In 1855, inventor and social reformer Sir Roland Hill commissioned a
feasibility study on the construction of a pneumatic tube-based system
between the General Post Office and the West District Central Post
Office in London, UK.
Almost one hundred years after a group of explorers set out across the
frozen landscape of Antarctica to set up supply depots for famed
explorer Sir Ernest Shackleton, a box of 22 never-before-seen exposed
but unprocessed negatives taken by the group's photographer has been
unearthed in one of those shacks, preserved in a block of ice.
"Around 11 p.m. Xmas Eve, people reported hearing a loud “boom” in Toronto, Newmarket, Aurora, Belleville, Richmond Hill, and Sutton. Not only was the boom heard, but it rattled houses, leaving many to believe that a tree had fallen on their rooftop...
The most likely explanation is that it was a cryoseism, also known as a frost quake.
Cyroseisms are rare, localized seismic events that occur when a sudden drop in temperature freezes the groundwater, which then expands and cracks the soil and rock. The crack will release a sudden burst of explosive energy, resulting in a loud noise and the shaking of the ground. They usually occur between midnight and dawn."
To flow, they moved around, rearranging themselves in the group, acting like a thick fluid. When the aggregation struggled to keep its shape, the ants clung to each other, acting like an elastic solid — rubber for example.Read more about the research at The New york Times.
The research could have practical implications, Dr. Hu said, for self-assembling robots, which build themselves out of smaller bits and for self-healing materials.
| 1460 | The Duke of York is defeated and killed by Lancastrians at the Battle of Wakefield. | |
| 1803 | The United States takes possession of the Louisiana area from France at New Orleans with a simple ceremony, the simultaneous lowering and raising of the national flags. | |
| 1861 | Banks in the United States suspend the practice of redeeming paper money for metal currency, a practice that would continue until 1879. | |
| 1862 | The draft of the Emancipation Proclamation is finished and circulated among President Abraham Lincoln's cabinet for comment. | |
| 1905 | Governor Frank Steunenberg of Idaho is killed by an assassin's bomb. | |
| 1922 | Soviet Russia is renamed the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. | |
| 1932 | The Soviet Union bars food handouts for housewives under 36 years of age. They must now work to eat. | |
| 1947 | Romania's King Michael is forced to abdicate by Soviet-backed Communists. Communists now control all of Eastern Europe. | |
| 1965 | Ferdinand E. Marcos is sworn in as the Philippine Republic's sixth president. | |
| 1972 | After two weeks of heavy bombing raids on North Vietnam, President Nixon halts the air offensive and agrees to resume peace negotiations with Hanoi representative Le Duc Tho. | |
| 1976 | Governor Carey of New York pardons seven inmates, closing the book on the Attica uprising. | |
| 2006 | Saddam Hussein, former Iraq dictator, is executed by hanging for crimes committed against his own people during his rule. |
“I had a little fun with Boehner and told him about the sun tanning tax. He goes, ‘I didn’t know it was in there,’ and I said, ‘Yes, it’s a ten percent tax.’ He goes, ‘Well, that’s not that big of a deal.’ I said, ‘It’s a racist tax.’ He goes, ‘You know what? It is.’”His explanation:
“I had an Indian doctor in our office the other day, very dark skin, with two non-dark skin people, and I asked this to him, I said, ‘Have you ever been to a tanning booth?’ and he goes, ‘No, no need.’ So therefore it’s a racist tax and I thought I might need to get to a sun tanning booth so I can come out and say I’ve been disenfranchised because I got taxed because of the color of my skin.”So, President Obama is attacking people for the “color of their skin” because of a 10% tax on tanning booths he included in “Obamacare.”
“President Obama waived a ban on arming terrorists in order to allow weapons to go to the Syrian opposition… Your listeners, US taxpayers, are now paying to give arms to terrorists including Al Qaeda. This happened and as of today the United States is willingly, knowingly, intentionally sending arms to terrorists. Now what this says to me, as I’m a believer in jesus christ, as I look at the End Times scripture, this says to me that the leaf is on the fig tree and we are to understand the signs of the times, which is your ministry, we are to understand where we are in god’s end times history… The prophets longed to look into the future to see these days of his coming! Rather than seeing this as a negative, we need to rejoice! Maranatha come lord jesus, his day is at hand!”And for good measure, she added:
“And so when we see up is down and right is called wrong, when this is happening, we were told this; that these days would be as the days of Noah. We are seeing that in our time. Yes it gives us fear in some respects because we want the retirement that our parents enjoyed. Well they will, if they know jesus christ.”You hear that, folks? praise the lord, jesus is coming! President Obama armed Syrian rebels, so therefore… jesus!
Suddenly christianity’s coded comfort codex is turned into an Agatha Christie whodunit. And each passing generation, further removed from the text’s original intent and increasingly anxious that Jesus has not yet returned as long ago promised, interprets Revelation more and more as a Hollywood disaster film. As one of my theology professors once put it: “In the past millennium, not one generation has gone by without christians insisting that the Book of Revelation points to christ’s imminent return, and that all of the text’s cryptic references can easily be mapped to the current political world. And every single generation has been spectacularly wrong.”I don’t have a problem with people believing what they want to believe, as long as they aren’t doing harm to others in the process. We have the First Amendment for a reason, and even the craziest get to utilize their rights. But there’s a difference between nutjobs like those associated with the Westboro baptist cult utilizing their First Amendment rights (as disgusting as they might be), and a whacko like Michele Bachmann utilizing hers. She is a sitting member of Congress, with direct influence over matters of intelligence in our country. She helps to oversee the CIA, FBI, NSA, DOJ and several other extremely important (and sensitive) departments. And here she is, expressing her belief that President Barack Obama has brought us to the Last Days.
Occasionally, in politics, parties drop the pretense, stop fighting it and just embrace their caricatures. So the repugican cabal, which every December transmogrifies in its critics’ eyes into the living embodiment of Dr. Seuss’ Grinch, has embraced the role.Jamelle Bouie at The Daily Beast was on the same page only he saw Scrooge instead of the Grinch with “the repugican cabal Decides to Play Scrooge as Millions Lose Benefits: repugicans are all that stands between security and crisis for the millions of Americans who are set to lose emergency unemployment benefits”:
How else can one explain the fact that, thanks to the repugican cabal refusing to allow an extension, Congress is just days away from letting supplemental unemployment benefits expire for 1.3 million Americans? And that’s just for starters. According to the White House Council on Economic Advisers, an additional 3.6 million people will lose their benefits by the end of 2014. These families should not, in other words, splurge on a Xmas feast of Who-pudding and rare Who-roast beast.
Even after you get a job, the harm from long-term unemployment can last for years. Indeed, the idea that this is something people enjoy—that anyone wants to stay idle—is ludicrous. “If you look at the long-term unemployed, a good chunk of them have children. A good chunk are married. A good chunk are college-educated or have had some college and in their prime earning years,” writes Michael Strain of the wingnut American Enterprise Institute, “It strikes me as implausible that this person is engaged in a half-hearted job search.” People want to work, the problem is that—with three seekers for every position—there aren’t enough jobs to go around.Mr. Bouie felt compelled to explain math to the Scrooges in the repugican cabal, as in: There are 3X number of people but only X number of jobs. Forget math! The Republicans believe in the Magic Fairy over math and science. The Magic Fairy creates jobs for the worthy. The Magic Fairy makes sure everything is fair and no one who is worthy is ever unlucky.
Hospice patients are expected to die: The treatment focuses on providing comfort to the terminally ill, not finding a cure. To enroll a patient, two doctors certify a life expectancy of six months or less.
But over the past decade, the number of “hospice survivors” in the United States has risen dramatically, in part because hospice companies earn more by recruiting patients who aren’t actually dying, a Washington Post investigation has found. Healthier patients are more profitable because they require fewer visits and stay enrolled longer.
The proportion of patients who were discharged alive from hospice care rose about 50 percent between 2002 and 2012, according to a Post analysis of more than 1 million hospice patients’ records over 11 years in California...
This vast growth took place as the hospice “movement,” once led by religious and community organizations, was evolving into a $17 billion industry dominated by for-profit companies...
Some of those patients simply outlived a legitimate prognosis of six months.
But much of the data suggests that the trend toward longer stays is a response to the financial incentive... multiple allegations have arisen from former hospice workers who say that the businesses took in people who weren’t in declining health.
Ed Currie holds one of his world-record Carolina
Reaper peppers by the stem, which looks like the tail of a scorpion.
On
the other end is the bumpy, oily, fire-engine red fruit with a punch of
heat nearly as potent as most pepper sprays used by police. It's hot
enough to leave even the most seasoned spicy food aficionado
crimson-faced, flushed with sweat, trying not to lose his lunch.
The island of California. A huge triangle of land called Florida. A
great ocean that cut down from the Arctic into the Midwest. As the New
World came into focus beginning in the 17th century, explorers and
cartographers struggled to measure a massive expanse of land that would
take centuries to accurately map.
Under ideal growing conditions the wax palm can grow to a height of 50 meters (160 ft)—or rarely, even as high as 60 meters (200 ft)—making it the tallest palm and by extension the tallest monocot in the world...
The palm is recognized as the national tree of Colombia, and since the implementation of Law 61 of 1985 it is legally a protected species in that country. Ceroxylon quindiuense has an extremely slow growth and can live up to one hundred years...
HECO, despite criticism from Hawaii’s solar industry, denies the moratorium is anything more than an honest effort to address the technical challenges of integrating the solar flooding onto its grid.
The slowdown comes in a state where 9 percent of the utility’s residential customers on Oahu are already generating most of their power from the sun and where connections have doubled yearly since 2008.
In California, where solar already powers the equivalent of 626,000 homes, utilities continue to aggressively push for grid fees that would add about $120 a year to rooftop users’ bills and, solar advocates say, slow down solar adoptions.
Similar skirmishes have broken out in as many as a dozen of the 43 states that have adopted net-metering policies as part of their push to promote renewable energy. In Colorado, Xcel Energy Inc. has proposed cutting the payments it makes for excess power generated by customers by about half, because it says higher payouts result in an unfair subsidy to solar users.
