The Daily Drift

So, true ...!

 

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The Pacific

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Today in History

1799		Napoleon Bonaparte participates in a coup and declares himself dictator of France.
1848		The first U.S. Post Office in California opens in San Francisco at Clay and Pike streets. At the time there are only about 15,000 European settlers living in the state.
1900		Russia completes its occupation of Manchuria.
1906		President Theodore Roosevelt leaves Washington, D.C., for a 17-day trip to Panama and Puerto Rico, becoming the first president to make an official visit outside of the United States.
1914		The Australian light cruiser HMAS Sydney wrecks the German cruiser Emden, forcing her to beach on a reef on North Keeling Island in the Indian Ocean.
1918		Germany is proclaimed a republic as the kaiser abdicates and flees to the Netherlands.
1935		Japanese troops invade Shanghai, China.
1938		Nazis kill 35 Jews, arrest thousands and destroy Jewish synagogues, homes and stores throughout Germany. The event becomes known as Kristallnacht, the night of the shattered glass.
1965		Roger Allen LaPorte, a 22-year-old former seminarian and a member of the Catholic worker movement, immolates himself at the United Nations in New York City in protest of the Vietnam War.
1965		Nine Northeastern states and parts of Canada go dark in the worst power failure in history, when a switch at a station near Niagara Falls fails.
1967		NASA launches Apollo 4 into orbit with the first successful test of a Saturn V rocket.
1972		Bones discovered by the Leakeys push human origins back 1 million years.
1983		Alfred Heineken, beer brewer from Amsterdam, is kidnapped and held for a ransom of more than $10 million.
1989		The Berlin Wall is opened after dividing the city for 28 years.
1993		Stari Most, a 427-year-old bridge in the city of Mostar in Bosnia and Herzegovina, is destroyed, believed to be caused by artillery fire from Bosnian Croat forces.
1994		The chemical element Darmstadtium, a radioactive synthetic element, discovered by scientists in Darmstadt, Germany.
1998		Largest civil settlement in US history: 37 brokerage houses are ordered to pay $1.3 billion to NASDAQ investors to compensate for price fixing.
2007		German Bundestag passes controversial bill mandating storage of citizens' telecommunications traffic date for six months without probable cause.

Scientists and Social Media

More scientists burnishing reputations by using social media

Here is an idea worth following: “share” for tenure; “like” […]

Democrats Are Fighting Back and Declaring War On The Koch Brothers

Democrats aren’t taking their Election Night loss sitting down. Sen. Harry Reid and several outside groups are doubling their efforts in a declaration of war against the Koch brothers.

Politico reported,

But despite repugicans — and some Democrats — publicly decrying the strategy after Tuesday’s repugican cabal wave as an ineffective waste of money, Reid told allies on election night that he planned to continue hammering the brothers, according to an operative close to him.

And big-money liberal groups ranging from the Democrats’ Senate campaign arm and House super PAC to the outfits run by billionaire Tom Steyer and conservative-turned-liberal enforcer David Brock all signaled that they intended to pursue anti-Koch spending and oppo tactics headed into the 2016 election.

Brock’s American Bridge outfit on Thursday began circulating a memo to senior Democratic congressional aides and big money groups making the case for redoubling the effort to make the Kochs into boogeymen.

A memo by David Brock argues that the Koch brothers will be easier to combat because they aren’t hidden anymore. The Kochs are in power, and their policies will be reflected in the actions of the House and Senate.

Democrats have had a history of not bouncing back well after defeats. Unlike 2010 or 2002, Democrats are coming back quickly with a strategy that they are going to put into action. The loss on Tuesday night has given Democrats the gift of being able to go on the offensive.

Being in the House and Senate minority in the years running up to the presidential election means that Democrats no longer have to defend policies. Democrats aren’t the ones who will be trying to push the boulder of obstruction up the mountain. In defeat, an opportunity has presented itself.

Democrats don’t have to justify their legislation and policy choices as much as they are now free to contrast themselves with what repugicans will be doing. The key is that repugicans are now on the clock. They have to do something. Congressional repugicans can no longer coast along saying no to everything.

Their agenda is now going to be out there, and Democrats are ready to attack. The Koch brothers are no longer just wingnut billionaires operating in the shadows. Their strategy was able to defeat Democrats in red states, but now the entire country is about to experience the Koch agenda.

Democrats aren’t backing down and running away. In fact, they are doing the opposite. They are gearing up to strike at money machine that delivered the repugican victory. The oligarchs wanted the Senate, and now they are going to be front and center as the Democrats fight back.

President Obama is ready to fight. Democrats are ready to fight for their values. Their message to their supporters is that it is time to put the defeat behind them, and move forward in the fight.

The Mainstream Media is Culpable in the Murder of American Democracy

Is the American electorate the least informed in the world? It is possible. I mean, after all, we’re looking at a possible century-long reign of repugican crazy as a result of the past two midterms. If you’re like me, you begin to wonder after a while if everybody but you took a stupid pill.

Or just watched too much TV. We have Faux News, after all, and even with declining ratings, a lot of people watch Faux News. Their old folk base stubbornly refuses to die off, or maybe there just are not enough young people NOT watching it. But even if you avoid it at home, you can’t escape it in stores and restaurants, so even if you don’t want to hear it, you’re bombarded nonstop with lies and distortions.

And let’s face it: there are a lot of vulnerable minds out there that should be protected from this stuff, and I’m not just talking children.

Certainly the midterm election results give one pause as well, with voters going with ballot initiatives in complete contradiction of the party they actually sent to Congress. Makes you wonder if they really understood any of the issues they were voting for, or if they really knew what their Republican candidates were for an against.

Extremism is hidden, after all, by the mainstream media. Faux News certainly doesn’t disclose the really crazy stuff; the crazy stuff you do see on Faux News is just the tip of the iceberg. The mainstream media is even worse than this, completely ignoring, for example, the extremism of supposedly mainstream repugican candidates while promoting the fantasy that the repugican cabal has reigned the teabaggers in. In fact, the teabaggers are so reigned in that Ted Cruz has been anointed by those ultra-extremists as de-facto leader of both chambers of Congress, right over Mitch McConnell’s balding pate.

The problem is, the repugican cabal is just as – if not more – extreme, than it was pre-reigning in. What seems to have happened is that the teabagger craziness has been further mainstreamed, subsumed by the repugican establishment until the need for teabagger radicalism has gone away.

And despite the fact that the ballot initiatives show widespread support for liberal and progressive positions on culture-war issues, the mainstream media is now claiming that the election proves the country has become a center-right country.

Right. That’s why most Americans support liberal positions like marriage equality and raising the minimum wage.

If the election results – leaving out the carefully ignored ballot initiatives – are supposed to prove their thesis of a center right country, how about the voter suppression, voter intimidation, and outright fraud the mainstream media completely ignored? And how about the district gerrymandering, which was also carefully ignored?

If America is stupid, it is not only underfunding education and overfunding charter “schools” but the mainstream media that is the blame. Look, there are reasons repugicans hate actual schools, because even under-funded, they actually educate kids. And there are reasons they love charter schools, because like all privatization, charter schools are money making schemes that make repugicans rich while educating no one. In fact, we’ve already seen that to celebrate their midterm theft of American democracy, repugicans are anxious to promote and support charter schools.

And why not? If you can’t steal elections any other way, just keep folks dumb enough to do what you tell them to do and think what you tell them to think. It’s working. Look at all the folks who think raising the minimum wage will destroy the country. Do you know people like that? I do. Blame Faux News for that, yes, but also the mainstream media.

You don’t see many moments of mainstream media candor where, as CNN Money did in January, it is revealed that 75 leading economists back raising the minimum wage. The mainstream media much prefers the conservative narrative, but of course, the mainstream media is a corporate media and it’s no more anxious to pay its employees a living wage than any other corporation.

We are facing a national crisis. An electorate too stupid to understand the issues and too unmotivated to vote even if they did. This midterm election was a national disgrace, and not only because of repugican propaganda, dark money, and electoral corruption, but because of widespread apathy.

You can be sure that repugicans will do all in their power between now and 2016 to ensure that Democrats never get elected again. We can laugh at Oregon Rep. Greg Walden’s claim Wednesday that, “We’re back to a majority as big as any of us have seen in our lifetimes. It may be a hundred-year majority,” and certainly with his outrageous lies as to why that might be true, but we really shouldn’t laugh, because it might be true.

The repugican cabal has completely de-legitimized liberal and progressive politics. We are now people who can have our heads held under water until we stop breathing, who can be “made to squeal,” not like pigs, but like rape victims in Deliverance, from where the line comes.

You know you stand in dark times when the mainstream media stubbornly refuses to report these outrages, or when the president’s offer to work with Congress is met, not with the relief it deserves, but with outrage.

What’s more frightening yet is that you won’t hear about that outrage from the mainstream media. Americans should not have to work so hard to get informed, and they won’t bother until they realize they are being kept uninformed. You can’t expect to have questions answered if you don’t know which questions to ask.

But until something is done to bring about change, American democracy will stand in front of a corporate executioner. If the trigger hasn’t been pulled already, it won’t be long until we collectively topple, like an ISIL victim, into a grave we have been forced to dig for ourselves.

The Truth Be Told

The US Federal Reserve to end quantitative easing program

by Angela Monaghan

Central bank's head, Janet Yellen, confirms cessation of buying bonds in October after injection of £4.5 trillion over five years

The US Federal Reserve has called time on its $4.5tn bond-buying program, halting a radical monetary policy introduced nearly six years ago to steer the world's largest economy through the financial crisis.
The central bank, led by Janet Yellen, said the final tranche of bonds under its quantitative easing program would be bought this month, but it committed to keeping record low interest rates for "a considerable time".
Announcing the decision on QE, made at its October policy meeting, the Fed said: "The committee judges that there has been a substantial improvement in the outlook for the labor market since the inception of its current asset purchase program. Moreover, the committee continues to see sufficient underlying strength in the broader economy to support ongoing progress toward maximum employment in a context of price stability. Accordingly, the committee decided to conclude its asset purchase program this month."
It brings to an end a program which marked a departure for US monetary policy when it was launched in December 2008, hugely swelling the Fed's balance sheet in an effort to prop up a battered financial system. The Fed began to slow its purchase of Treasury bonds and mortgage-backed securities in January, but until now it had not confirmed an end date. The central bank has steadily reduced its monthly bond purchases from a peak of $85bn a month to $15bn a month.
Despite the end of its bond-buying program, US monetary policy remains ultra loose, with an interest rate range at a record low of between zero and 0.25% since December 2008.

More

Ayn Rand-loving CEO destroys his own empire

by Lynn Parramore

How corporations avoid paying income tax

Everyone knows about these shenanigans, but nobody does anything about it.

Pepsi, IKEA, FedEx and 340 other international companies have secured secret deals from Luxembourg, allowing many of them to slash their global tax bills while maintaining little presence in the tiny European duchy, leaked documents show.

These companies appear to have channeled hundreds of billions of dollars through Luxembourg and saved billions of dollars in taxes, according to a review of nearly 28,000 pages of confidential documents by the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists and a team of more than 80 journalists from 26 countries...

The leaked documents reviewed by ICIJ involve deals negotiated by PricewaterhouseCoopers, one of the world’s largest accounting firms, on behalf of hundreds of corporate clients. To qualify the companies for tax relief, the records show, PwC tax advisers helped come up with financial strategies that feature loans among sister companies and other moves designed to shift profits from one part of a corporation to another to reduce or eliminate taxable income...

Luxembourg agreed to tax only one quarter of 1 percent of FedEx’s non-dividend income flowing through this arrangement - leaving the remaining 99.75 per cent tax-free.

The companies will argue publicly that this is all legal.  It's legal because tax laws have been created by the politicians they bought to make it legal.

Man surprised after being charged $3,750 for bottle of wine he was told cost 'thirty-seven-fifty'

Joe Lentini was at Bobby Flay Steak in Atlantic City, New Jersey last week when he asked the server to select a bottle of wine for his party of 10. The host of the dinner, who would be paying the bill, told Lentini to pick a bottle, Lentini said. "I don't know much about wine at all," the Hazlet man said. "I asked the waitress if she could recommend something decent because I don't have experience with wine," Lentini said. "She pointed to a bottle on the menu. I didn't have my glasses. I asked how much and she said, 'Thirty-seven fifty.'" The drinkers at the table agreed to the price and they ordered, Lentini said. Soon, the sommelier presented the corked bottle at the table. Lentini said he was having conversation with his companions and didn't really pay attention, but he approved of the bottle.

A taste of the wine was served for him to sample. He approved, he said, and the bottle was placed on the table. "It was okay. It was good," Lentini said of the wine. "It wasn't great. It wasn't terrible. It was fine." When dinner was over, the bill was handed to the host, who was sitting opposite Lentini at the round table, Lentini said. "[The host] was sitting across from me and he handed the bill to person next to him, who handed it to the next person until it got to me," he said. "I showed the gentleman next to me and we were shocked. We couldn't believe it." The total bill was $4,700.61, including tax. The bottle of wine, Screaming Eagle, Oakville 2011 - cost $3,750. "I thought the wine was $37.50," Lentini said.
Lentini said he called the waitress over and said there was a problem. He said he explained that he never would have ordered such expensive wine, and repeated that when he asked about the price, the waitress said "thirty-seven fifty," not "three-thousand, seven-hundred-and-fifty." The waitress disagreed, and a maître d'/manager was called over. "I said the waitress told me it cost 'thirty-seven fifty,' not 'three-thousand, seven-hundred and fifty dollars,'" Lentini said. The maître d'/manager offered to give separate bills, so the dinner bill, which wasn't being disputed, could be paid. Next, Lentini said he was told the best price the restaurant could offer was $2,200. Lentini said he couldn't afford that, but to be able to leave, he and two other diners agreed to split the $2,200 bill. The diner sitting to Lentini's left at the table, Don Chin, said he heard what Lentini heard when the wine was ordered.

"Joe had asked for a suggestion on the wine and the waitress pointed to a wine," he said. "Joe asked the price and she said 'thirty-seven fifty,' not 'three-thousand, seven-hundred and fifty,' which is what I would have said, so we all thought it was $37.50." When the bill came, "We all had a heart attack," Chin said. Marcia Lentini was sitting to Joe Lentini's right at the table. "My husband said to the waitress, 'I don't know much about wine. Can you pick for me?'" Marcia Lentini said. "He asked her how much, and she said, 'thirty-seven fifty.'" "But then it was $3,750. Who would expect that in a restaurant?" she said. Borgata said it conducted a thorough investigation of the incident, and it believes the proper practices were followed. "As the leading culinary destination in this region, we consistently serve as many, if not more high-end wine and spirits without incident," executive vice president Joseph Lupo said. "In this isolated case, both the server and sommelier verified the bottle requested with the patron."

Cannibal "tries to eat woman"

Police in Wales confronted a man who was "trying to eat the eyeball and face of a woman". He was tased but became unresponsive; both the man and the victim were subsequently pronounced dead. "Many details of the incident were not immediately clear," reports Reuters.

Police said they were called to an incident at a hostel in the village of Argoed in South Wales on Thursday after reports of a man attacking a woman.
Security staff at the Sirhowy Arms discovered the 34-year-old man, who had been released from prison two weeks ago, eating the woman, a 22-year-old believed to be his girlfriend, according to witnesses quoted by the South Wales Evening Post.

8 Creative Ways People Went Over the Berlin Wall

Sunday will be the 25th anniversary of the opening of the Berlin Wall, which began the reunification of Germany. For decades, people on the East German side were desperate to get across to West Germany and freedom from Communist rule. Many risked their lives to cross the border, and some came up with ingenious ways to do it.

East German acrobat Horst Klein made one of the most daring escapes over the wall in early 1963. Thanks to his acrobatic skill, Klein was able to turn an unused high-tension cable that stretched over the wall into his route. He moved hand-over-hand while dangling from the cable 60 feet over the head of patrolling guards, then when his arms became fatigued, he swung his whole body up over the cable and inched his way along. Klein’s dismount wasn’t particularly graceful – he fell off of the cable – but he landed in West Berlin.

Every escape that was detected led to more security, and crossing from East to West became more difficult as time went by. Read about seven other methods used to cross the Berlin Wall at mental_floss.

15 Female Explorers You Should Know

You've heard of Christopher Columbus, Lawrence of Arabia, and Lewis and Clark. But do you know the incredible accomplishments of Gertrude Bell, Osa Johnson, or Valentina Tereshkova? In the female sect of explorers, there are heiresses, socialites, rebels, and cross-dressers. But the one thing they share beyond their sex is an intrepid spirit that thirsts for adventure.

Why Are So Few People Left-Handed?

A Biologist Explains:

(Video Link)

Joe Hanson is a biologist and the host of the PBS online series It’s Okay to Be Smart. In this video, he explains why it’s odd that there so few left-handed people. It’s a mystery because other animals do not possess this characteristic. The odds of a dog favoring a left or right forepaw are about 50/50.
Scientists have not been able to determine with certainty why there are so few left-handed people, but they have a few theories. One is that early hominids possessed a genetic mutation encouraging right-handedness. Left-handed people aren’t people with a left-handedness gene, but people who lack the right-handedness gene. You can learn more about this theory and others in the video above.

How George Washington’s Bad Teeth Helped Win the Revolutionary War

As he aged, George Washington gradually lost his teeth. Throughout his life, he consulted a variety of dentists to provide dentures for him.
In 1781, General Washington commanded the army watching over New York City, then occupied by the British. General Cornwallis was then campaigning in the South. For a brief time, a French fleet and army would be available to assist the Americans, so Washington and the French General Rochambeau planned to jointly march to Virginia to attack Cornwallis. At the end of this campaign, Washington scored his greatest victory by forcing Cornwallis to surrender at Yorktown.
Washington’s bad teeth helped the Americans win that battle at Yorktown.
While he remained encamped outside of New York City, the British captured a packet of Washington’s letters. One of them was a letter to a dentist in Philadelphia. Washington mentioned that he would probably not be able to come to Philadelphia and asked the doctor to send him a tooth scraper.

Washington would not be able to come to Philadelphia because he would be fighting in Virginia. But General Clinton, the British commander in New York City, interpreted the letter to mean that Washington would remain encamped outside of New York City. John L. Smith, Jr. writes in the Journal of the American Revolution:

After verifying that the intercepted mail was real and not a set-up, the British Army commander in America, Sir Henry Clinton, became convinced that Washington and his army was going to stay put the Hudson Highlands north of New York City. Clinton let his guard down.
Little did Clinton know that just after Washington had written the tooth-scraping letter, both Washington and Rochambeau began planning the Franco-American armies’ movement down to Virginia – down to meet General Cornwallis at Yorktown for the siege that basically ended the Revolutionary War.

A webpage maintained by Mount Vernon confirms this claim.

The True Story of The Elephant Man

In the 19th century, Joseph Merrick was exhibited in a freak show. In 1979, his story became a Broadway play, and then a movie in 1980. Now it’s going back to Broadway, with Bradley Cooper in the title role. Merrick was known as “The Elephant Man” because of his multiple deformities, but underneath he just wanted to be treated like anyone else. He died in 1890, and scientists have tried ever since to pinpoint what caused his disabilities.Various diagnoses have been theorized, starting with Merrick’s own folk belief that the problems were due to his mother being frightened by an elephant when she was pregnant with him. While that cause may be safely discarded, the correct one is hard to pin down.I recall being taught during my medical education that a likely diagnosis was neurofibromatosis type 1. A disease typified by tumors arising from nerve tissue, those with neurofibromatosis can develop skin lesions, spinal curvatures and large heads. During my pediatric residency I was involved in a very sad case of a severely affected young man, who had a large cranial mass that gave him an appearance similar to Merrick’s. That they shared a diagnosis seemed quite plausible to me.

However, the current thinking is that Merrick may have suffered from Proteus syndrome. Named after a shape-shifting Greek sea god, this very rare (fewer than 500 known cases) syndrome causes unchecked growth in some parts of affected individuals’ bodies, leaving other areas normal.

Russell Saunders gives us the short version of Merrick’s story at The Daily Beast. You can also read an extensive biography at Wikipedia.

Brain Ghosts

Do Ghosts Live in Our Brains?

The sensation some people get of a foreign presence in a room can be recreated in a lab. The research could help patients with schizophrenia.

'Witch Marks' and 'Demon Traps'

'Witch Marks' Carved Into 17th-Century Estate

The marks date to early 1606 and the reign of King James I, a period when superstition and paranoia gripped England.

'Demon Traps' Found in 17th-Century English House

The carvings included interlocking V shapes to invoke the protection of the Virgin Mary.

Europe Was a Melting Pot From the Start

Genetic analysis of a 37,000-year-old human bone from Russia suggests widespread intermingling during Paleolithic times.

The 37,000-year-old remains of a Russian man known as Kostenki 14 have yielded DNA that helps show how humans spread throughout ancient Europe.

Modern Europeans have genetic ties that bind them together much further back in time than once thought,

Scraps of DNA harvested from a tiny fragment of the man's 37,000-year-old leg bone show that, genetically speaking, he was remarkably similar to people living in Europe today.

The man's genes include signature traces of DNA long thought to have been part of separate movements into Europe, says Eske Willerslev, a geneticist at the University of Copenhagen and co-author of a study published Thursday in the journal Science.

The findings suggests that Europe's past wasn't marked by waves of migration when people met, clashed, and mingled; rather, people arrived in a single event or as a continuous flow over millennia.

The leg bone belongs to a hunter-gatherer found at a Russian site called Kostenki, not far from the city of Voronezh. Excavated in 1954, the Kostenki bone is one of the oldest specimens of a modern human found in Europe.

"One of the surprising things is that if you go 37,000 years back in time, you find all the major genetic components that are present in modern Europeans," Willerslev says.

The Kostenki fossils were excavated in 1954 by a Russian team led by A. N. Rogachev (left) and are among the oldest for modern humans in Europe.

Tale of Migrations

Archaeologists and geneticists have long debated who the ancestors of modern Europeans are—and how, and when, they arrived. It's typically been a tale of migration and invasion, of people moving into Europe in waves that left distinct genetic signatures behind.

First, the thinking goes, there were groups of hunter-gatherers, moving from Africa into Europe beginning about 40,000 years ago. Much later, a separate group of farmers and herders from the Middle East made their way north, eventually out-competing the hunter-gatherer locals and forming the basis for the European genome we see today.

The introduction of agriculture by this second wave of people—the so-called Neolithic Revolution—was such a pivotal moment in prehistory that it can be seen in both artifacts and genes.

The new results add a surprising wrinkle.

What other geneticists have identified as separate hunter-gatherer and farmer genes are all present in the Kostenki find. "You wouldn't predict if you go back to one of our earliest individuals, all the components of modern Europeans were already there," Willerslev says.

Genes once thought to have arrived with the first farmers, for instance, now seem to have been around much earlier. "Until now, it seemed clear this was something that came into Europe during the Neolithic," says Pontus Skoglund, a geneticist at Harvard Medical School. "It's an extremely interesting suggestion that they have."

The complex mixture of DNA in such an old specimen, Willerslev says, suggests that Stone Age Europe was a lively place. Instead of separate groups colliding and occasionally mingling, Willerslev argues there was a single, genetically similar population sprawling across the continent, from Russia to the Middle East to northern Europe.

"Rather than separate populations moving into each others' areas and having sex with each other," he says, "there was a single 'meta-population' having sex—or exchanging genes—in a complex and heterogeneous way."

Out of Africa

While the results challenge our understanding of Europe's past, they seem to confirm what geneticists have said more broadly about human migration out of Africa.

Looking at the genes of modern people around the world, researchers see three major movements out of Africa: first a group that wound up in what is now Australia and the Pacific Islands, then a population that settled in East Asia, and finally western Eurasians, or Europeans.

And indeed, the Kostenki man's DNA shows that he was unrelated to East Asians or Australo-Melanesians, suggesting that the populations diverged more than 37,000 years ago.

The new find complicates a picture of Europe's deep past that geneticists thought was becoming clearer. "We all thought you could sequence these bones and come up with a simple story. This paper really shows things are not as simple as people thought they were," Willerslev says. "Europe has always been a melting pot."

The Windmills Of Kinderdijk

The village of Kinderdijk is located in the Netherlands, about 50 miles from where I live. Kinderdijk is situated in a region that lies below sea-level. Called polders, these regions are often land reclaimed from a body of water, such as a lake or marshes.
To drain the polder, a system of 19 windmills was built between 1738 and 1740. Their purpose was to pump the excess water into a reservoir until the level of the river had fallen enough to pump the water back into river Lek. This group of mills represents the largest concentration of old windmills in the Netherlands, and is today a popular tourist site.

Dungeness

The UK's Desert

Dungeness lies at the southernmost point of Kent and is a veritable desert of gravel and shell debris. A strange atmosphere can be found nowadays: two lighthouses are visible from afar, narrow streets, little fishing houses and a steam-powered narrow gauge railway.
The surreal environment is dominated by telephone and power lines. A nuclear power plant can also be found while the modern concrete lighthouse provides a highly visible contrast to this strange area.

Low Density Extinction

NZ’s moa exterminated by low-density human population

A new study suggests that the flightless birds named moa […]

Dog Lashes

Iran Dog Lovers Face 74 Lashes, Fines Under New Law

The legislation would ban keeping the pets at home or walking them in public.

Byproduct Supplement

Grocery byproduct feed proves effective as energy supplement in cattle

Food waste has become a serious problem in the United […]

Paleontology News

Dodo Bird 3D Scan Reveals Previously Unknown Bones

New laser scans of the flightless bird have exposed portions of its anatomy unknown to science, revealing secrets about how the bird once lived.

Stegosaurus Wasn't Above Striking a Low Blow

Judging from injuries evident in allosaurus fossils, a paleontologist has deduced that stegosaurus knew how to use it spikes to deliver devastating crotch shots to the otherwise dominating allosaurs. Ouch!

9,300-Year-Old Bison Mummy Found in Siberia

A frozen bison mummy dating to the end of the Ice Age literally freezes in time what an animal from this period looked like.

The Mammal of Madagascar

Scientists discover fossil of bizarre groundhog-like mammal on Madagascar

Paleontologists have discovered an almost complete skull of a previously […]

Oldest Insects, Spiders and Bugs

Top 10 Oldest Insects, Spiders and Bugs

Insects and other creepy crawlies have extremely long family histories. Here are some bugs with impressively long lineages. 

Sonar Jamming

Bats Jam Each Other's Sonar in Competition for Prey

Mexican free-tailed bats make specialized jamming calls to prevent competing bats from catching insects they want for themselves.

Boar broke into hardware store

Police came face-to-face with a wild boar after a burglar alarm sent them racing to a hardware store in Dillenburg, Germany, on Wednesday morning.
“The animal apparently ran at full speed against the entrance door of the large do-it-yourself shop and broke through two glass doors, which triggered the alarm,” police spokesman Guido Rehr said.
Surveillance camera footage captured the animal roaming the store's aisles.

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After the manager opened the outlet's front doors, the animal escaped “without any loot and apparently unharmed,” according to police.

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