The Daily Drift

OK, now they've gone a bit too far with the 20th straight week of 'Shark Week' ...!

 

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Today in History

1666		The Fire of London is extinguished after two days.
1664		After days of negotiation, the Dutch settlement of New Amsterdam surrenders to the British, who will rename it New York.
1792		Maximilien Robespierre is elected to the National Convention in France.
1804		In a daring night raid, American sailors under Lieutenant Stephen Decatur, board the captured USS Philadelphia and burn the ship to keep it out of the hands of the Barbary pirates who captured her.
1816		Louis XVIII of France dissolves the chamber of deputies, which has been challenging his authority.
1859		Harriot E. Wilson's Our Nig, is published, the first U.S. novel by an African American woman.
1867		The first shipment of cattle leaves Abilene, Kansas, on a Union Pacific train headed to Chicago.
1870		Author Victor Hugo returns to Paris from the Isle of Guernsey where he had lived in exile for almost 20 years.
1877		The great Sioux warrior Crazy Horse is fatally bayoneted at age 36 by a soldier at Fort Robinson, Nebraska.
1878		Bat Masterson, Wyatt Earp, Bill Tilghman and Clay Allison, four of the West's most famous gunmen, meet in Dodge City, Kansas.
1905		The Russian-Japanese War ends as representatives of the combating empires, meeting in New Hampshire, sign the Treaty of Portsmouth. Japan achieves virtually all of its original war aims.
1910		Marie Curie demonstrates the transformation of radium ore to metal at the Academy of Sciences in France.
1944		Germany launches its first V-2 missile at Paris, France.
1958		Martin Luther King is arrested in an Alabama protest for loitering and fined $14 for refusing to obey police.
1960		Leopold Sedar Sengingor, poet and politician, is elected president of Senegal, Africa.
1969		Charges brought against US lieutenant William Calley in the March 1968 My Lai Massacre during Vietnam War.
1972		"Black September," a Palestinian terrorist group take 11 Israeli athletes hostage at the Olympic Games in Munich.
1975		President Gerald Ford evades an assassination attempt in Sacramento, California.
1977		Hanns-Martin Schleyer, a German business executive who headed to powerful organization and had been an SS officer during WW2, is abducted by the left-wing extremist group Red Army Faction, who execute him on Oct. 18.
1977		Voyager 1 space probe launched.
1978		Israel's Menachem Begin and Egypt's Anwar Sadat begin discussions on a peace process, at Camp David, Md.
1980		World's longest tunnel opens; Switzerland's St. Gotthard Tunnel stretches 10.14 miles (16.224 km) from Goschenen to Airolo.
1984		Space Shuttle Discovery lands afters its maiden voyage.
1996		Hurricane Fran comes ashore near Cape Fear, No. Car. It will kill 27 people and cause more than $3 billion in damage.

Non Sequitur

Did you know ...

That apparently a naked camp counselor penis = horseplay, says cult

That wealth creates narcissism

That federal cuts are blamed for Yosemite fire spread

That one of the first fruit trees planted in America is still alive

North Carolina University Student Beats the repugican cabal’s Vote Suppression Road Show

ECSU student Montravius King fought the repugican cabal's vote suppression effort and won in North Carolina.…

For years, the chairman of Pasquotank County’s repugican cabal, Richard Gilbert went out of his way to challenge as many voters as possible at the historically black public college Elizabeth City State University.   More recently, Gilbert challenged ECSU student Montravius King’s candidacy for city council based on the argument that he has always used. Gilbert claimed that since King lives in a dorm, he doesn’t meet the residency requirement. King who has resided in Elizabeth City since enrolling at Elizabeth City State University in 2009, would be the first student elected to the council, if he is elected.
The Pasquotank County Board of Elections accepted Gilbert’s argument and disqualified King’s candidacy. Interesting to note, when Gilbert challenged King’s candidacy, Sue Myrick of the John W. Pope Citivas Institute found time in her schedule to attend the meeting.
After the decision, Montravius King appealed  to the state board of elections. Aside from King’s candidacy there was much more at stake with this decision.
Since the qualifications for candidacy on the city council and for voting are the same, this decision was seen as a first step toward disenfranchising all students living in ECSU dorms.
Richard Gilbert has extensive experience challenging the voting rights of ECSU students.  He was behind previous attempts  to disenfranchise Elizabeth City State University students by arguing they don’t really meet the residency requirement.  Gilbert got 56 ECSU students dropped from the voting rolls earlier this year based on this very argument. That makes Myrick’s attendance at the meeting especially curious.  Obviously, she wasn’t there to guide Gilbert through the process.  The Institute for Southern Studies  has a more plausible explanation.

Myrick’s presence at King’s hearing has raised questions about Pope’s involvement in efforts to roll back voting rights in North Carolina, which had made great strides in boosting turnout in recent years.

Fortunately, the State Board of Elections unanimously reversed the county’s decision on Tuesday.
Montravius King had every reason to be confident the State Board would reverse Pasquotank County’s decision because the question of whether a dorm room meets the residency requirement was already settled law in North Carolina. At the same time, repugicans in North Carolina have a special way of looking at laws protecting voting rights and for that matter any other rights that benefit people beyond the tea party/repugican base. If given an opening, right wing ideologues will run with the opportunity to restrict certain votes as much as possible.
That was exactly what Richard Gilbert wanted to do with the earlier decision.  He told the AP that he intended to “take this show on the road“,  following the county board’s decision.  Of course, Gilbert’s road led to ECSU but never has made it to the predominantly white and private Mid-Atlantic christian College.  Perhaps Gilbert believes that white students living in dorms are some how different from black students living in dorms when it comes to the question of residency.
Now that the state board has reversed the ruling, eligible voters who are students living in dorms at public colleges and were therefore on Richard Gilbert’s radar can breathe a little bit easier. Voting remains a challenge because of restrictions ranging from the sort of ID that’s accepted, to reduced voting hours and in some cases out of the way voting precincts.
And don’t be surprised if Gilbert and the John W. Pope Civitas Institute find yet another act to take on their student vote suppression road show.

The repugicans Weasel Out of Syria Debate

The repugicans are desperate to avoid taking responsibility for their Syria votes. They know they have to give the President the votes if they want to use the expanded powers of the presidency when they have it next, and that’s why leadership supports it, but repugican members can’t find it in themselves to give Obama anything.
So House repugicans are trying to force Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi to get the votes since they can’t. Again.
A House Democratic leadership aide told Roll Call that they aren’t taking responsibility for Boeher’s job. “The more interesting question is, can Boehner convince (repugicans) to vote on the substance, not against the president? At the end of the day, it will be the repugican leadership’s responsibility to get the votes because they are in the majority.”
No, Boehner can’t get repugicans to be serious even though he backs authorizing the Syria strikes, and yes, repugicans are going to blame their failure on the President. As cover for their failure, repugicans devised the ad hominem that Obama is incompetent and they can’t trust him. Yes, it’s not that repugicans dispute that Assad used chemical weapons on his own people, it’s that Obama can’t be trusted.
Bryon York at the Washington Examiner talked to Congressional repugicans to get a sense of which direction they were leaning, and it seems that they are looking for cover. No big shocker there — the repugicans are once again unable to govern seriously due to their Obama Opposition Disorder and their inner party destruction.
York, who is in with the Congressional repugicans, lists five reasons why repugicans tell him they have a “compelling” case against authorizing Syria. Since the other four were inconsistent with the repugican cabal’s own values (arguing against intervention just because and arguing against the expanded powers of the executive office), the central theme seems to be that Obama is incompetent and they can’t trust him with warmaking powers:

The lack of confidence in Barack Obama. There’s no doubt the president has been extremely reluctant to take action in Syria. He also showed terrible judgment by painting himself into a corner with his 2012 “red line” comments on chemical weapons. For those reasons, and more, some Republicans will argue that they simply cannot entrust special warmaking powers to a president who they believe is not competent to use them.

So their premise is that they can’t trust the special, legal warmaking powers of the presidency to Obama. In other words, their premise is that Obama is not really the president.
Obama asked Congress for input on Syria but he didn’t have to, legally. And that is why Peter King and other repugicans are freaking out, because when repugicans make the argument that they can’t “trust” the executive office with the power to make limited strikes, they are setting a precedent for the next repugican president. The repugicans have worked very hard to expand the powers of the presidency, especially when it comes to war.
Obama is not “competent”? Seriously? This from the party that defunded Libya just to spite Obama, and then spent a year screaming about Libya. This from the party that lied about Weapons of Mass Destruction, lied about Iraq, bungled Iraq, never had an exit strategy, never found Osama bin Laden after telling us that finding him was their number one priority, managed to generate hatred of this country around the globe….
This cabal is saying that the man who got Osama bin Laden is incompetent. The repugicans, who invented the “red line” and hounded Obama over “red lines” (repugicans tend to equate “strength” with rhetoric like “red lines”) are now going to claim that by saying he had a “red line”, he showed he had horrible judgement. Is that the same red line Paul Ryan agreed with during the campaign? Yikes. They’re tripping all over themselves to avoid responsibility.
Meanwhile Speaker Boehner and Majority Leader Eric Cantor dodged a classified briefing on Syria after Boehner issued a flaccid announcement of said briefing, alerting his members that hey, if they miss this one, there will be plenty more. Gee, they are only working nine days this month, but chillax people. No rush.
It’s just a matter so serious that they can’t trust Obama with it. So serious that they can’t be bothered to show up for the classified briefing. So serious that won’t come back early from a vacation.
The repugicans are going to dodge a very serious issue by pointing their fingers and crying, “Obama is incompetent!” Oh well, no one expected any better from them. Speaker Boehner might be wishing that he had been overthrown at the start of this session.

Koch Industries Exposed for Bribery, Secret Iran Sales and More

by Rebekah Wilce

Late Sunday night, after a flurry of PR flack-directed prebuttals that had eyebrows arching and anticipation building, Bloomberg Markets Magazine released an epic exposé about Koch Industries' misdeeds during the last three decades.
Fifteen Bloomberg journalists from around the world contributed to the story.
What did they uncover?

Bribery

Bloomberg reports that employees of a Koch Industries unit in France called Koch-Glitsch made "improper payments to secure contracts in six countries dating back to 2002, authorized by the business director." The activity was uncovered in May 2008 by a Koch Industries compliance officer, Ludmila Egorova-Farines, who was hired to investigate allegations the French unit had been awarding improper salary increases -- not to investigate bribery.
These six years of "improper payments" were made in Algeria, Egypt, India, Morocco, Nigeria and Saudi Arabia. "The only thing that would seriously impact the profitability and continuity of Koch Industries was a compliance issue," former Koch-Glitsch managing director for the U.K., Ged Horner, told Bloomberg. To avoid a bribery scandal like that faced by Siemens AG, the company placed the responsibility on the business director of Koch-Glitsch France, Leon Mausen, and fired him in December 2008.
Koch-Glitsch described the illegal activity in Mausen's termination letter, which was later made public when Mausen challenged his firing in French Labor Court (but was not reported on by the media). The letter described giving cash-stuffed envelopes to a Moroccan company, making payments to a partially state-owned company in Egypt, and paying off a Nigerian government agency to win contracts.
The "U.S. Foreign Corrupt Practices Act" of 1977 (authored by former Wisconsin Senator Bill Proxmire) makes it illegal for U.S. or foreign companies to pay bribes to government officials and state-owned companies. Duke Law School professor Sara Sun Beale tells Bloomberg the termination letter outlining the six years of Koch's illegal payments "really should get the Justice Department's attention. When you have a smoking gun, you launch an investigation."
Despite Koch-Glitsch's efforts to point the finger at Mausen, the French Labor Court wrote in its opinion that "it was not Mr. Mausen alone who was giving authorizations." Mausen was the fall guy, but responsibility may have gone further up the command chain. Company policy required approval from other Koch-Glitsch managers, the court said, including Christoph Ender, the president of Koch- Glitsch for Europe and Asia.
The compliance officer who exposed the bribery scandal, Egoriva-Farines, was initially promoted by Koch but then fired in 2009. She also challenged her termination in French Labor Court, alleging she was fired in retaliation for uncovering the illegal payment scheme.

Sales to Iran

Bloomberg also reports that Koch Industries "sold millions of dollars of petrochemical equipment to Iran, a country the U.S. identifies as a sponsor of global terrorism." U.S. companies have been banned from trading with Iran since 1995, but Koch made sales through its foreign subsidiaries as recently as 2007.
George Bentu, a sales engineer from 2001 to 2007 for Koch-Glitsch in Germany, was interviewed by the U.S. Department of Homeland Security in 2008 about these trades. "Every single chance they had to do business with Iran, or anyone else, they did," Bentu said.
Bentu was forced out of the company in April 2007.
According to the article, the company took "elaborate steps to ensure that its U.S.-based employees weren't involved in the sales to Iran " to avoid technically violating the law.
What is Koch's current PR line on its trading with Iran? The conservative PowerLine blog's pre-emptive spin on the Bloomberg article claims that "the fact that long ago, a subsidiary of a European Koch subsidiary sold equipment in Iran is anything but a bombshell."
Apparently four years is "long ago," and Koch can now sweep both whistleblowers and past misdeeds under the rug. This is a well-rehearsed operation for Koch companies, which is no stranger to recovering from regulatory actions and lawsuits.

Falsifying Benzene Emissions

In April 2001, the Koch Petroleum Group (now Flint Hills Resources) pled guilty to a felony charge of lying to the government about benzene emissions from its Corpus Christi, Texas plant. Benzene can cause Leukemia and other cancer. Koch earned $176 million in profit from the plant in 1995. It would have cost $7 million to comply with the benzene emission regulation.
In January 1995, Koch informed the Texas Natural Resource Conservation Commission it had installed a new anti-pollution device to burn off the benzene – but refinery workers disconnected it in days.
In December 1995, Koch environmental technician Sally Barnes-Soliz found 91 metric tons of uncontrolled benzene emissions from Koch Petroleum's plant in Corpus Christi, Texas, more than 15 times what was permitted by law. In April 1996, however, Koch reported to Texas regulators uncontrolled emissions of only 0.61 metric tons for 1995, or 1/149th the quantity Barnes-Soliz had found.
Barnes-Soliz reported the falsification, and when Koch found out, it "stripped her of her responsibilities and moved her to an empty office with no tasks and no e-mail access." She quit in July 1996.

Stealing Oil on Indian Land

In May 1989, estranged Koch brother Bill, twin brother of David, told the Senate special committee on investigations of a scheme to steal oil on Indian land. "According to data the committee compiled, Koch took 1.95 million barrels of oil it didn't pay for from 1986 to 1988.
FBI agent Richard Elroy told the committee, "The theft is widespread and pervasive, and these people are being horribly victimized."
The Senate referred the case to the Justice Department, but no indictment followed.
However, in a December 1999 civil trial brought by Bill Koch, the jury found that "Koch Industries had made 24,587 false claims in buying oil, underpaying the U.S. government for royalties on Native American land from 1985 to 1989."
Phil Dubose, who worked for Koch Industries from 1968 to 1994, told the jury that "the Koch Method is to cheat the producer out of crude oil."
Koch settled the case in 2001 for $25 million.
Koch's current PR line on the scandal? Melissa Cohlmia, Koch's director of corporate communications, said in an email to Bloomberg reporters, "We believe that our practices were consistent with industry practice."

Deadly Butane Explosion

In August 1996, Danny Smalley watched his 17 year old daughter Danielle and her friend Jason Stone get burned alive in a cloud of ignited butane gas that had leaked from a corroded Koch Industries pipeline.
A jury found that "Koch Industries acted with malice because it had been aware of the extreme risks of using the faulty pipeline," and awarded Danny Smalley $296 million in 1999 for the wrongful death of his daughter.
Smalley used the settlement money to start the Danielle Dawn Smalley Foundation for pipeline safety education. "You see two children burned to death in front of you, you never forget that," Danny Smalley said in an interview with Bloomberg. "I want to stop other parents from ever having to see that."
Three months later, Koch settled two EPA cases for $35 million, which covered more than 300 oil spills in six states.
Koch's PR line on the Smalley verdict? Well, spokesperson Cohlmia says, there was only one explosion, after all.

Koch and the American Legislative Exchange Council

Given the Kochs' history of environmental violations and efforts to skirt U.S. law, it is little wonder they have funded a broad array of organizations that seek to dismantle the Environmental Protection Agency, deny climate science that justifies many environmental regulations, and otherwise deregulate the economy in ways that benefit Koch Industries' bottom line.
In addition to Astroturf groups like American for Prosperity, Koch Industries and the foundations funded or managed by the Koch brothers have a long history of heavily funding the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC).
Among the ALEC "model" bills and resolutions that the Center for Media and Democracy made public on ALECexposed.org are bills that roll back environmental protections and regulations like those that Koch violated in Corpus Christi, resolutions that thwart regional carbon emissions initiatives, and a report calls EPA regulations a "trainwreck." There are also resolutions opposing any and all trade sanctions like those Koch came close to violating with its Iran sales, in addition to bills that advance Koch ideological initiatives like dismantling social security.
The Kochs' Claude R. Lambe Foundation gave $125,000 to ALEC in 2009. The Charles G. Koch Foundation gave over $75,000 to ALEC in 2009 and loaned ALEC $500,000 in 1996. Koch Industries sponsored the publication of ALEC's 1995 Sourcebook of "model" legislation for the states.

Believe it or not

Language Studies

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"A blizzard of horseradish" explained

I had not heard this phrase before, but I had heard of "horsefeathers."  They are related, as noted at World Wide Words:

Most examples from newspapers imply that a blizzard of horseradish is a torrent of unhelpful or irrelevant political verbiage:

All the righteous indignation which drifts down Capitol Hill like a blizzard of horseradish is simply partisan politics.

The News and Tribune (Jefferson City, Missouri), 3 Feb, 1974.

Horseradish is on record from the 1920s meaning arrant nonsense or rubbish, a relative of horsefeathers. Both terms are euphemisms for horseshit or bullshit. It’s possible that an unbowdlerised alliterative form blizzard of bullshit could already have been in use around that date; it’s recorded only within the past decade, but that doesn’t mean a lot as it would have been considered too rude to print much before then...

A few sources suggest where it comes from:

The death of Ho Chi Minh has left policy-makers at the State Department, and the men who convey their thinking to the public, lost in what Groucho Marx once called “a blizzard of horseradish.”

Naugatuck Daily News (Connecticut), 10 Sep. 1969.

'Shitstorm'

Shitstorm Dictionary Wins Award for Ruining German

Germany's respected Duden dictionary has received a spoof award for its excessive use of English words. "Shitstorm," "app" and "Facebook" are among the anglicisms recently added to the reference book. More...

The Uncanny Valley might not actually exist

The Uncanny Valley is that point where something designed to look human gets too close to success, and ends up accidentally reminding us of the many, many ways that it also looks totally alien. The result: A one-way ticket to Creepoutsville.
Or, anyway, that's the hypothesis. See, despite the fact that we've long treated it as a given, the Uncanny Valley isn't a proven concept. In fact, writes Rose Eveleth at The BBC, the original 1970 paper that described the Uncanny Valley wasn't really based on research at all. It was more of an essay. An essay that nobody much questioned for 30 years. Since 2000, there's been some actual research on the subject, and the results are very mixed. Some studies can find evidence of the Uncanny Valley. In others, though, it appears to not exist at all.

In one study, David Hanson of Hanson Robotics, in Plano, Texas, and his colleagues showed participants images of two different robots that were animated to simulate human-like facial expressions. The survey simply asked the participants what they thought of the experience. The vast majority (73%) liked the human-like robots. In fact, not one person stated that these robots disturbed them.
Hanson and his team then showed the participants a continuum of images, starting with a picture of Princess Jasmine taken from the Disney movie Aladdin. Over the course of six images, Jasmine’s face slowly morphed into that of actress Jennifer Love Hewitt. The idea of these facial progression studies is to try to observe the dip in likeability that Mori predicted between an obviously cartoon image and an obviously human one. The participants were asked to rank the acceptability of each picture in the series. But, again, rather than see a dip in the scores in the middle of the range – as the uncanny valley would predict – none of the images seemed to bother anyone.

Eveleth's piece is definitely worth a read. Not only does it challenge out accepted cultural wisdom, but it also suggests that there's more to what creeps us out than the simple concept of an Uncanny Valley is capturing. There might be other factors that determine whether a human-looking thing gives us the willies, or is no big deal. As we think about the future of robotics, figuring out what those factors are will become more and more important.
 

Landlord claims that fake tan is ruining student beds

Students' obsession with fake tanning is costing a Cardiff landlord thousands of pounds in new mattresses and mattress covers. At first John Winter thought the marks were caused by bodily fluids or a mattress fault. The fashion for faking bronzed skin has even resulted in a change in the type of mattress being used."It seemed to be a new phenomena in Cardiff which began about four years ago, although I had come across it before when I checked other properties elsewhere," said Joe Harris, lettings manager for John Winter's company.

"John [the owner] didn't have a clue what the strange orange marks were. They were roughly body shaped and you could see the wrist, ankle and shoulder areas. There is a high percentage of females out of the 400 students we house, so the incidents were much higher, and you could see the fake tanning products in nearly every room," he said. Mr Harris added that the problem was causing so much damage the type of mattress being used had to be changed.

"John had custom-made mattress which were pocket sprung and it was ruining those. I went to one house and was met by a parade of mattresses being carried down the stairs on the way to the skip. Those have been changed into memory foam because the covers can be removed and washed or replaced, although we still have some where the color has gone right through and ruined the whole thing."

New mattress covers cost around £30 each, plus VAT, and so the company is taking a proactive approach to try to reduce the damage, he said. "We try to educate the students and it has been quite successful because three years ago we had 220 mattress covers ruined, but this year that's dropped to 147." Mr Harris says that he does not see the problem going away until the interest in fake tan wanes. "There are quite a few orange coloured people walking around Cardiff," he added.

Airline Introduces "Flying Nannies" to Help Children During Long-Haul Flights

(Photo: Etihad Airways)

Ever been on a long flight with a screaming baby? Etihad Airlines, the national carrier of the United Arab Emirates, is working on a solution:

Etihad Airways is introducing 300 nannies to assist families and help children behave during long-haul flights.

Acting as an extra pair of hands for put-upon parents, it is hoped the nannies will keep little ones amused while on board a plane.

Tricks up the orange-aproned nannies’ sleeves include face painting, puppets, magic tricks and origami. According to the airline, the nannies can help with entertaining children and settling them before bed, but will not be able to take children to the bathroom or off their parents’ hands entirely. For older children there are quizzes and tours of the galley.

Etihad expects to have 500 nannies, approved by Norland, a childcare training college in the UK, bringing order to the skies by the end of the year.

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Still not worth it!

 

Even at that price

Late Justice

Germany to Prosecute 30 Auschwitz Guards

Germany's top official for investigating Nazi war crimes announced on Tuesday he has recommended 30 suspected former Auschwitz guards be prosecuted for accessory to murder. More...

Nazi Murder Trial Former SS Officer Faces Charges in Germany

by Jörg Diehl

Former Waffen SS officer Siert B. faces trial in Germany on Monday for the fatal shooting of a Dutch resistance fighter in 1944. A witness said that the 92-year-old Dutch-born German "spread fear and terror."  More... 

Path of a Tyrant

Uncovering Genghis Khan's Lost Legacy

by Frank Thadeusz
As competing researchers race to locate Genghis Khan's tomb, discoveries by German and Mongolian archaeologists are shedding light on his son Ögödei's equally impressive accomplishments.  

 More... 

• Photo Gallery: The Hunt for Genghis Khan's Tomb

Mystery Intensifies

Attic Mummy Contains Human Bones

by Rainer Leurs
Many thought the mummy found last month by a boy in his grandmother's eastern German attic would turn out to be a phony. But scans show it contains real human bones, though probably not those of an ancient Egyptian.  More... 

• Photo Gallery: Mummy Found by Boy Contains Real Bones

Cool, interactive site shows you how ocean currents carry flotsam around the globe

Drop a message-in-a-bottle into the Gulf of Mexico, somewhere near New Orleans, and, 10 years later, your missive has a high likelihood of ending up near Cuba — or northern France. The website Adrift uses data from a global system of floating buoys to show you how ocean currents carry things like plastic debris around the planet.

Industrial Age Soot Melted Glaciers During Cold Climate

Industrial Age Soot Melted Glaciers During Cold Climate

Soot in the smoke billowing from Industrial Age coal-burning factories seems to have sullied the glaciers, causing them to melt, although average temperatures in Europe were dropping.

Did Ancient Earth-Chilling Meteor Crash Near Canada?

Did Ancient Earth-Chilling Meteor Crash Near Canada?

A meteor or comet impact near Quebec heaved a rain of hot melted rock along North America's Atlantic Coast about 12,900 years ago.

Random Celebrity Photos

Squirrels hell-bent on destruction of American electric infrastructure

If you enjoy the irony in the fact that the great East Coast blackout of 2003 was largely caused by a few untrimmed trees, then you're going to love Jon Mooallem's account of how America's squirrels are wreaking havoc on America's electricity system.
Using a Google news alert, he's cataloged 50 squirrel-caused power outages in 24 states — and that's just since Memorial Day. These aren't small outages either. Several of them have cut power to thousands of people at a time. Back in 1994, a squirrel took out the Nasdaq. These are kamikaze raids and they've lead to an interesting phenomenon — technology developed specifically to protect our infrastructure from furry, tree-hopping rodents.

Species

America's Invasive Species 450 Million Years Ago

The formation of mountains 450 million years ago may have allowed invasive species to storm the continent that gave rise to North America.

Historic Seafood Menus Show Move to Deep-Sea Cuisine

The abundance of fishes on restaurant menus provide clues to the quantities of fish species in the ocean.

Scientists discover new bat species in West Africa

An international team of scientists, including biologists from, the University of York, has discovered five new species of bats in West Africa. The team, which also included researchers from the

More...

Frog Hears With Its Mouth

The Gardiner’s Seychelles frog is the smallest frog ever found, at only 11 millimeters in length.  This frog doesn't have a middle ear, so scientists assumed it was deaf. Or were they? An experiment in which frogs sounds elicited a response indicated they could hear! But How?

So the scientists refocused their experiments on the frogs’ heads. By making various 3-D simulations of how sound travels through the frogs’ heads, the scientists found that the bones in their mouths act as an amplifier for sound waves.

Further x-rays showed that sound travels from the mouth to the inner ear, thanks to an evolutionary adaptation: The frogs have thinner and fewer tissue layers between the mouth and inner ear.

In essence, these frogs' mouth bones act as the equivalent of the hammer, anvil, and stirrup bones in humans. Read more about the experiments at NatGeo News.

Couple's chicken rental service is catching on

A man and his wife's chicken-rental service is catching on. Phil and Jenn Thompkins of Freeport, Pennsylvania says they are giving people who like the idea of farm-fresh eggs an opportunity to see if they are up to the task keeping hens before taking the plunge.

“It really is a trial period for someone who wants to have chickens long term,” said “Homestead” Phil Thompkins, who runs Rent the Chicken with his wife, Jenn. “A lot of people don’t know where to start.” After watching friends struggle to learn what was involved in raising chickens for the eggs, they saw a need for a sort of starter-kit for other interested families.

They provided their first hen rental in July, and are spreading the word with a soft-opening of their business ahead of their grand opening next spring. “I think it’s something a lot of people are into,” Thompkins said. “We’ve actually had a lot of positive feedback.” Rent the Chicken provides two hens (already laying eggs), a wheeled coop, feed for the entire rental period and a water dish for $350.

They will deliver the hens in May and collect them again in November. During that time period, the hens should lay between 8 and 14 eggs a week. (Hens tend to taper off their laying during the cold winter month.) At the end of the rental period a client may either have the hens and coop picked up to rent again the following spring, or they have the option to buy the hens.

Tourist stranded on Australian island for two weeks while being stalked by massive crocodile

A New Zealand kayaker has had an amazing escape after becoming trapped on a remote Western Australia island for more than two weeks by a huge crocodile which would not let him leave. The man, known only as Ryan, was last month exploring the northern WA coast near Kalumburu, which is between Derby and Kununurra. Having been left on the remote Governor Island, the Kiwi realized he didn't have enough supplies and attempted to paddle the four kilometers or so back to the mainland. But he immediately caught the eye of the six-meter saltwater crocodile who has lived in the area for years.

Every time he attempted to leave, the crocodile would make his presence felt, leaving the adventurer stranded for a fortnight. On Saturday, local Don McLeod spotted a light on the island, and when he checked it out, the hatless, shirtless and desperate visitor approached. "When I came round through Red Bluff opposite Governor Island I saw a flash in the scrub,'' Mr McLeod said. "I went across and Ryan came out looking a bit distraught. He came down the beach, he had no hat on and no shirt on.

"He was relieved and shocked, and thankful someone had come along because he was running out of options pretty quickly. He is a very, very lucky man.'' Ryan's passage to WA was an incredible story in itself, having traveled from Queensland to the Kimberley on a yacht whose owner was then jailed in the Northern Territory, leaving his passenger stranded for two months. After hitching a lift with a solo yachtsman from the Territory to WA, he was dropped on Governor Island with 160 liters of water, some flour and dry stores.

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But after realizing he was unprepared for the Kimberley wilderness, his first attempt to reach the mainland was thwarted by the massive crocodile. Mr McLeod said the story was incredible. "He said every time he got in his little kayak, which was only 2.5m long, this crocodile - who has lived there for many years and is a monster - has chased him,'' Mr McLeod said. "He was desperate for water when I trotted up. We gave him a cold beer, which was probably the wrong thing, and then he went to sleep about three-quarters of the way home.'' The New Zealander has been given a bed at a mission on the mainland as he recovers.

State Record Gator Killed in Mississippi ... Twice

It was a big weekend for alligator hunting in Missisippi. A six-person crew led by hunter Sean King of Yazoo City hooked what they joked was the Loch Ness Monster in Issaquena County.

The six-person party spent the following two hours trying to wrestle the behemoth into the boat and finally succeeded after two other hunters offered assistance.

When the harvest was officially weighed, it was obvious why they had so much trouble loading it. The gator came in at an enormous 723.5 pounds, beating the state record for heaviest male by 26 pounds.

But the record was only good for a short time. At the same time, Dustin Bockman of Vicksburg and his crew were chasing a very large alligator in the Mississippi River near Port Gibson. They were able to shoot the animal after a couple of hours of wrangling. Then there was a several-hours wait for help getting him into a boat. That's when he heard about the earlier 723-pound gator.

Bockman said he couldn’t believe it and thought he’d probably missed his chance at the claim of harvesting a state-record alligator by an hour. “I knew he was over 700, but I wasn’t sure about 723,” he said.

However, when Bockman’s 13-foot, 4.5-inch gator was lifted, the scales stopped at 727 pounds and the hour-old state record fell.

Believe it or not, those weren't the only gator records broken in Mississippi. Earlier in the weekend, Brandon “Boo” Maskew of Ellisville bagged a a female alligator weighing 295.3 pounds, setting a state record for the longest and heaviest female caught. More

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