The Daily Drift

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Today in History

1264   King Henry III is captured by his brother-in-law, Simon de Montfort, at the Battle of Lewes.
1509   At the Battle of Agnadello, the French defeat the Venitians in Northern Italy.  
1610   French King Henri IV (Henri de Navarre) is assassinated by François Ravillac, a fanatical monk. 1796   English physician Edward Jenner gives the first successful smallpox vaccination.  
1804   Explorer William Clark sets off from St. Louis, Missouri.  
1853   Gail Borden applies for a patent for condensed milk.  
1863   Union General Nathanial Banks heads towards Port Hudson along the Mississippi River.  
1897   Guglielmo Marconi sends first communication by wireless telegraph.  
1897   "Stars and Stripes Forever" by John Phillip Sousa is performed for the first time in Philadelphia.  
1935   A plebiscite in the Philippines ratifies an independence agreement.  
1940   Holland surrenders to Germany.  
1942   The British Army, in retreat from Burma, reach India.  
1948   Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion establishes the State of Israel.  
1961   A bus carrying black and white civil rights activists is bombed and burned in Alabama.  
1969   Three companies of the 101st Airborne Division fail to push North Vietnamese forces off Hill 937 in South Vietnam.  
1973   The U.S. space station Skylab is launched.  
1991   In South Africa, Winnie Mandela is sentenced to six years in prison for her part in the kidnapping and beating of three black youths and the death of a fourth.

Non Squitur

Amazingly Bizarre KISS Merchandising Products

KISS co-founders Gene Simmons and Paul Stanley, the last-remaining original members of the band, have had the world rocking all night for 40 years. With an astounding 23 consecutive gold records and generation gap-crossing live performances, there's no question that KISS is a musical phenomenon.

What's more, over the years, the band has become a hardcore business. With over 3,000 licensed products, KISS has been transformed from a hard-partying rock 'n' roll band into a globally recognized business brand that, according to Simmons, is worth as much as $5 billion. Here’s a look at 15 of the band's most shameless licensing deals.

Did you know ...

That a study finds sex and partying make people happier than having kids

Hey, check out Americans against the tea party

That you & your family are guinea pigs for chemical companies

Here's Will Durst on "too stupid to fail"

Thirteen 'Benghazis' Occurred on the shrub's Watch

But funny, FAUX News never mentioned it

The repugican inquisition over the Benghazi attacks has never really gone away, but it appears as though in the wake of the Boston Marathon bombing and the House Oversight Committee’s Benghazi hearings this week there’s renewed psycho-histrionics over Benghazi. Lindsey Graham and Faux News Channel in particular are each crapping their cages over new allegations from an alleged whistleblower, while they continue to deal in previously debunked falsehoods about the sequence of events during and following the attacks. Faux News is predictably helming the biggest raft of hooey on the situation — turning its attention to Hillary Clinton in an abundantly obvious early move to stymie her presidential run before it even begins.

So I thought I’d revisit some territory I covered back in October as a bit of a refresher — especially since it appears as if no one, including and especially the traditional press, intends to ask any of these obnoxious, opportunistic liars about why they’re so obsessed by this one attack yet they entirely ignored the dozen-plus consulate/embassy attacks that occurred when the shrub and Dick Cheney were allegedly “keeping us safe.”

The Benghazi attacks are absolutely not unprecedented even though they’re being treated that way by repugicans who are deliberately ignoring anything that happened prior to Obama.

More

More Bad News For Dimbulb: He's Breaking Federal Law By Accepting Money From Wingnut Groups

There were lots of headlines about Lush Dimbulb this week.The majority had nothing positive to say about the hate-speaking radio host or his parent company, Clear Channel, run by Bob Pittman and John Sykes. Not a good week for the Lushbo, at all. One headline referred to Limbaugh as a wingnut welfare bum, because he’s having to take  money/gifts/payola from right-wing groups. Given that 95% of Cumulus radio network advertisers want no part of Dimbulb, it makes sense he would need to have other sources to subsidize his smut.
Payola, is indeed, taking place. Heritage Foundation and FreedomWorks (linked to the tea party/Koch Bros.) have been paying Lush Dimbulb and Glenn Brick, according to Dick Armey, former FreedomWorks Chairman. Dimbulb and Brick are  taking money to talk up the wingnut agendas unbeknownst to their audiences. Pretty seedy – and illegal.

Some decades ago there was a shake-up in the music industry. Record execs were using payola to push their music/agendas. A law was passed making it illegal. FCC has specific rules against payola in the broadcast industry. Apparently, Lush Dimbulb’s show is being overlooked. With the new FCC Chairman coming in, maybe the government agency will take a good, long, and hard look into the goings on at Clear Channel.
An FCC rule states:

Any broadcast station employee who has accepted or agreed to accept payment for the airing of program material, and the person making or promising to make the payment, must disclose this information to the station prior to the airing of the program.

Wouldn’t it be nice if the FCC rule turns out to be the ticket for Dimbulb’s demise? And isn’t it ironic? Wingnuts are always preaching “Free Market.” Once again, wingnut hypocrisy rears its ugly head.

And the stupid continues to grow ...

Wingnuts are a cancer on America

From Think Progress

Elizabeth Smart: Abstinence Education Teaches Rape Victims They're Worthless, Dirty, And Filthy

by Tara Culp-Ressler

Elizabeth Smart became a household name after she was kidnapped from her home in Salt Lake City, UT at the age of 14 and held in captivity for nine months. She was forced into a polygamous marriage, tethered to a metal cable, and raped daily until she was rescued from her captors nine months later. Smart was recovered while she and her kidnappers were walking down a suburban street, leading many Americans who followed her story on the national news to wonder: Why didn't she just run away as soon as she was brought outside?

Speaking to an audience at Johns Hopkins about issues of human trafficking and sexual violence, Smart recently offered an answer to that question. She explained that some human trafficking victims don't run away because they feel worthless after being raped, particularly if they have been raised in wingnut cultures that push abstinence-only education and emphasize sexual purity:

Read more at the link.

The House repugican Attack on Overtime Pay Is Designed to Kill Jobs

One of the definitions of slave labor is prohibiting an indentured servant from demanding compensation for their labor, and although slavery is illegal in America, there is a movement to eliminate labor laws that prohibit employers from taking advantage of their workforce. The repugicans and their wingnut paymasters have begun a concerted effort to remove labor laws that have been in force since the Great Depression to increase profits of the wealthy, and their goal is creating a labor force at the mercy of employers who, if successful, will avoid compensating their employees fairly, and if possible, force them to work for less than subsistence wages. As it stands now, the only thing standing in the way of slave-like conditions are government laws to protect workers, and in their perpetual campaign to “get government out of the way” of unscrupulous businesses, repugicans are on a crusade to dismantle laws that prevent predatory employers from compensating their employees as well as protect workers from unsafe and unfair labor practices.
In 1938, the Fair Labor Standards Act (FLSA) effectively provided American workers with the eight-hour workday and the 40-hour workweek, and although it does not prevent employers from requiring their employees to work more than eight hours in a day or over 40 hours in a week, it does induce employers to either pay higher wages for longer hours or hire more employees. It is important to remember that the FLSA also outlawed child labor and required employers to pay a pathetic minimum wage that are both under threat of elimination from repugicans at the behest of their corporate masters paying them to “get government out of the way” of imposing near-slave labor conditions on the American workforce.
Last week, repugicans in the House passed a bill that eliminates overtime pay for private sector employees in what is a continuing repugican assault in their war on working Americans. Eric Cantor sponsored and heavily promoted the bill as a family friendly measure to “help” working mothers spend more time with their families, but the reality is it puts employees at the mercy of employers who are fed up with paying overtime wages for workers who put in more than 8 hours a day and 40 hours a week at their jobs. The way Cantor promotes the bill is promising that when an employee works overtime, instead of higher wages, they can take “time off” at a later date to spend time with their families, but he never reveals that there is no guarantee the employer has to give “flex time” off, ever, because the decision of when an employee takes their “flex time” remains solely under purview of the employer who decides when a worker can use their comp time, if at all. The bill effectively eliminates overtime pay and puts the employee at the mercy of predatory employers who can withhold “flex time” indefinitely, including when they terminate the worker meaning they worked overtime for free.
The law is also another repugican attempt to kill new jobs because without the incentives inherent in the FLSA overtime rule, employers have no reason to hire new employees to avoid paying overtime because if they have free rein to work employees 16 hours a day for minimum wage, they will not bring in new workers to save payroll expense on overtime pay; until they fire the employ to avoid giving them the time off they earned. Americans already work more hours and are more productive than any other industrialized country, and giving employers protection to reduce paychecks is a real threat because they can claim giving employees earned comp time will “unduly disrupt the operations of the employer.” Regardless what Cantor says, his bill is meant to force Americans to work more for less pay and it is another Republican gift to the business community regardless the damage to American workers and the economy.
Proponents of ending overtime pay claim many public sector employees have, and take advantage, of flex time provisions, but they are predominately unionized workers with protections the private sector does not afford its employees and repugicans are fighting desperately to end.  America is one of the only industrialized nations on Earth that does not provide paid sick leave or paid vacations, and opponents of Cantor’s bill warn that it effectively “liquidates the whole concept of paid leave” because instead of giving workers paid vacations or sick leave, they will force them to “earn” time off by working overtime that still gives the employers the option to defer the time off indefinitely, or until  the time of termination that absolves them from ever compensating the employee.
Most, if not all, Americans would rather not be forced to work overtime, but with wages falling and the cost of living rising they have little choice if they are to avoid falling into poverty. It is important to remember that with a woefully lacking minimum wage, a worker putting in 60 hours a week cannot afford to pay rent in any state in the Union, and eliminating overtime pay will make it harder than it already is to afford food, much less put a roof over their family’s heads. The National Partnership for Women and Families released a fact sheet titled “An Empty Promise: The Working Families Flexibility Act Would Give Workers Less Flexibility and Less Pay,” and noted that Cantor’s bill “sets up a dangerous false choice between time and money, when working families really need both. The bill would erode hourly workers’ ability to make ends meet, plan for family time and have predictability, stability and true flexibility at work,” and that really is the repugican’s 75-year goal in giving power to employers to abuse their workforce the FLSA was created to prevent. President Obama has already issued a statement promising to veto the bill if it reaches his desk saying it “undermines the existing right to hard-earned overtime pay, on which many working families rely to make ends meet, while misrepresenting itself as a workplace flexibility measure that gives power to employees over their own schedules.” The idea of employees having power over their own schedules, or their lives, is something Republicans are out to end to restore Depression-era working conditions before the New Deal or FLSA, and it is precisely what their “get government out of the way” meme is meant to accomplish.
If repugicans were not rank liars and they had the least interest in helping working families, or any Americans, they would raise the pathetic minimum wage, make it easier to form and join unions, and fund enforcement of laws against employer scams that are little more than wage theft. Instead, they promote eliminating the minimum wage, child labor laws, workplace safety departments like the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA), and any employee protection agency administered by the government. They would, in effect, institute indentured servitude on the American people if they could get away with it to provide businesses with higher profits from Americans who are more productive, work longer, and earn less than most developed nations’ workforce.
America is one of, if not, the only industrialized nation that does not have mandatory paid vacation time, sick leave, maternity leave, or health insurance and now repugicans want to eliminate overtime pay, minimum wage, and eventually child labor laws. Slavery was abolished in America nearly 130 years ago, and although repugicans are not yet proposing its return, they are promoting conditions that make employees expecting compensation for their labor appear extravagant and there is little doubt that in their drive to create a nation of peasants serving the wealthy few, they will impose legal cover for employers to force workers to labor for survival wages and sadly for millions of Americans, they have already succeeded.

The job fatality rate isn't budging, and no wonder, with penalties this low

by Laura Clawson

  

When we think about workplace fatalities, it's natural that we think about cases like the Rana Plaza collapse in Bangladesh, which at this writing had caused more than 1000 fatalities. In the United States, we think about the West Fertilizer Co. explosion, which killed 14, including 10 firefighters. Or the Upper Big Branch Mine explosion. We think about disasters with fatalities in the double digits and dramatic visuals, in other words. And we do notice those stories. Many deaths on the job, though, are virtually ignored outside the circle of people directly affected. They happen in ones and twos, quietly, and the hazards or negligence or outright disdain for the lives of workers that cause them are punished only with fines, usually bargained down to shockingly low levels. The AFL-CIO released its Death on the Job report this week, and the toll for the United States in 2011 was 4,693 workers killed on the job, an average of 13 every day. It's much harder to know how many died from occupational diseases, but the estimate is 50,000. Everyone's risk is not equal, with states having fatality rates ranging from 1.2 per 100,000 in New Hampshire to 12.4 per 100,000 in North Dakota, differences due partly to the mix of industries in those states; workers in agriculture or mining are at much more risk than workers in finance or education, obviously.
One category of workers at high risk stands out. Where the overall job fatality rate is 3.5 for every 100,000 workers:

Latino workers continue to be at increased risk of job fatalities, with a fatality rate of 4.0 per 100,000 workers in 2011. There were 749 fatal injuries among Latino workers, up from 707 in 2010. Sixty-eight percent of these fatalities (512 deaths) were among workers born outside the United States. Workers who are undocumented may be at particular risk facing abuse and exploitation and fearing retaliation if they raise concerns about unsafe working conditions.

Job fatality rates declined for years, but have been stalled for the past three years. Of course it's harder to reduce relatively low rates, but, as we'll discuss below the fold, the enforcement of workplace safety laws and the incentives for employers to do the right thing are weak.

For one thing, there aren't enough inspectors to check out workplaces on a regular—hell, even on an occasional—basis.

For another thing, the penalties for violations are low enough to be seen by unscrupulous or careless business owners as a cost of doing business. A serious violation of the Occupational Safety and Health Act drew an average penalty of $2,156 in 2012, and that's for states where the federal government is doing the enforcing. States that have their own OSHA plans give an average $974 penalty for a serious violation. Penalties are higher but still totally inadequate even when a worker dies:

For FY 2012, the median initial total penalty in fatality cases investigated by federal OSHA was $6,625 ...

Bad, right? Just $6,625 when someone died? It gets worse: After settlement, the median penalty was down to $5,175. And again, that's when the federal government is in charge. OSHA state plans have an initial median penalty of a paltry $4,900, which is knocked down to $4,200 by settlements. Criminal penalties? Forget about it:

They are limited to cases in which a willful violation results in a worker death and are misdemeanors. Since 1970, only 84 cases have been prosecuted, with defendants serving a total of 89 months in jail. During this time there were more than 390,000 worker deaths. By comparison, in FY 2012 there were 320 criminal enforcement cases initiated under federal environmental laws and 231 defendants charged, resulting in 79 years of jail time and $44 million in penalties—more cases, fines and jail time in one year than during OSHA’s entire history.

It's a slight overstatement to say that the government is basically giving employers free rein to kill workers. But it's not the outrageous hyperbole it should be in any kind of civilized society. Here's what some of those deaths look like. Grain smothering killed 26 in 2010:

“It created kind of a quicksand effect,” Piper said. “So we worked around it and we were aware of it, and after a while … Wyatt ended up getting caught up in it and started screaming for help. Me and Alex went in after him, and we each grabbed one side of him under his armpits and started dragging him out, and got pretty close to the edge of the quicksand and then we started sinking in with him.” [...]
“And it was just me and Alex standing there up to our chests completely, just trapped in the corn,” Piper said. “And Wyatt was underneath. I was hopeful that he was still alive, but at this point I’m pretty sure that he suffocated pretty quickly. The pressure underneath the corn was just too great.” [...] The corn kept flowing around Piper and Pacas. “After a little bit [Pacas’s] hand was sticking up above the grain and I could just see his scalp, and his hand stopped moving,” Piper said. “And the corn was up to my chin at that point. And it was slowly trickling down … and I was about to be covered, too.”

These deaths, like so many others on the job, are horrific and preventable, yet employers tell workers to take the risks, and don't suffer real consequences for the deaths.

The truth be told

Oral surgeon's quest to re-imagine the garage-band guitar

Ben Marks, our pal at Collector's Weekly, says, "I just wrote a piece about Matt Eichen, the yarmulke-wearing, oral-surgeon founder and designer of Musicvox, whose Spaceranger guitars were used in the last Austin Powers movie. After taking an almost decade-long hiatus due to his daughter's bout with cancer (she's fine now), he's back at it, with new designs and models, all inspired by the cheap, consumer guitars of the 50s and 60s, from Danelectro and Harmony to Supro and Silvertone."

Like a lot of budding collectors of the inexpensive, entry-level guitars of the 1950s and ’60s, Eichen found himself in a lot of pawn shops. “During my residency and afterward, whenever I had some spare change I would go to a pawn shop wherever I could find one. If I was traveling to a conference in any state, when I get off the plane, the first thing I’d do is go to a pawn shop in the worst part of town and see what kind of guitars were available. Harmonys were always on my list, but then I spread out to Supros, Danelectros, Airlines, and Silvertones. Anything made by Valco or Kay. They had magical tones.”

Oral Surgeon's quest to reimagine the garage-band guitar

A 4-year-old boy is mayor of town for a year after his name was drawn from a hat

A town in Minnesota has a new mayor and he’s not even started school yet. In Dorset, 4-year-old Robert Tufts, who goes by the name of Bobbie, now calls the shots.

Every year the town picks a name out of a hat, and that person becomes the mayor for a year.

Mayor Tufts enjoys his job. He likes to play, dance, sing, and talk to his townspeople, but he also likes to sneak off to the lake with his parents in his downtime and fish.

YouTube link.

He likes to catch plenty of crappie, muskies, and bass. He says the best bait to use is leeches and worms. Mayor Tufts also has a girlfriend named Sophia. He'll give up his post in August, when another name will be pulled out of the hat.

Woman fined by Dubai court for calling man stupid

A woman who called her friend's former husband stupid has been fined Dh1,000 (£175, $270). The woman, ZF, 40, a Filipina, made the insult while accompanying her friend to a police station. Her friend's former-husband had complained to police that his former wife - who had custody of their child - was late to a scheduled meeting as part of his visitation rights.

"She was awarded custody and he was given visitation rights every Friday," said the woman, who said that on the day of the incident, her friend was busy and running late. "He called police because she was just late," said the woman. "I went with her to Al Qusais police station and when I saw him, I couldn't contain myself and called him stupid."

The former-husband, MF, 34, a sales executive from Egypt who works at a bank, said that as part of the couple's divorce he was granted the right to see his daughter from 6pm to 9pm every Friday. He said he was complaining not because his former-wife, AJ, a Filipina, was late, but because she was not allowing him to see the two-month-old child.

"I was left with no choice but to go to police who called her and ordered her to come to the station so I could see my baby," he said. "The woman was with my former wife and I have never seen her before. I don't know why she insulted me." The Misdemeanours Court fined her Dh1,000 on a charge of issuing insults.

Firefighters rescued young girl from tree full of hissing and growling raccoons

Firefighters in Abbotsford, British Columbia, Canada responded to a report of a young girl trapped in a tree on Friday.

The crew arrived to find that a 12 year old girl was trapped in the tree about 3 meters from the ground. The firefighters also noticed that there was a family of raccoons in the tree.

The girl was frightened because every time that she attempted to climb down from the tree, the raccoons would hiss and growl at her. The Fire Crew approached the tree and placed a ladder against it.

The raccoons then scurried up to the top of the tree. Firefighters were then able to help the girl climb down the ladder and fortunately she was uninjured. One engine with 4 firefighters attended the incident.

To suppress or to explore?

To suppress or to explore? Emotional strategy may influence anxiety

When trouble approaches, what do you do? Run for the hills? Hide? Pretend it isn’t there? Or do you focus on the promise of rain in those looming dark clouds? New research suggests that the [...]

First vatburger is ready to eat

After spending $250,000 worth of anonymously donated money, Mark Post from Maastricht University is ready to go public with his first vat-grown hamburger, which will be cooked and eaten at an event in London this week. Though they claim that it's healthier than regular meat, one question not answered in the article is the Omega 3/6 balance -- crappy, corn-fed, factory-farmed meet is full of Omega 6s and avoided by many eaters; the grass-fed, free-range stuff is higher in Omega 3s.

Yet growing meat in the laboratory has proved difficult and devilishly expensive. Dr. Post, who knows as much about the subject as anybody, has repeatedly postponed the hamburger cook-off, which was originally expected to take place in November. His burger consists of about 20,000 thin strips of cultured muscle tissue. Dr. Post, who has conducted some informal taste tests, said that even without any fat, the tissue “tastes reasonably good.” For the London event he plans to add only salt and pepper.
But the meat is produced with materials — including fetal calf serum, used as a medium in which to grow the cells — that eventually would have to be replaced by similar materials of non-animal origin. And the burger was created at phenomenal cost — 250,000 euros, or about $325,000, provided by a donor who so far has remained anonymous. Large-scale manufacturing of cultured meat that could sit side-by-side with conventional meat in a supermarket and compete with it in price is at the very least a long way off.“This is still an early-stage technology,” said Neil Stephens, a social scientist at Cardiff University in Wales who has long studied the development of what is also sometimes referred to as “shmeat.” “There’s still a huge number of things they need to learn.”
There are also questions of safety — though Dr. Post and others say cultured meat should be as safe as, or safer than, conventional meat, and might even be made to be healthier — and of the consumer appeal of a product that may bear little resemblance to a thick, juicy steak.

Engineering the $325,000 Burger

HIV Virus Awakens Ancient Viral Gene in the Human Genome

Psst! Don't panic, but you've got sleeper agents inside of you: viruses that have integrated their genome into human DNA. No big deal, you say, so what if we've got a few hitchhiking genes in our genome? Actually, there's quite a bit of them:

Scientists have identified 100,000 pieces of retrovirus DNA in our genes, making up eight percent of the human genome. That’s a huge portion of our DNA when you consider that protein coding genes make up just over one percent of the genome.

Carl Zimmer of The Loom blog over at National Geographic explains how one such viral gene could be awaken (by infection by HIV, for example) after lying dormant for six million years in our DNA:

Markovitz and his colleagues analyzed the sequence of the virus genes they found in the patients with HIV. The genes belonged to a family of endogenous retroviruses called HERV-K, but they were not quite like any known HERV-K virus previously found.
The Michigan scientists wondered if this new HERV-K virus was hidden in the human genome. They checked the most complete draft of the human genome and couldn’t find a match. They knew that the human genome sequence was only about 95% finished, so they turned instead to the chimpanzee genome, on the off chance that the virus had infected the common ancestor of humans and chimpanzees over six million years ago. Bingo: a single copy of the virus turned up in the chimp genome. They dubbed it K111.
Having found this match, the scientists decided to return to the human genome and search for K111. They isolated DNA from their HIV patients, as well as from healthy people. They then split apart the two strands of the DNA and added a short piece of DNA that would bind to K111, should it be lurking there. In all 189 of their subjects, the scientists found the virus’s DNA.

Read the rest over at The Loom.

Scientists sequence genome of ‘sacred lotus,’ which likely holds anti-aging secrets

Scientists sequence genome of ‘sacred lotus,’ which likely holds anti-aging secrets

A team of 70 scientists from the U.S., China, Australia and Japan today reports having sequenced and annotated the genome of the “sacred lotus,” which is believed to have a powerful genetic system that repairs [...]

Scientists pinpoint how we see a 95 mph baseball coming

Scientists pinpoint how we see a 95 mph baseball coming

How does San Francisco Giants slugger Pablo Sandoval swat a 95 mph fastball, or tennis icon Venus Williams see the oncoming ball, let alone return her sister Serena’s 120 mph serves? For the first time, [...]

The Magic Roundabout In Swindon, England

The Magic Roundabout in Swindon, England was constructed in 1972 and consists of five mini-roundabouts arranged in a circle. Its name comes from the popular children's television series The Magic Roundabout. In 2009 it was voted the fourth scariest junction in Britain, in a poll by Britannia Rescue.

The Magic Roundabout was designed by Frank Blackmore of the British Transport and Road Research Laboratory, under the control of Highways engineer Jeff Maycock of Swindon Council. Traffic flow around the smaller, inner roundabout is counter-clockwise, and traffic flows in the usual clockwise manner around the five mini-roundabouts and the outer loop.

Tulips

Not Only From Amsterdam

When it's spring again I'll bring again tulips from Amsterdam - so goes the old song. Tulips and the Netherlands seem to be forever inextricably bound, yet neither the plant or its cultivation originated there.

It's native range encompasses Turkey, Israel, Palestine, North Africa, and Iran all the way to the Northwest of China. Today, however, the flower is a truly global species and each spring the fields of numerous countries explode in a riot of colors.

In 1945: American and German Soldiers Fight Together

In nations that were under Hitler's thumb during World War II, it was often difficult to know anyone's actual allegiance. There were those who truly believed in the Nazi cause, others who knew which way the wind blew, and some who put on a Nazi face while secretly fighting for the Allied cause. In the week between Hitler's death and VE Day, these different allegiances turned on each other as Allied forces swept in. The Last Battle is the story of one fight in World War II that you won't find in history textbooks.

Here are the basic facts: on 5 May 1945—five days after Hitler’s suicide—three Sherman tanks from the 23rd Tank Battalion of the U.S. 12th Armored Division under the command of Capt. John C. ‘Jack’ Lee Jr., liberated an Austrian castle called Schloss Itter in the Tyrol, a special prison that housed various French VIPs, including the ex-prime ministers Paul Reynaud and Eduard Daladier and former commanders-in-chief Generals Maxime Weygand and Paul Gamelin, amongst several others. Yet when the units of the veteran 17th Waffen-SS Panzer Grenadier Division arrived to recapture the castle and execute the prisoners, Lee’s beleaguered and outnumbered men were joined by anti-Nazi German soldiers of the Wehrmacht, as well as some of the extremely feisty wives and girlfriends of the (needless-to-say hitherto bickering) French VIPs, and together they fought off some of the best crack troops of the Third Reich. Steven Spielberg, how did you miss this story?

You can read the story in an article at The Daily Beast, as excerpted from Stephen Harding's new book The Last Battle: When U.S. and German Soldiers Joined Forces in the Waning Hours of World War II in Europe. More

The Cities That Live Behind Walls

For thousands of years, humans have been defending their cities by building huge walls around them. Over time, the cities often spill over the walls - but sometimes they remain hemmed in. Here are some incredible images that show what happens to walled cities over time.

Why Ancient Egyptians Stopped Building Pyramids

I would've guessed "they ran out of stones," but structural engineer Peter James arrived at a very different answer when pondering why ancient Egyptians stopped building pyramids. Turns out, these pyramids were too perfect and that's the ironic basis for their structural instability:

So what was causing the crumbling? James presents a new explanation: thermal movement -- that is to say the expansion and contraction of the limestone with temperature fluctuations -- has ground down the rocks and shifted their positions.
He estimates that the motion can amount to 1¼ inches per 328 feet. As the stones move, dust and sand would fall from the stones and fill in the spaces between them. The spaces into which they could contract at night would shrink, and over time they would be pushed out of position. "Multiply this endless movement by the number of days that the pyramid has been erected and you have the reason why all the outer casing has moved to the extremities, where it has buckled or displaced against blocks moving in the opposite direction and then fallen off," James writes. "It may then have been picked up by opportunists and removed from the site.?"

Problem was, as ancient Egyptians became better at constructing pyramids, the voids between the stones disappeared and the structure were less able to withstand the thermal expansion and contraction of the limestone.
Rebecca J. Rosen of The Atlantic explains: Here.

Physicists observe quantum phenomenon without destroying it

Physicists observe quantum phenomenon without destroying it

Improving our understanding of the human brain, gathering insights into the origin of our universe through the detection of gravitational waves, or optimizing the precision of GPS systems- all are difficult challenges to master because [...]

Astronomical News

Resolving the Radio Background of the Universe

Astronomers using the newly revamped Karl G. Jansky Very Large Array (VLA) in New Mexico, have resolved a component of the ever-present cosmic sky glow -- the radio background.

SOFIA Discovers a Massive Stellar Surprise

A team of astronomers has taken pictures of a huge star as it forms, to find that massive stars form in exactly the same way as smaller ones like the sun.

Right Whale Die-Off Continues to Puzzle

Right Whale Die-Off Continues to Puzzle

Scientists are still vexed about the mysterious deaths of an unprecedented number of baby southern right whales.

Animal Pictures