Police say a man was carrying a dead weasel when he burst into a Hoquiam apartment and assaulted a man.This incident makes more sense once you learn an important fact: the assailant was actually looking for his girlfriend at the time.
The victim asked, “Why are you carrying a weasel?” Police said the attacker said, “It’s not a weasel, it’s a marten,” then punched him in the nose and fled.
America is absolutely awash with easily obtainable firearms. You can go down to a gun show at the local convention center and come away with a fully automatic assault rifle, without a background check, and most likely without having to show an identification card. So what are you waiting for?More from ThinkProgress:
So it seems like it might be a pretty responsible and relevant idea to force individuals to go through a background check at gun shows and to prevent those on the terrorist watch list from purchasing firearms.
However, there are powerful people in this country that don’t want that to happen. The National Rifle Association is opposed to eliminating the gun show loophole. And, referring to the terror gap, an NRA spokesperson said recently that “it’s wrong to arbitrarily deny a law-abiding person a constitutional right.”
House repugicans on Friday introduced legislation that would allow workers to partially opt out of Social Security immediately, and fully opt out after 15 years.Let's hope the White House sees the wisdom in cutting this off at the legs.
A first set of 23 results from 40 samples taken at the farm were negative, Lower Saxony's agriculture ministry said in a statement.The German handling of this is so bad that American experts have called them incompetent.
"The search for the outbreak's cause is very difficult, as several weeks have passed since its suspected start," it said. "A conclusion of the investigations and a clarification of the contamination's origin is not expected in the short term."
This is the worst possible news for both German consumers, who face indefinite warnings against raw salad leaves, tomatoes and cucumbers, and, more acutely, farmers. Spain's farmers, whose cucumbers were wrongly at first blamed by German scientists, have suffered in particular. The news also came too late to prevent the small town of Bienenbüttel, 40 miles south of Hamburg in Lower Saxony's rural heartland, being overrun by media while police sealed off access to the farm. Its owner, Klaus Verbeck, told a local newspaper he was baffled at the apparent connection, given there were no animals or animal products on the site.
They say that something can’t be created out of nothing, but that’s what researchers may have done- sort of. Quantum theory states that even in a vacuum some particles do exist. Testing this, scientists in Sweden claim to have made sparks in a vacuum.
According to quantum theory, empty space is, well, not that empty after all. Rather it is full of virtual particles – particles that quickly blip in and out of existence. Theory states that a mirror can absorb energy from some of these virtual photons, and re-emit it as actual photons. Of course, this only works if the mirror is traveling through the vacuum at nearly the speed of light, making it difficult to prove, to say the least.
Vancouver-based Recon Instruments, maker of GPS-enabled ski goggles with in-goggle displays tucked in the peripheral, is sending its technology to NASA for potential inclusion in the next generation of spacesuit helmets in which mission critical information and checklists could appear right before astronauts eyes. NASA’s spacesuit designers have been toying with the idea of an in-helmet displays for a while now, and considering that spacewalking astronauts currently rely on paper checklists taped to their arms, such a display represents a pretty big technological leap forward.
I once went camping in Death Valley and the conditions were so hot I longed for the air conditioned comfort of a Motel 8, or at least a Motel 6. So I can’t imagine camping in the deserts of Mars. That’s just what some students at North Carolina State University have proposed by creating a radiation shielded camping tent for future astronauts.The students created a 1,900-square-foot inflatable tent which is radiation-proof by layering radiation-shield materials like Demron. Demron is currently used in protective safety suits. In fact, the workers cleaning up Japan’s nuclear Fukishima plant are currently using them. The tent, which can house four to six astronauts, also uses a gold-metalicized film to reflect the UV rays. According to the university, it’s airtight material is made from a “polyurethane substrate” which keeps the air in, allowing for an atmosphere that the astronauts can breathe.
What do christians think about this? (Who cares)Five years after it abolished Hinduism as the state religion, Nepal is working on a new criminal code forbidding a person from one faith to “convert a person or abet him to change his religion.”
Article 160 of the proposed code also says no one will be allowed to do anything or behave in any way that could cause a person from a caste, community or creed to lose faith in his/her traditional religion or convert to a different religion. The proposal would also prohibit conversion “by offering inducements or without inducement,” and preaching “a different religion or faith with any other intent.”
If found guilty, offenders could be imprisoned for a maximum of five years and fined up to 50,000 Nepalese rupees (US$685). If the offender is a foreigner, he or she would be deported within seven days of completing the sentence.
Nepal’s christian community, which has no representation in the Council of Ministers or in parliament, was caught unaware of the new criminal law in the offing. “We have not heard of this,” said Lokmani Dhakal, general secretary of Nepal christian Society. “We need to look into this.”
She was the daughter of the god and goddess Anguta and Isarrataitsoq and, like countless female figures in Inuit myths, she refused all prospective husbands. Sedna instead had sexual relations with dogs and the “freakish” offspring of these unions were said to be white people and Native American tribes that the Inuit were often at war with. A ghoulish twist to the story is how Sedna took to using her parents as food (a recurring theme in Inuit myths because of the scarcity of food in the frozen north at times and how instances of cannibalism during such famines were much-discussed). Sedna devoured both of her mother Isarrataitsoq’s arms and had finished eating one of her father’s arms before he was able to subdue her and take her out to sea in his canoe, intent on banishing her to the sea. Continuing to struggle, Sedna clutched the sides of the canoe as her father tried to submerge her, prompting him to take his long knife and cut off her fingers. Since, to the Inuit, loss or mutilation of the hands was often seen as a horrific transformation into something new, the myth states that Sedna now embraced her fate, transforming her now-fingerless hands into flippers and transforming her severed digits into the various species of sea animals.Read more about Sedna and eleven other Inuit deities at Balladeer's Blog.
The super powers of the X-Men may still may take awhile in the evolutionary process. However scientists have discovered that due to rapid population growth human evolution may be speeding up.In a fascinating discovery that counters a common theory that human evolution has slowed to a crawl or even stopped in modern humans, a study examining data from an international genomics project describes the past 40,000 years as a time of supercharged evolutionary change, driven by exponential population growth and cultural shifts.
Thanks to stunning advances in sequencing and deciphering DNA in recent years, scientists had begun uncovering, one by one, genes that boost evolutionary fitness. These variants, which emerged after the Stone Age, seemed to help populations better combat infectious organisms, survive frigid temperatures, or otherwise adapt to local conditions.
This undated handout photo provided by Reid Ferring of the University of North Texas shows the Dmanisi excavation site in the Republic of Georgia.
