Doctors warn teens: Don't take the cinnamon challenge

Don't take the cinnamon challenge. That's the advice from doctors in a new report about a dangerous prank depicted in popular YouTube videos but which has led to hospitalizations and a surge in calls to U.S. poison centers.

The fad involves daring someone to swallow a spoonful of ground cinnamon in 60 seconds without water. But the spice is caustic, and trying to gulp it down can cause choking, throat irritation, breathing trouble and even collapsed lungs, the report said.

Published online Monday in Pediatrics, the report said at least 30 teens nationwide needed medical attention after taking the challenge last year.

The number of poison control center calls about teens doing the prank "has increased dramatically," from 51 in 2011 to 222 last year, according to the American Association of Poison Control Centers.

"People with asthma or other respiratory conditions are at greater risk of having this result in shortness of breath and trouble breathing," according to an alert posted on the association's website.

Thousands of YouTube videos depict kids attempting the challenge, resulting in an "orange burst of dragon breath" spewing out of their mouths and sometimes hysterical laughter from friends watching the stunt, said report co-author Dr. Steven E. Lipshultz, a pediatrics professor at the University of Miami Miller School of Medicine.

Cinnamon is made from tree bark and contains cellulose fibers that don't easily break down. Animal research suggests that when cinnamon gets into the lungs, it can cause scarring, Lipshultz said.

Dr. Stephen Pont, a spokesman for the American Academy of Pediatrics and an Austin, Texas pediatrician, said the report is "a call to arms to parents and doctors to be aware of things like the cinnamon challenge" and to pay attention to what their kids are viewing online.

An Ypsilanti, Mich., teen who was hospitalized for a collapsed lung after trying the cinnamon challenge heartily supports the new advice and started her own website — http://nocinnamonchallenge.com — telling teens to "just say no" to the fad.

Dejah Reed, 16, said she took the challenge four times — the final time was in February last year with a friend who didn't want to try it alone.

"I was laughing very hard and I coughed it out and I inhaled it into my lungs," she said. "I couldn't breathe."
Her father, Fred Reed, said he arrived home soon after to find Dejah "a pale bluish color. It was very terrifying. I threw her over my shoulder" and drove to a nearby emergency room.
Dejah was hospitalized for four days and went home with an inhaler and said she still has to use it when she gets short of breath from running or talking too fast. Her dad said she'd never had asthma or breathing problems before.
Dejah said she'd read about the challenge on Facebook and other social networking sites and "thought it would be cool" to try.
Now she knows "it's not cool and it's dangerous."

People smoking HIV medicine to get high

People smoking HIV medicine to get high

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Be smart: Change diet, exercise habits at same time

Most people know that the way to stay healthy is to exercise and eat right, but millions of Americans struggle to meet those goals, or even decide which to change first. Now, researchers at the [...]

White button mushrooms in place of meat can help with weight loss

New research published as an abstract in The FASEB Journal and presented at Experimental Biology 2013 (EB 2013) on Monday, April 22 ties mushrooms to positive health outcomes in the area of weight management. A [...]

Man survives shooting self in brain while cleaning harpoon

A Brazilian man has miraculously survived after shooting himself in the head with a harpoon.

Bruno Barcellos de Souza Coutinho, 34, was cleaning fishing equipment in the city of Petropolis when the speargun accidentally fired and lodged 15 centimeters into his head, through his left eye and deep into his brain.

However, he did not seek medical attention until the next day when a relative encouraged him to go to hospital. He arrived for treatment completely lucid and underwent emergency surgery.

De Souza Coutinho lost his eye but incredibly avoided suffering any brain damage.

Say it sister ...

The World's First E-Commerce Transaction Was a Drug Deal

According to John Markoff in his 2005 book What the Dormouse Said: How the Sixties Counterculture Shaped the Personal Computer Industry, the first online eCommerce transaction was a drug deal:

In 1971 or 1972, Stanford students using Arpanet accounts at Stanford University's Artificial Intelligence Laboratory engaged in a commercial transaction with their counterparts at Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Before Amazon, before eBay, the seminal act of e-commerce was a drug deal. The students used the network to quietly arrange the sale of an undetermined amount of marijuana.

Mike Power of The Guardian has more: Here.

The Baseball Player Who Tried to Steal Third, Only to End up Stealing First Base

Who's on first?The wackiest night in baseball since the Abbot and Costello skit occurred Friday night during the Brewers-Cubs game, where Jean Segura tried to stole third but ended up stealing first base!
Jayson Stark of ESPN explains:

I think we just found baseball's version of Leon Lett.
I'm talking about Brewers shortstop Jean Segura, who, like the mixed-up grandma who made a U-turn on a one-way street, performed an act of baserunning madness Friday that he'll be seeing, on scoreboard video-screen blooper reels, for the rest of his life.
To even try to describe this adventure is almost as challenging as actually doing it. And all the jumbled online play-by-play accounts out there are living proof.
But here's the simplest way to sum it up:
This guy stole second. Then he tried to steal third but somehow wound up on first. Then he got thrown out trying to steal second again. All in a span of five pitches.

More | Here's the play in question over at MLB.com

The Ten Most Bizarre Branches Of Parapsychology

Parapsychology is a remarkably broad discipline, and it is difficult to study when the area itself deals with the unknown potential of the human mind. At this time, there is no definitive way to prove phenomena like telepathy or telekinesis, and observation by no means provides unambiguous proof.

Here are 10 of the most prominent branches of parapsychology. The very nature of so-called psi phenomena is such that they cover the unknown, and it is only by critical dissection that we can get to the truth.

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Ava Gardner

The Most Fascinating Abandoned Mansions From Around The World

There's something particularly spectacular about witnessing the decay of a once-grand building. Lavish trappings fall into disrepair, once proud halls play host to insects and dust, and elegantly constructed architecture is exposed to time and the elements.

Here are 9 crumbling mansions that are fascinating to look at and come with some intriguing backstories.

The Mystery Of Puma Punku

Puma Punku is part of a large temple complex or monument group near Tiwanaku, Bolivia. The Puma Punku complex consists of an unwalled western court, a central unwalled esplanade, a terraced platform mound that is faced with megalithic stone, and a walled eastern court.

Determining the age of the Puma Punku complex has been a focus of researchers since the discovery of the Tiwanaku site. Some scientists say Puma Punku is 5,000 years old but others claim it could be between 10,000 en 15,000 years old. Today, researchers still don't understand how Puma Punku was built.

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The Craziest Environmental Ideas (That Could Work)

Craziest Environmental Ideas (That Could Work)

If you're looking for simple ideas to help the environment this Earth Day, these aren't them.

Group kicks off planting of ancient tree clones

 

A team led by a nurseryman from northern Michigan and his sons has raced against time for two decades, snipping branches from some of the world's biggest and most durable trees with plans to produce clones that could restore ancient forests and help fight climate change. Now comes the most ambitious phase of the quest: getting the new trees into the ground.
Ceremonial plantings of two dozen clones from California's mighty coastal redwoods were taking place Monday in seven nations: Australia, New Zealand, Great Britain, Ireland, Canada, Germany and the U.S.
Although measuring just 18-inches tall, the laboratory-produced trees are genetic duplicates of three giants that were cut down in northern California more than a century ago. Remarkably, shoots still emerge from the stumps, including one known as the Fieldbrook Stump near McKinleyville, which measures 35 feet in diameter. It's believed to be about 4,000 years old. The tree was about 40 stories high before it was felled.

"This is a first step toward mass production," said David Milarch, co-founder of Archangel Ancient Tree Archive, a nonprofit group spearheading the project. "We need to reforest the planet; it's imperative. To do that, it just makes sense to use the largest, oldest, most iconic trees that ever lived."

Milarch and his sons Jared and Jake, who have a family-owned nursery in the village of Copemish, Mich., became concerned about the condition of the world's forests in the 1990s. They began crisscrossing the U.S. in search of "champion" trees that have lived hundreds or even thousands of years, convinced that superior genes enabled them to outlast others of their species. Scientific opinion varies on whether that's true, with skeptics saying the survivors may simply have been lucky.
The Archangel leaders say they're out to prove the doubters wrong. They've developed several methods of producing genetic copies from cuttings, including placing branch tips less than an inch long in baby food jars containing nutrients and hormones. The specimens are cultivated in labs until large enough to be planted.
In recent years, they have focused on towering sequoias and redwoods, considering them best suited to absorb massive volumes of carbon dioxide, the greenhouse gas primarily responsible for climate change.

"If we get enough of these trees out there, we'll make a difference," said Jared Milarch, the group's executive director.

Archangel has an inventory of several thousand clones in various stages of growth that were taken from more than 70 redwoods and giant sequoias. NASA engineer Steve Craft, who helped arrange for David Milarch to address an agency gathering, said research shows that those species hold much more carbon than other varieties.
The challenge is to find places to put the trees, people to nurture them and money to continue the project, Jared Milarch said. The group is funded through donations and doesn't charge for its clones.
"A lot of trees will be planted by a lot of groups on Arbor Day, but 90 percent of them will die," David Milarch said. "It's a feel-good thing. You can't plant trees and walk away and expect them to take care of themselves."

The recipients of Archangel redwoods have pledged to care for them properly, he said. The first planting of about 250 took place in December on a ranch near Port Orford, Ore. Others were being planted during Earth Day observances Monday at the College of Marin in Kentwood, Calif., and in parks and private estates in the other six countries.

"I know the trees will thrive here," said Tom Burke, landscape manager at the College of Marin.

The Fly Orchid

Agent Provocateur Of The Plant World

It may not be the most attractive orchid on the planet - at least to our eyes. Yet the Fly Orchid (Ophrys insectifera) has come up with an ingenious way to ensure that it is pollinated. Its flowers look like flies and its scent mimics sexual pheromones.

This combination attract hordes of male insects, themselves simply attempting to ensure the continuation of their species. These unwitting insects are enticed in to performing the act of reproduction - on a flower. The fly orchid is the agent provocateur of the plant world.

An Amazing Ice Cave in Russia

A hot spring near the Mutnovksy volcano in Russia's Kamchatka peninsula cut a path through the ice of a glacier. The roof of the resulting cave is close to the surface of the glacier. In photos of it, you can see the sunlight penetrating the ice.

More (Translation)

How to Form a Star Near a Black Hole

How to Form a Star Near a Black Hole

Black holes get a bad rap -- but it looks like the black hole in the center of our galaxy may be stimulating the birth of stars, rather than killing them. 

Animal Pictures

The Daily Drift

Yes by all means ...

Carolina Naturally is read in 191 countries around the world daily.

Celebrate your Mother!  ...

Today is Mother Earth Day

Don't forget to visit our sister blog!

Today in History

296		St. Gaius ends his reign as Catholic Pope.
536		St. Agapitus I ends his reign as Catholic Pope.
1500		Pedro Alvarez Cabral discovers Brazil.
1509		Henry VIII ascends to the throne of England upon the death of his father, Henry VII.
1529		Spain and Portugal divide the eastern hemisphere in the Treaty of Saragosa.
1745		The Peace of Fussen is signed.
1792		President George Washington proclaims American neutrality in the war in Europe.
1861		Robert E. Lee is named commander of Virginia forces.
1889		The Oklahoma land rush officially starts at noon as thousands of Americans race for new, unclaimed land.
1898		In the first action of the Spanish-American War, the USS Nashville, takes on a Spanish ship.
1915		At the Second Battle of Ypres, the Germans use poison gas for the first time.
1918		British naval forces attempt to sink block-ships in the German U-boat bases at the Battle of Zeeburgge.
1931		Egypt signs treaty of friendship with Iraq.
1944		Allies launch major attack against the Japanese in Hollandia, New Guinea.
1954		The Senate Army-McCarthy hearings begin. They are broadcast on television.
1955		Congress orders all U.S. coins to bear the motto "In God We Trust."
1976		Barbara Walters becomes the first female nightly news anchor on network television.
1995		In Africa, Rwandan troops kill thousands of Hutu refugees in Kibeho.

Non Sequitur

Local weather does not always reflect global trends

Americans in the Midwest and residents of Europe may be surprised to discover that despite their local insufferably-prolonged winters, global temperature patterns were somewhat different:

 "...The globally-averaged temperature across the world's land and ocean surfaces was 0.58°C (1.04°F) above the 20th century average of 12.7°C (54.9°F), tying with 2006 as the 10th warmest March since records began in 1880. Both the Northern and Southern Hemispheres were also 10th warmest for March..."

Data from the National Climactic Data Center

Did you know ...

That a marathoner witnesses Boston bombing, flies home to Texas, sees fertilizer plant explode

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That Karl Rove is accurately named as "terrorist" and "war criminal" during speech ... again

Wow, Dr. Who must be pleased: old, used Dalek found in a pond in England

West Fertilizer Company Failed To Disclose It Had Unsafe Stores Of Explosive Substance

The fertilizer plant that exploded on Wednesday, obliterating part of a small Texas town and killing at least 14 people, had last year been storing 1,350 times the amount of ammonium nitrate that would normally trigger safety oversight by the U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS).
Yet a person familiar with DHS operations said the company that owns the plant, West Fertilizer, did not tell the agency about the potentially explosive fertilizer as it is required to do, leaving one of the principal regulators of ammonium nitrate - which can also be used in bomb making - unaware of any danger there.

Fertilizer plants and depots must report to the DHS when they hold 400 lb (180 kg) or more of the substance. Filings this year with the Texas Department of State Health Services, which weren't shared with DHS, show the plant had 270 tons of it on hand last year.

A U.S. congressman and several safety experts called into question on Friday whether incomplete disclosure or regulatory gridlock may have contributed to the disaster.

"It seems this manufacturer was willfully off the grid," Rep. Bennie Thompson, (D-MS), ranking member of the House Committee on Homeland Security, said in a statement. "This facility was known to have chemicals well above the threshold amount to be regulated under the Chemical Facility Anti-Terrorism Standards Act (CFATS), yet we understand that DHS did not even know the plant existed until it blew up."

Company officials did not return repeated calls seeking comment on its handling of chemicals and reporting practices. Late on Friday, plant owner Donald Adair released a general statement expressing sorrow over the incident but saying West Fertilizer would have little further comment while it cooperated with investigators to try to determine what happened.

"This tragedy will continue to hurt deeply for generations to come," Adair said in the statement.

Failure to report significant volumes of hazardous chemicals at a site can lead the DHS to fine or shut down fertilizer operations, a person familiar with the agency's monitoring regime said. Though the DHS has the authority to carry out spot inspections at facilities, it has a small budget for that and only a "small number" of field auditors, the person said.

Firms are responsible for self reporting the volumes of ammonium nitrate and other volatile chemicals they hold to the DHS, which then helps measure plant risks and devise security and safety plans based on them.

Since the agency never received any so-called top-screen report from West Fertilizer, the facility was not regulated or monitored by the DHS under its CFAT standards, largely designed to prevent sabotage of sites and to keep chemicals from falling into criminal hands.

The DHS focuses "specifically on enhancing security to reduce the risk of terrorism at certain high-risk chemical facilities," said agency spokesman Peter Boogaard. "The West Fertilizer Co. facility in West, Texas is not currently regulated under the CFATS program."

The West Fertilizer facility was subject to other reporting, permitting and safety programs, spread across at least seven state and federal agencies, a patchwork of regulation that critics say makes it difficult to ensure thorough oversight.

An expert in chemical safety standards said the two major federal government programs that are supposed to ensure chemical safety in industry - led by the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) - do not regulate the handling or storage of ammonium nitrate. That task falls largely to the DHS and the local and state agencies that oversee emergency planning and response.

More than 4,000 sites nationwide are subject to the DHS program.

"This shows that the enforcement routine has to be more robust, on local, state and federal levels," said the expert, Sam Mannan, director of process safety center at Texas A&M University. "If information is not shared with agencies, which appears to have happened here, then the regulations won't work."

HODGEPODGE OF REGULATION

Chemical safety experts and local officials suspect this week's blast was caused when ammonium nitrate was set ablaze. Authorities suspect the disaster was an industrial accident, but haven't ruled out other possibilities.

The fertilizer is considered safe when stored properly, but can explode at high temperatures and when it reacts with other substances.

"I strongly believe that if the proper safeguards were in place, as are at thousands of (DHS) CFATS-regulated plants across the country, the loss of life and destruction could have been far less extensive," said Rep. Thompson.

A blaze was reported shortly before a massive explosion leveled dozens of homes and blew out an apartment building.

A U-Haul truck packed with the substance mixed with fuel oil exploded to raze the Oklahoma federal building in 1995. Another liquid gas fertilizer kept on the West Fertilizer site, anhydrous ammonia, is subject to DHS reporting and can explode under extreme heat.

Wednesday's blast heightens concerns that regulations governing ammonium nitrate and other chemicals - present in at least 6,000 depots and plants in farming states across the country - are insufficient. The facilities serve farmers in rural areas that typically lack stringent land zoning controls, many of the facilities sit near residential areas.

Apart from the DHS, the West Fertilizer site was subject to a hodgepodge of regulation by the EPA, OSHA, the U.S. Department of Transportation, the Texas Department of State Health Services, the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality and the Office of the Texas State Chemist.

But the material is exempt from some mainstays of U.S. chemicals safety programs. For instance, the EPA's Risk Management Program (RMP) requires companies to submit plans describing their handling and storage of certain hazardous chemicals. Ammonium nitrate is not among the chemicals that must be reported.

In its RMP filings, West Fertilizer reported on its storage of anhydrous ammonia and said that it did not expect a fire or explosion to affect the facility, even in a worst-case scenario. And it had not installed safeguards such as blast walls around the plant.

A separate EPA program, known as Tier II, requires reporting of ammonium nitrate and other hazardous chemicals stored above certain quantities. Tier II reports are submitted to local fire departments and emergency planning and response groups to help them plan for and respond to chemical disasters. In Texas, the reports are collected by the Department of State Health Services. Over the last seven years, according to reports West Fertilizer filed, 2012 was the only time the company stored ammonium nitrate at the facility.

It reported having 270 tons on site.

"That's just a god awful amount of ammonium nitrate," said Bryan Haywood, the owner of a hazardous chemical consulting firm in Milford, Ohio. "If they were doing that, I would hope they would have gotten outside help."

In response to a request from Reuters, Haywood, who has been a safety engineer for 17 years, reviewed West Fertilizer's Tier II sheets from the last six years. He said he found several items that should have triggered the attention of local emergency planning authorities - most notably the sudden appearance of a large amount of ammonium nitrate in 2012.

"As a former HAZMAT coordinator, that would have been a red flag for me," said Haywood, referring to hazardous materials.

NRA Utopia

Condition of Indian girl who was raped improves

 

The condition of a 5-year-old girl who was allegedly kidnapped, raped and tortured by a man and then left alone in a locked room in India's capital for two days has improved, a doctor said Sunday, as protests continued over the authorities' handling of the case.

The girl was in critical condition when she was transferred Thursday from a local hospital to the largest government-run hospital in the country. But D.K. Sharma, medical superintendent of the state-run hospital in New Delhi where the girl was being treated, said Sunday that she was responding well to treatment and that her condition had stabilized.

Police say the girl went missing April 15 and was found two days later by neighbors who heard her crying in a locked room in the same New Delhi building where she lives with her family. The girl was alone when she was found, having been left for dead by the man following the brutal attack, police say.
A 24-year-old man was arrested Saturday in the eastern state of Bihar, about 1,000 kilometers (620 miles) from New Delhi, in connection with the incident. After being flown to New Delhi, he was in custody Sunday and was being questioned, police said.

The incident came four months after the fatal gang rape of a woman on a New Delhi bus sparked outrage across India about the treatment of women in the country.

For the second consecutive day, hundreds of people protested Sunday outside police headquarters in the capital, angry over allegations that police had ignored complaints by the girl's parents that she was missing.
About 100 supporters of the main opposition Bharatiya Janata Party protested outside the home of the chief of the ruling Congress Party, Sonia Gandhi, demanding that the government ensure the safety and security of women and girls in the city.
The protesters also demanded that the Delhi police chief be removed from office and that police officials accused of failing to act on the parents' complaint be dismissed.

"Police and other officials that fail to do their jobs and instead engage in abusive behavior should know that they will be punished," Meenakshi Ganguly, South Asia director of New York-based Human Rights Watch, said Sunday.

Police said they detained more than 50 protesters when they tried to break down barricades on the road leading to Gandhi's house. The protesters were released after a few hours.
Police also placed restrictions on the gathering of more than four people on the main avenue in the heart of New Delhi after university students said they planned to hold a demonstration there later Sunday. Despite the police order, about 100 students gathered at New Delhi's iconic India Gate monument and held a peaceful protest late Sunday.
Sexual crimes against women and children are reported every day in Indian newspapers, and women often complain about their sense of insecurity when they leave their homes.

Prime Minister Manmohan Singh called for changes in attitudes toward women in India, where there has been a fierce debate since December's fatal New Delhi gang rape about the routine mistreatment of females.

"The gruesome assault on the little girl a few days back reminds us once again of the need to work collectively to root out this sort of depravity from our society," Singh said Sunday at a meeting with civil servants.
A day earlier, Singh had urged Indian society "to look within and work to root out the evil of rape and other such crimes from our midst."
The fatal beating and gang rape of a young woman aboard a moving New Delhi bus sparked outrage and spurred the government to pass tough laws for crimes against women, including the death penalty for repeat offenders or for rape attacks that lead to the victim's death.
But activists say that merely passing strong laws is not enough, and that the government has to convey its intention to crack down on crimes against women to its officials and the police.
"Enacting strong laws are simply a first step, but it needs the government to focus urgently on implementation if it is serious about protecting children and other victims of sexual abuse," Human Rights Watch's Ganguly said.

A South Carolina Man Accused Of Killing Two Claims “Stand Your Ground” Self-Defense

 An Irmo man accused of killing his wife and a man owed $20,000 by his sports betting ring is invoking South Carolina’s “stand your ground” self-defense law.
Brett Parker’s attorney, Dave Fedor, argued in a court motion Friday that Parker can’t be prosecuted because of the state law allowing a person who fears for his life to use deadly force. A similar law in Florida gained notoriety during the coverage of the killing of teenager Trayvon Martin.
Parker has said that Bryan Capnerhurst, 46, came to his $760,000 home and shot his 44-year-old wife, Tammy, in an upstairs room. Brett Parker said after hearing the shots he ran upstairs and was confronted by Capnerhurst, who pointed a gun at him and ordered him to get money from a safe in the room. Parker said he knelt down, grabbed a gun hidden on top of the safe, and fatally shot Capnerhurst.
But authorities say forensic testing, cellphone records, surveillance video and other evidence don’t back up Parker’s story.

Prosecutors say Parker killed his wife to try to collect more than $1 million in insurance money and retirement accounts. Investigators say Parker ran a gambling operation from his home and Capnerhurst came to the house to collect about $20,000 from bets.
Three men have been sentenced to federal prison after pleading guilty last year to running a gambling operation that collected thousands of dollars a day. Eleven other men have been arrested as Richland County sheriff’s deputies investigate the sports betting operation that was revealed after the double homicide last April.
Brett Parker faces a federal charge of operating an illegal gambling business. He could face the death penalty if convicted of double murder.
The “stand your ground” motion will delay the trial scheduled to start May 6. The motion will have to be heard by a judge, Fedor said, and the subsequent ruling could then be appealed to the state Supreme Court.

Smuggler caught at airport with four gold bars in his socks and eight up his ass

Customs officials arrested a 50-year-old man at Rajiv Gandhi International Airport in Hyderabad, southern India, and seized 1.4 kilos of gold from his possession on Wednesday morning. The man, identified as Abdullah Mohammad Riyaz, said he had taken a flight from Chennai to Dubai only to stay there for three hours before he took another flight back to Hyderabad.
Sources said Riyaz, who had travelled abroad at least 100 times probably to carry out similar operations, was found carrying four gold biscuits weighing 116 gm each in his socks and eight similar gold biscuits in his rectum, with a market value of Rs4 million (£49,000, $74,000).

Stating that they were still interrogating Riyaz, the Customs officials said they had received a tip-off about the smuggling attempt. “We intercepted him when he tried to exit through the Green Channel,” the officials said, adding that after they recovered the gold biscuits from the socks, Riyaz said that was all he had on his person.

The Customs officials, however, got suspicious when they saw Riyaz’s discomfort while sitting, which prompted them to conduct an intense body search leading to the recovery of the gold biscuits from his rectum. With the duty payable on the gold amounting to Rs1 million, the officials arrested him under Section 135 of the Customs Act since the duty evaded was more than Rs500,000.

Woman told she was 'too fat' to tan by salon

A woman was told she was too fat to tan at a tanning salon. Kelly McGrevey said she purchased a tanning package at Aloha Tanning in Norton, Ohio, on Monday after a quick tour of the salon. On Monday, McGrevey tanned in a standup bed.

Random Photo

Heavy Texters Are Shallow, Racist

Heavy Texters Are Shallow, Racist

New study suggests that heavy texters are less likely to value living an ethical, principled life.

GMOs: The Walking Dead of the Food Industry

Some startling facts and figures about genetically modified organisms... More

Brain Development Is Guided by Junk DNA that Isn’t Really Junk

Brain Development Is Guided by Junk DNA that Isn’t Really Junk

Specific DNA once dismissed as junk plays an important role in brain development and might be involved in several devastating neurological diseases, UC San Francisco scientists have found. Their discovery in mice is likely to [...]

Under the Microscope

So what do you know? Snow is made of teeny little snowflakes and sharks are just slithering gobs of goddamn teeth.

8 Ordinary Things That Look Insanely Cool Under a Microscope

Ziggy

How Parenting Advice has Changed

Raising a baby means getting advice from those who supposedly know more than you do -and in the 19th century, there were no shortage of experts to sell you a book. But even the most commonly-followed advice seems strange to us now.

From the day of birth, schedules and strict discipline were of deep importance. This baby was to interfere as little as possible with your life. Affection was to be restricted, with care instructions more fitting a ficus than a child. From 1916's The Mother and her Child by Drs. Lena and William Sadler: "Handle the baby as little as possible. Turn it occasionally from side to side, feed it, change it, keep it warm, and let it alone; crying is absolutely essential to the development of good strong lungs. A baby should cry vigorously several times each day."

As the child grew, regulated contact could be tolerated. "At the age of two weeks, the child may be systematically carried about in the arms 2 to 3 times a day, as a means of furnishing additional change in position," is the precise advice of Dr. JP Crozer Griffith in 1900.

That appears cruel and unnecessary to us today, but if you dig a little deeper, there are reasons that they seemed like a good idea at the time. An article at the Atlantic tells the reasons why such advice might not have been "stupid" after all. More 

A History of "Trial By Ordeal"

Once upon a time, "trial by fire" was a literal trial, with literal fire. The idea was that if an accused criminal were subjected to mortal danger, such as a fire, divine intervention would save the truly innocent. These were called trial by ordeal, and in some ways it made sense.

Of course, the system was far from foolproof; many of the trials were easily manipulated by the administering judges (or priests) to “prove” a verdict that they thought was correct. Still, some authors, such as George Mason University economist Peter Leeson, say that in a society that unflinchingly believes in the efficacy of these trials, the ordeals and ordealists would have resulted in the “correct” verdict more often than not. After all, if a person was guilty, but believed that the trials always showed the truth, they’d be unlikely to be willing to undergo them—the punishment for pleading guilty was almost always far more lenient than the punishment for being “shown” to be guilty under trial by ordeal.

There were many different ordeals used to separate the innocent from the guilty -burning, poisoning, drowning, torture- and specific procedures for each that you can read about here.

Awesome Pictures

Grassy field in Florida was once secret CIA base from which Guatemalan coup was launched

There's a fascinating article in the Miami Herald today about a grassy field in Opalocka, Florida which was the site of the secret CIA base where the US-led coup of Guatemala was launched in 1953.

Snip:

60 years ago on that very spot was Building 67, a two-story barracks, that in 1953 and 1954 served as CIA field headquarters for the covert operation that overthrew leftist Guatemalan President Jacobo Arbenz. It was there that several senior CIA officers labored for months organizing the intricate logistical details of PBSUCCESS, the code name for the anti-Arbenz operation. Among the officers who worked at Building 67 was E. Howard Hunt, who later went on to help engineer the 1972 Watergate burglary as one of the White House plumbers. What happened at Building 67 was known at the time only to a very small circle of people, but the impact of the 1953-54 operation dramatically altered the history of South Florida and the United States.

Well, yes, and not to mention the history of Guatemala. The operation set off a series of catastrophic events that still affect the country today. I'm blogging this from Guatemala, where the genocide trial of former de facto dictator and ex-general Rios Montt is now in its second month. Montt was supported by and trained in the US. The successful overthrow of Arbenz from this clandestine Florida site emboldened the CIA "to try a similar operation, though on a larger scale, at Cuba’s Bay of Pigs." Read more here. And there is video here.

Play Black Sabbath Music to Make Your Plants Grow

Chris Beardshaw, an award-winning gardener and television show host, says that playing heavy metal music to plants helps them grow. Specifically, he suggests playing a lot of Black Sabbath:

Beardshaw, a familiar face on BBC2's Gardener's World over the years, said using rock music as a nutrient appeared to create larger flowers. Although the plants themselves were shorter, they were more disease-resistant.
The test came about because one of his horticultural students wanted to write a dissertation on the effects of music on plants.
"We set up four glasshouses with different sorts of music in to see what happened to the plants," Beardshaw said.
"We had one that was silent - that was a control house - and we had one that was played classical music, we had one that was played Cliff Richard and we had one that was played Black Sabbath.
"And the ones with Black Sabbath - great big, thumping noise, rowdy music - they were the shortest, but they had the best flowers and the best resistance to pest and disease.

More

A "grass tree"

Found only in Australia, all 28 species of grass trees are perennial, slow-growing plants belonging to the ancient genus Xanthorrhoea. Some species produce aboveground trunks, while others do not. A grass tree’s trunk is a cylinder formed from tightly packed leaf bases... The leaves of grass trees with trunks obtain water and nutrients via aerial roots that pass down through the open core of the trunk to the ground... Bushfires blacken the trunks of grass trees, but don’t kill the plants. Like many species of eucalyptus trees, grass trees possess highly resinous leaves and exist in an intimate relationship with fire, depending on it for their survival. Flowering is stimulated by fire.

Upping the Cute Factor

Tortoise who defied Hitler came back from the dead

A tortoise who survived Nazi attacks and a blazing bonfire was feared to have finally met his match in this year’s snow – until he made a miraculous recovery. Carey and David Miller believed their beloved pet reptile Adolf was dead after he was caught in late snowfall in their north London garden while they visited their son in New York.
His inert shell was discovered and taken inside by grandson Jake, eight, where it remained without a hint of life for the next month. But last Sunday, the Millers took him outside into the sunshine to see if the warmth might revive him. “We thought he was dead,” said Mrs Miller. “He was inert. We thought that was it. It was only on Sunday we took him out of the box and his head gradually came out. We were ecstatic!”

It is the latest in a long line of brushes with death for the tortoise whose actual age is unknown, but he is at least 70. His current owners were told that he was discovered crawling in a crater caused by a parachute mine which had destroyed three houses in 1942. He was adopted by the neighbours and named William, remaining happily with them until the Millers bought the house 35 years ago. They renamed him Adolf, in honour of surviving the Nazi attack, and he became a much-loved family pet.

However, it seems Adolf was not destined to live a quiet life. He has gone missing from the garden four or five times, giving the family a fright. Then there was the time Adolf thought he had found a good place for a nap – only to be woken up as the bonfire above him was lit. “My husband set fire to him accidentally – he lost a huge lump from his shell,” said Mrs Miller. Luckily, his shell grew back, and Adolf looks set to enjoy many more years of adventures.

Bar-coded Ants

How do you track the movement of hundreds or thousands of ants in a colony? With barcodes, of course! A team of Swiss scientists glued barcodes to hundreds of individual ants to record their movement to shed some light on the complexity of ant colonies:

Not surprisingly, the researchers found out that ants divide and conquer. They found three main groups of workers—one tends the young, another forages for food, and a third keeps the nest clean. Other studies have documented this segregation of labor before, but Mersch et al wanted to figure out how the ants know which groups they belong to. [...]
These researchers suspected that age might play a role in the division of labor, but it’s not easy to figure out how old an ant is. Instead, the researchers spent 60 weeks in advance of the experiment tagging the ants as they emerged from their pupal state—each week got its own color code.
Analyzing the color codes, they found that younger ants were more likely to work nursing the young, and older ants were more likely to be foragers. In general, they watched ants transition from nursing to cleaning to foraging as they age, but there’s a lot of individual variation in how quickly these transitions took place.

Kate Prengaman of Ars Technica has the post: Here.

Rare New Guinea Singing Dog Snapped in the Wilds of West Papua

An expedition into one of the most remote areas on Earth has shed new light on the fate of the New Guinea singing dog – one of the world's rarest canines. More

An Elephant Seal Scratches Its Head

Two things we learn from this cute photo by Mike Gin, who submitted his shot to National Geographic:
1. Elephant seals have fingers on their flippers (they even have fingernails)
2. It's useless to ask them questions. They only scratch their heads and say, "I dunno!"

River rescue lamb at center of custody battle

A schoolgirl who saved a newborn lamb from drowning is embroiled in a row with a farmer who has launched a legal battle to reclaim the animal. Kirsty Finnie, 15, pulled the creature from a river in Banchory, Aberdeenshire, and nursed him back to health before handing him over to an animal sanctuary. Now farmer John McIrvine has instructed lawyers to demand the return of the lamb, christened River, which he claimed had been stolen. He described the Willows sanctuary as a "funny farm" and said: "River has a future as a breeding ram, not spending his time castrated with a goat and a pony." The row began after Kirsty, from Peterculter, rescued the young animal from a river in Banchory on April 8.

She told Willows Animal Sanctuary, near Strichen: "I went into the river and pulled it out, by that time it had given up. I carried it back to the caravan, wrapped it in a towel and put a heater on. It recovered but was very weak. We couldn't see any sheep nearby so we think it had been swept down the river. It doesn't have any tags and still had a bit of its umbilical cord. We took it to our house in Peterculter. We looked up online how we should look after it. We have been feeding him 150ml of goats milk every four hours from a babies bottle. We decided it would be best to put him to Willow Animal Sanctuary so he could live a happy contented life. We found out that he is a male black faced sheep."

Staff said River has become an instant attraction at the sanctuary and is particularly popular with disabled visitors. But now he is at the center of a tug-of-love battle between the charity - which is determined to keep him - and farmer John McIrvine, who wants his lamb back. Charity trustee Kate Robinson said: "Young Kirsty risked her own life to rescue River and she is determined he should be allowed to stay where he is. People would be heartbroken if we had to give him away. What we want to do is appeal to the farmer's good side and ask him to let River stay with us. If he wasn't saved by Kirsty in the first place, he would have been lost for ever. We're hoping he can see things our way." A Willows spokeswoman said: "We are hoping that we can appeal to his better nature and are asking him to leave the lamb here where it is much loved by all our vulnerable people.

"We do not have a problem with farmers at all. We simply want what's best for River. We are well aware of how to care for lambs and sheep correctly and can assure you all that he receives the best possible care from us and our vets. We hope that the farmer will allow us to keep him here as our vulnerable clients are already deeply attached to him and the matter is in the hands of our solicitors." Mr McIrvine said he accepted that he was being portrayed as the “villain of the piece”. But he insisted: “This situation can be resolved. I have offered the sanctuary a donation and offered a replacement lamb that doesn’t have the same breeding potential. But they don’t want to know and that’s where we’ve got an issue. And if this lamb is castrated we are going into litigation. It is my living and I need the lamb.”

There's a news video here.

Animal Pictures