Tips to stretch your retirement benefits
These five clever tricks can help you maximize your Social Security payouts.
These five clever tricks can help you maximize your Social Security payouts.
The three-room structure is believed to be about 8,000 years old and was built in the Neolithic period.
A dairy farm welcomes a newborn with a forehead mark that makes some people suspicious.
Few taxpayers dare take on the IRS, but one Maryland nurse did it on her own and won.
The former Alaska governor has inked a multi-year TV deal, the network reports.
Fitting one fake joining another fake.
Images from Jane Goodall Institute
Jane Goodall has been around forever. Back in 1957 she was studying the habits of wild chimpanzees in Tanzania, under the tutorship of Sir Louis Leakey, the famous archaeologist and paleontologist. She never left...and in 1977 she set up her own institute, the Jane Goodall Institute which is still going strong, with her at the head. Its mission is protect chimpanzees and their habitats. It also is widely recognized for establishing conservation and development programs in Africa.
In recognition of the Institute's work, they have now received 2 grants and are in the money. One is from the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) to expand programmes to help local people become more involved in the conservation work, thus improving their lives and the chimp's as well. The Royal Norwegian Embassy in Tanzania has also given grant money to work on the sale of carbon credits with local community people.
A thousand years ago, there wouldn't have been much jungle here, just terraced plots of maize and clear view off the mountain slopes to the valley far below. Visitors got a dizzying look at the drop from either side of a cobblestone road that lurched upward along the back of a steep ridge. At the edge of town, they'd find themselves funneled into a stairway shadowed on either side by stone walls and tall guard houses. Up the steps, a cobble-paved causeway stretched ahead, rising gradually, its edges lined with sculptures and the piked heads of conquered enemies. At the end, the chiefs' house stood on a tall stone foundation, its conical roof mirrored by the peak of the volcano in the distance.
The modern entrance to the ancient city of Guayabo is not nearly so dramatic. There's a pockmarked gravel road up a mountain, with chasms that threaten to swallow the front wheel of our boxy, little Honda. A wooden ticket booth, like a lemonade stand, marks the spot were you park the car on the roadside. Carefully maintained nature trails wind through rainforest less than a century old—this land was a dairy farm not so very long ago—and spit you out in the center of what was once a city of some 10,000 inhabitants.
Guayabo—pronounce it "Why-ahbo"—is one of many ancient cities in eastern and central Costa Rica that get overlooked by the general public, largely because their builders worked mostly with materials—wood, thatch, cane—that disintegrated in the tropical climate. The massive communal houses rotted away long ago. But the stone foundations, roads, tombs and aqueduct systems that remain are, in themselves, impressive enough to be named an International Historic Civil Engineering Landmark by the American Society of Civil Engineers.
OK, for the last time UFO's DO exist!
Any flying object that you cannot identify is a UFO.
Now whether or not it is an extraterritorial 'spacecraft' is another ball of wax all together.
LA Times
Brian noted earlier how Charles Diez got four months in jail for shooting (and barely missing) a cyclist who was in his way, and considered it an embarrassment. In California, they are a bit tougher: In July 2008 Christopher Thompson, passed two cyclists and got in front of them and jammed on the brakes. Ron Peterson went face first into the rear window, breaking his teeth, slicing off his nose, and cutting his face; he needed ninety stitches.
He was sentenced last week to five years in prison for mayhem; assault with a deadly weapon, his car; battery with serious injury; and reckless driving causing injury.
Photo via UFOBC
This will be news to no one: some have soured on Barack Obama. The list of his missed opportunities and non-accomplishments thus far irks his supporters and gives ammunition to his enemies. But before we all get too disappointed, it's worth remembering that he actually accomplished a lot his first year, too. For every not-so-abolished Don't Ask Don't Tell law, there's a promising national auto emissions standard, for each not-closed-yet Guantanamo, there's an EPA mobilizing to regulate greenhouse gases. Here are some of his best accomplishments of 2009.
photo: Barry Silver via flickr.
You've probably read claims about how the glaciers in the Himalayas are melting at such a fast pace that some of them could be entirely gone by 2035. I know I've made reference to the statement, made by Indian glaciologist Syed Hasnain and repeated around the internet, as have other posts on TreeHugger. Well, it seems according to a recent article in New Scientist by Fred Pearce, that Hasnain is backtracking on his assertion, saying that the statement was "speculative" and that he's never made that claim in any peer-reviewed journal. Yet it made it into the IPCC report of 2007:
Image credit: Good
The slow cities movement started in Italy in 1999 when Mayor Paolo Saturnini chose to stay small and protect local business instead of courting industry and growing larger. With the help of three other Italian towns and the Slow Food organization he founded the Cittaslow movement.
Howard County, Indiana Sheriff Department Deputy Matt Roberson tracked down fugitive Alfred Hightower via the hugely popular massively multiplayer online game. Hightower was wanted on several counts of drug dealing but had fled the country to Canada.
After finding out Hightower was a WoW fan, Roberson sent a subpoena to the game's maker, Blizzard Entertainment. With the information they sent back, Roberson was able to pinpoint the perp's location.
Well ...
They lied.
The documents, which include technical specifications and vendor contracts, indicate that the TSA requires vendors to provide equipment that can store and send images of screened passengers when in testing mode, according to CNN.
The TSA has stated publicly on its website, in videos and in statements to the press that images cannot be stored on the machines and that images are deleted from the scanners once an airport operator has examined them. The administration has also insisted that the machines are incapable of sending images.
US government employees doing Al Qaida's job for them: undermining the quality of life in the "free" world.
Osama's still free, how about you?

People may not be quite the humans they think they are. Or so suggests new research showing that the human genome is part bornavirus.
Bornaviruses, a type of RNA virus that causes disease in horses and sheep, first inserted their genetic material into ancestral human DNA at least 40 million years ago, the study shows. The findings, published January 7 in Nature, provide the first evidence that RNA viruses other than retroviruses (such as HIV) can stably integrate genes into host DNA. The new work may help reveal more about the evolution of RNA viruses as well as their mammalian hosts.
“Our whole notion of ourselves as a species is slightly misconceived,” says Robert Gifford, a paleovirologist at the Aaron Diamond AIDS Research Center, affiliated with Rockefeller University in New York City. Human DNA includes genetic contributions from bacteria and other organisms, and humans have even come to rely on some of these genes for basic functions like fighting infections.
A promising push toward a novel, biologically-inspired “chemical computer” has begun as part of an international collaboration.
The “wet computer” incorporates several recently discovered properties of chemical systems that can be hijacked to engineer computing power. [...]
What distinguishes the current project is that it will make use of stable “cells” featuring a coating that forms spontaneously, similar to the walls of our own cells, and uses chemistry to accomplish the signal processing similar to that of our own neurons.
The goal is not to make a better computer than conventional ones, said project collaborator Klaus-Peter Zauner of the University of Southampton, but rather to be able to compute in new environments.
“The type of wet information technology we are working towards will not find its near-term application in running business software,” Dr Zauner told BBC News.
“But it will open up application domains where current IT does not offer any solutions – controlling molecular robots, fine-grained control of chemical assembly, and intelligent drugs that process the chemical signals of the human body and act according to the local biochemical state of the cell.”
Put a delicious dinner on the table with these easy menus for every day of the week.
Some married couples will pay more for the same coverage than unmarried people living together.
A federal surge in spending on roads and bridges was supposed to help local unemployment.
Highly skilled workers in these fields can earn $60,000 a year — or even more.
The Maya built pyramids. The Inca constructed Machu Picchu. But what do you know about the historical exploits of the Maléku, the Cabécar or the Bribri?
Chances are, not a whole heck of a lot. All three are indigenous peoples native to Costa Rica, part of a larger cultural and linguistic group that archaeologists call Chibchan. Their ancestors were the earliest inhabitants of Costa Rica, but the general public (even within that country) knows very little about them.
With a Archaeology degree the Chibchan culture isn't unknown to me but this is an interesting piece nonetheless.
Wait ... it gets better:
The screeners only caught seven out of eight explosive-plants.
The remaining one was left in the luggage of an Irish tourist, who was nabbed on his return to Dublin and thrown in jail.
Three days later, the Slovak cops contacted their Irish counterparts, who let the poor bastard out of jail, cordoned off his street, and had the bomb-squad remove the Slovak explosives.
Ludmila Stanova, spokeswoman for Slovakia's ministry of the interior, says Dublin airport was warned to expect a person carrying explosive samples, and that the passenger was also alerted after his arrival."He was supposed to wait for the police to take the sample from him," she told the BBC World Service...
On Tuesday morning the man's flat near Dublin city centre was cordoned off while bomb disposal experts removed the explosives for further examination.
The Irish Army said passengers had not been put in danger because the explosives were stable and not connected to any essential bomb parts.
The Slovak minister for the interior has expressed his government's "profound regret" to Mr Ahern.
A discovery upends long-held beliefs about who built ancient Egypt's towering monuments.
Overdosing on condiments, shoveling food, double dipping — that's so 2009.
When asked to name your biggest weakness, ignore the conventional wisdom.
Photo via Mongabay
While environmental groups and governmental policies are aiming at reducing deforestation and development in the Amazon rainforest to help preserve the world's most diverse terrestrial ecosystem, traditional indigenous cultures in the region are being rescued from extinction as well. For native tribes of the Northwest Amazon, shamans have long played an important role in daily life, acting as spiritual leaders and medicinal healers. Throughout the twentieth century, shamans faced such intense persecution from Roman Catholic and Protestant missionaries that some feared their ancient wisdom would be lost to the ages, but a new school in the Amazon is working to make sure that doesn't happen.
Image: Flickr, hermanusbackpackers
How do you kill a shark? Well, you don't. Sure, sharks are responsible for the deaths of six humans swimming off of Western Australia. But WA law prohibits killing sharks. They are protected species. Even the widow and son of one shark victim, Brian Guest, have stated publicly that they believe sharks belong in the marine environment and should not be killed.
That may not stop the WA Government's Shark Hazard Committee, which -- according to the Perth Now Sunday edition -- has "put down in policy" a method for killing great whites that have attacked a human and hung around to get caught red-handed (red-toothed in this case, I guess).
"Bison Lane" photo by V Man via Flickr
Eco-baron and media mogul Ted Turner has placed a bid to "borrow" 74 wild bison from Yellowstone National Park at the request of Montana's Governor Brian Schweitzer. But opposing forces to the plan claim the animals are being used for private profit instead of conservation, in violation of promises made. Should they stay or should they go?
An officer opens fire on a bull in the roadway. Photo: Cristiano Couto
Lawyers for the International Union for the Protection of Animals (UIPA) are hoping that charges will be sought against an officer of the Brazilian Federal Highway Police for breaking animal protection laws when he shot and killed a bull on a highway road in the country last week. The questionable incident and shocking photograph above have propelled the story throughout South American news sources--leading some to wonder if the officer's actions were justified.
" WINTER "
by Abigail Elizabeth McIntyre
Shit It's Cold
The End
A hedge-fund investor who predicted the Enron scandal is betting on the next big economic crash.
A new poll by the Pew Research Center's Forum on Religion & Public Life concludes: "Large numbers of Americans engage in multiple religious practices, mixing elements of diverse traditions. Many also blend Christianity with Eastern or New Age beliefs such as reincarnation, astrology and the presence of spiritual energy in physical objects. And sizable minorities of all major U.S. religious groups say they have experienced supernatural phenomena, such as being in touch with the dead or with ghosts."
China overtook Germany as the world's biggest exporter after exports rose in December for the first time in 14 months, data showed Sunday, in a new sign of the rapid Chinese rise as a global economic force.
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