes into a compartment. Blue Tooth? That might come later. But the car forces Riley to keep one hand on the wheel, and the other on the stick, especially in city traffic.

How come the police kick down the doors of medical marijuana users, but ignore reports of men keeping girls on leashes?

Scratch-and-sniff cards caused evacuation of several buildings

Reports of a natural gas smell sparked the evacuation of several buildings in downtown Great Falls, Montana on Wednesday morning, but scratch-and-sniff cards were to blame and not a widespread gas leak.

Nick Bohr, general manager at Energy West, said workers at the company were cleaning out some storage areas and discarded several boxes of scratch-and-sniff cards that it has sent out to customers in the past to educate them on what a natural gas smells like.

“They were expired, and they were old,” Bohr said. “They threw them into the dumpsters.” When they were picked up by sanitation trucks and crushed, “it was the same as if they had scratched them.” The chemical has a very strong smell, so as the garbage truck drove around it left behind the smell of natural gas. The smell wafted into buildings and emergency crews responded to several reports of gas leaks, with at least six buildings evacuated.

Bohr said the company apologizes for the problem, especially since the smelly culprits originally were just part of a process to make everything safer. “In a sense, it worked the way it was supposed to,” Bohr said of the numerous calls reporting gas leaks.

Woman's shopping list included chicken breast, potato salad, cocaine and a reminder to get high

Police in Whitemarsh Township, Pennsylvania arrested 21-year-old Collegeville woman Carolyn Murray on April 28 following a fender bender during which she allegedly rear-ended a car being driven by a 76-year-old man as it was stopped at a stop sign.

But it was the shopping list investigators allegedly found in the young woman’s car that really got their attention. According to the police report, the list spelled out the following items: ”Chicken Breast, German Potato salad, Pepsi, Xanex [sic], Cocaine, get high and muscle relaxers.”

After the accident – during which the 76-year-old driver was allegedly at a full stop and officers found no indication Murray attempted to bring her vehicle to a halt – ”Murray was very out of it, her speech was slurred and she had no idea where she was,” according to the police report. “Murray could also not locate her insurance information and registration for her vehicle.”

As an officer attempted to help Murray find the documents, he allegedly found the to-do list written on a yellow index card and stashed in the car’s center console. Murray was taken to Chestnut Hill Hospital and her blood was drawn “due to Murray showing signs of impairment and the index card that was located,” the police report reads. Charges are pending lab results.

Man deliberately crashed car into tree to test the airbags

Motorist Uwe Schrager, 45, has had his license confiscated after he was caught deliberately crashing his car into a tree "to test the airbags". Officers turned up at the crash site at Goslar in Lower Saxony in central Germany after another motorist reported seeing the Ford Mondeo smash into a tree.
When they arrived they found Schrager putting the cars bumper and other parts into the boot of the car so that he could drive the wrecked vehicle back home and get it repaired. And when asked how the accident had happened Schrager, who tested negative for drugs or alcohol, readily admitted that it had been deliberate.

He said: "I knew that the car was fitted with airbags but I didn't trust that they would work, so I wanted to test them. I felt it was better to have a low speed crash that I was likely to survive if they didn't work rather than a high-speed crash when I only found out when it was too late that they didn't work." Police said that the airbags had gone off and that the man had expected to be able to put them back afterwards, but had then discovered that this wasn't possible.

Schrager apparently expected the insurance company to put the car back together again but was told that wouldn't work now that he had admitted deliberately crashing. In addition police confiscated his driving license and reported him to the German DVLA who will now order him and to carry out psychiatric tests. The police spokesman said: "They will need to carry out psychiatric test to determine whether the man is suitable to have a license at all. He had apparently crashed into two walls at lower speeds before he finally hit the tree. That is not normal behavior."

Girl hit by toilet on way to school

A teenage girl in Thorndike, Maine had an unhappy surprise first thing on Monday morning when a portable toilet fell onto her Jeep as she was driving to school.

A man who had just made a portable toilet delivery to Mount View High School forgot to lash a second one down and it fell off his truck as he drove away.

The girl swerved to avoid the flying toilet but it hit her Jeep Cherokee despite her efforts. “Fortunately, it was clean,” Chief Deputy Jeff Trafton of the Waldo County Sheriff’s Office said of the toilet.

The truck driver, Ronnie Furrow, was issued with a summons for having an unsecured load. No one was injured.

New York City's nastiest apartments

The Worst Room is a blog exploring the seedy and insanitary world of New York City's "affordable housing." The home featured above, in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, is yours for $1200 a month.

Stonewall Jackson death likely pneumonia

FILE - This undated file photo shows a drawing of Thomas Jonathan "Stonewall" Jackson, the Confederate general during the American Civil War, 1861-65. On Friday, May 10, 2013, the 150th anniversary of Jackson's death, a trauma surgeon with experience on the battlefield in Iraq and Afghanistan has reinvestigated the medical record to offer a diagnosis of Jackson's death. University of Maryland surgeon Joseph DuBose says Jackson likely died of pneumonia. He is confirming the diagnosis given by Jackson's physician, the famed Confederate doctor Hunter McGuire. (AP Photo/File)

Historians and doctors have debated for decades what medical complications caused the death of legendary Confederate fighter Thomas J. "Stonewall" Jackson, felled by friendly fire from his troops during the Civil War. Shot three times while returning from scouting enemy lines in the Virginia wilderness, Jackson was badly wounded in the left arm by one of the large bullets the night of May 2, 1863. Blood gushed from a severed artery. It took at least two hours to get him to a field hospital, and Jackson was dropped twice in a stretcher before his arm was amputated. He died days later at 39.
Scholars have long questioned whether it was an infection or pneumonia that killed Jackson, who gained the nickname "Stonewall" early in the war and went on to be lionized in the South and feared in the North because of his military exploits.
On Friday, the 150th anniversary of Jackson's death, a trauma surgeon with experience on the battlefield in Iraq and Afghanistan will reveal his diagnosis of Jackson's death after reinvestigating the medical record. After reviewing the 1860s files and subsequent reports, University of Maryland surgeon and professor Joseph DuBose told The Associated Press that Jackson most likely died of pneumonia.
DuBose is confirming the original diagnosis given by Jackson's personal physician, the famed Confederate doctor Hunter H. McGuire.
"You would be hard-pressed to find someone more qualified than him for the treatment of this injury and taking care of Stonewall Jackson," DuBose said. "I do defer to him in some regard. I kind of have to. He's not only the treating physician; he's also the only source of information."
McGuire's original medical notes were lost when he was captured by Union soldiers. He recreated them from memory three years later for the Richmond Medical Journal.
Pneumonia was common in the Civil War, becoming the third most fatal disease for soldiers.
Jackson is the subject of an annual conference Friday at the University of Maryland School of Medicine in Baltimore that reviews medical diagnoses of historical figures. In the past, researchers have reviewed the deaths of Alexander the Great, Edgar Allan Poe and Abraham Lincoln, among others.
DuBose is a graduate of the Virginia Military Institute, where Jackson was a professor before the Civil War. A large statue of Jackson stands near the campus barracks. So, his legacy and death were ingrained in DuBose's experience as a cadet.
Jackson was shot by soldiers from the 18th North Carolina regiment in a moment of confusion. He had led a surprise attack in the Battle of Chancellorsville in Virginia, and the Confederates drove Union forces back about three miles. Civil War historian James I. Robertson Jr. recounts that Jackson wasn't satisfied and rode out at night to review the enemy's position. When he rode back, he was shot by his own soldiers.
Then, being dropped during a frantic nighttime rescue may well have contributed to Jackson's death, DuBose found.
"If he had been dropped and had a pulmonary contusion, or bruise of the lung, it creates an area of the lung that doesn't clear secretions real well, and it can be a focus that pneumonia can start in," DuBose said. "That's probably what happened in this particular instance."
DuBose, a U.S. Air Force veteran, said pulmonary embolism — a blockage of the major blood vessel in the lung — still occurs in nearly 6 percent of combat casualties in Iraq and Afghanistan. It is even more common among those who have amputations, as Jackson did.
Still, the debate will continue over Jackson's death.
Dr. Philip Mackowiak, an internist who organizes the conference each year, said he differs with DuBose on the Jackson case. He reviewed the records and said he believes a recurrent pulmonary emboli destroyed Jackson's lung over time, leading to his death. The medical records don't describe Jackson coughing, as one would expect with pneumonia, Mackowiak said.
It's impossible to know for sure what killed Jackson. But DuBose said modern medicine could have saved him. Jackson's doctor didn't have the tools or knowledge to treat the complications after the shooting.
Robertson, a former Virginia Tech historian and professor who wrote Jackson's biography, said he has been persuaded that sepsis, caused by severe infection, killed Jackson, due to his chaotic rescue and unsanitary conditions. He noted, though, doctors at the time agreed Jackson had pneumonia.
"Unfortunately, medicine in the mid-19th century was still in the dark ages," he said. "Obviously, I'm not overly concerned with how he died. I'm terribly concerned that he died."
Jackson was a pivotal figure and perhaps the most esteemed soldier in the war, Robertson said. He was known for secrecy and speed to executive surprise flank attacks for Gen. Robert E. Lee's strategy.
"He was killed in what may be the high-water mark of the Confederacy," Robertson said. "You can make a case that after Chancellorsville, it's just a question of time for Lee."

Wild west (anti)heroes in a rare (and maybe not real) group photo

This may be a photo of Billy the Kid, Doc Holliday, Jesse James, and Charlie Bowdre, taken in Las Vegas (NM) in 1879:

"There is that story that these two met in Las Vegas at the Old Adobe Hotel on July 26, 1879, and during a card game Jesse asked Billy to join his gang..........Henry Hoyt and Migeul Otero say so in their books, and that they witnessed it..............But Jesse James did stay at the Old Adobe Hotel from July 26 through July 29 in the summer of 1879, according to an announcement in the Las Vegas Optic printed weeks later. The owner of the Old Adobe Hotel, W. Scott Moore, was from Clay County, Missouri, Jesse's home turf, and was a childhood friend of his. Hoyt recalled Jesse's missing finger and his alias, Mr. Howard. And Jesse was on the run, so New Mexico is possible."

Billy the Kid and Jesse James

Tea Company Claims World's Biggest Tea Bag

A tea company on Queensland's Sunshine Coast in Australia says it has made the world's biggest tea bag to raise money for cancer research. The giant tea bag weighs 151 kilograms, stands three metres high and would make about 100,000 cups of tea. The tea bag will be officially unveiled later this month at Australia's Biggest Morning Tea in Coolum, to raise money for cancer research.

Science-Based 7 Minute Exercise

We know, we know. We should exercise more. But who has the time to go to the gym?
American College of Sports Medicine's Health & Fitness journal just squashed that excuse with this: a set of 12 exercises with only body weight, a chair and a wall that takes only 7 minutes of your life. Best of all, it's all based on science, as Gretchen Reynolds of the New York Times' Well Blog summarized:

“There’s very good evidence” that high-intensity interval training provides “many of the fitness benefits of prolonged endurance training but in much less time,” says Chris Jordan, the director of exercise physiology at the Human Performance Institute in Orlando, Fla., and co-author of the new article. [...]
The exercises should be performed in rapid succession, allowing 30 seconds for each, while, throughout, the intensity hovers at about an 8 on a discomfort scale of 1 to 10, Mr. Jordan says. Those seven minutes should be, in a word, unpleasant. The upside is, after seven minutes, you’re done.

The reason mad scientists are pictured in film in labs with interconnected beakers and machinery that does incomprehensible things is because that's the way labs looked at one time. io9 has a collection of pictures of the laboratories where huge scientific and engineering breakthroughs occurred, from Edison (top) and Tesla (bottom) to the development of cellophane and computers. More

Tinkerbell Fairyfly

Fairyflies - a type of chalcid wasp that live on the eggs and larvae of other insects - are pretty small. They're about the diameter of the tip of fine drawing pen, which makes them almost impossible to find.
But not to John Huber of Natural Resources Canada and colleagues! They've discovered a new species of the fairyfly that's just 250 micrometer (0.01 inches) long, and named it after Tinkerbell:

A new species of tiny fly named after the fairy in "Peter Pan" is mind-blowingly miniscule, with delicate wings trimmed in fringe.
Tinkerbella nana is a newly discovered species of fairyfly from Costa Rica. [...]
Under the microscope, these teeny-tiny insects reveal fine detail, particularly their long, skinny wings, which terminate in hairlike fringe. This wing shape may help ultra-small insects reduce turbulence and drag when they fly, a feat that requires beating their wings hundreds of times per second.
Researchers don't know how small insects can get, Huber said.

Could the flickering and winking of some stars be a kind of Morse Code that extraterrestrials are using to communicate across space? Princeton University astrophysicist Lucianne Walkowicz and her colleagues are exploring that very question. Her team is using algorithms to sift data from the space observatory Kepler for flickering patterns that don't appear to be the result of passing planets, sunspots, eclipses, or other known reasons. “What would lead us to say it really is an alien signal?” she asks. “I don’t know, but in my book, finding things you can’t explain is interesting no matter what it is."
And just to be clear, this has nothing to do with the star twinkling that we see, which is caused by atmospheric turbulence on Earth. Or so they'd like us to think. "Flickering Stars: Could Aliens Be Sending Us Signals?"

Astronomical News

NEWSFLASH: Mars is Toxic

A one-way mission to Mars is a risky proposition and now scientists have identified Martian dust as a toxic hazard.

Hubble Discovers 'Planetary Graveyard'

Hubble has discovered rocky remains of planetary material 'polluting' the atmospheres of two white dwarfs.

Deep Lakes and Catastrophic Floods of Mars

A new look at the chasms of Mars suggests there were kilometers-deep lakes that spilled catastrophically from one to another early in martian history.

NGC 6240: A Mind Blowing X-Ray Galactic Clash

Ever tried to comprehend the magnitude of the cosmos and some of its most energetic processes? If so, the X-ray halo around the merging galaxies known as NGC 6240 may just blow your mind.

Why Would Aliens Obliterate Our Moon?

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Puppy apparently survived for nearly a month in impounded car

For what officials believe is nearly one-third of her life, Kia the puppy was trapped inside a Chevy Suburban as it sat in a Kansas City tow lot. The car had been impounded nearly a month ago, and no one knew she was there - until Monday. A tow company employee was marking vehicles for auction when the dog jumped up on the dashboard, according to Danny Rotert, spokesman for Kansas City municipal government. Tow lot employees called police, who came out and got the vehicle unlocked.

No one knows how Kia survived, but it is believed that she picked through a leftover McDonald’s bag and, apparently, cigars, but tow lot employees didn’t see any sign of water. Everyone at the tow lot is very upset, and no one intended to neglect a dog, Rotert said. “It’s a pretty miraculous story,” Rotert said, adding that everyone is relieved the dog will live and go to a foster home. Veterinarian Billie Deam, who owns and operates the Animal Clinic of Boardwalk Square in Kansas City, North, said that while it’s possible, it’s pretty unlikely for a puppy to survive such an ordeal.

“Without an appreciable amount of water, it’s pretty miraculous for a puppy to survive three weeks in a car,” she said. The key would be what was in the debris inside the car. There are pups abandoned outside that are able to live on minimal amounts of food and little water, she said. “Physiologically it’s possible, depending on what she was eating to survive on,” said Deam. “But it’s really stretching the outer limits of what’s possible.” Rotert suggested the dog might have been scared and hiding out of sight when the car was brought in.

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The owner, whom Rotert declined to name, showed up May 1 to inspect the car, but did not have keys to get into it. The owner never mentioned a dog, and it is not known if the owner was driving the vehicle when it was abandoned. The owner still owes $1,100 to retrieve the vehicle. Once Kia was found Monday, she was taken to the city’s animal shelter. Although the dog is 12 weeks old, it appeared to be only 8 weeks old. The terrier-schnauzer mix was emaciated and dehydrated from being trapped in the vehicle. They named her Kia because they couldn’t think of any names based on the vehicle she was in that were fitting. Kia ate a little when she arrived at the shelter and she is expected to survive.